skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right that the language is not the API, it is the medium. The "appointment booking API" exists only in our heads, it is a set of mutually understood conventions for interpreting a subset of language in order to create a record of the appointment somewhere.

If you call up a hair salon and start reciting poetry you'll get an error response in the same way as you would if you had sent malformed JSON to an endpoint. If you stick to the expected script you'll achieve success almost all of the time.

I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of human communication works this way, especially when it involves individuals who do not know each other. We have agreed upon limits, key phrases and words, and expected responses that allow most of the unpredictable stuff to be ruled out. All of that favours automation.
I've disabled my account too. I haven't decided whether to delete yet. I originally got on FB because it was the best way to communicate with our kids. They have since moved on but in the mean time I have found several communities that I enjoy. Key among these is that there is absolutely no politics discussed. We remain focused on the common interests that we share. I also had a lot of "friends," some of whom would post absolute garbage. I gradually unfriended or muted the worst of these and FB became an enjoyable place to see what others were doing.

I always had a feeling that the various quizzes and games were harvesting information. I thought that if I ignored them, they would not get mine. The CA incident proved that wrong. That's what pushed me over the edge. The shifting sands of FB personal information security just got to be too much for me.

I miss the camaraderie and the communities (and communication) but I'm not certain it is worth the price. At the very least, I want to send a message to FB. And they did notice in an algorithmic manner. They really cranked up the email notifications of all of the things I was missing. If enough people do that their numbers will drop and that will have a material effect on their stock price. That will get their attention and perhaps result in a reevaluation of their behavior.
Residential electricity is less than half of the electricity used in California. Solar may slow down the electrical generation growth needs, but I doubt it will shut down any generators. (Except for some peak usage gas generators).

http://ecdms.energy.ca.gov/elecbyutil.aspx
We need to really cut down on the whole "we're doomed because of AI narrative". People watched too much "I Robot" and similar movies. There is a big gap between a staged demo and any strong AI, which doesn't exist yet. I remember demos of Microsoft/Skype doing translations in real time few years ago, or reproducing someone's voice. Where is that technology now? Nowhere, because it's one thing to stage a demo in perfect conditions with a good training set, and another thing to make a generic solution.
The Trump administration just forced smartphone maker ZTE to shut down
> You just have to have the discipline to run your internal data center the way cloud providers do.

AWS employee here, so I am obviously cloud provider biased, but in my viewpoint having that discipline only comes from having very good, expensive engineers. It's hard to get people who really know how to run a datacenter well, especially when most of the good ones would probably prefer to work for a larger cloud provider since than is more interesting and impactful than running a smaller datacenter for a single company.

The forgotten / underestimated cost is the salaries of these people to set things up well in the first place, be on call to fix things when they break, and perform those upgrades in the same way that cloud providers do.

A single engineer salary can get you a LOT of cloud compute power on AWS. If a cloud provider allows you to build the same thing with two fewer engineers then that's probably an extra $400k or so for the infrastructure budget after you factor in these engineer's salaries, taxes, benefits, etc. And $400k can get you an incredible amount of AWS cloud compute.
I keep Xubuntu in a VM. It performs perfectly.
There are 5-6 million Jews in the US, that’s a small demographic any way you cut it. You could say it’s a large demographic in New York City, but I don’t think you could say that about any other part of the country.

Americans as a whole (not select demographics) overwhelmingly support Israel. Here’s a recent poll

http://news.gallup.com/poll/229199/americans-remain-staunchl...
The dumbest questions begin with a disclaimer like the one used here.

Yes, methane, especially from cows and livestock, is a contributor to global warming. Other sources of methane worthy of concern include oil and gas wells (apparently they leak a lot) and other quasi-natural sources like the breakdown of plant matter in forests (often because the forest is cleared).

Methane is far more potent than CO2 but also far shorter-lived. I would argue in many ways it's far less of a concern because it doesn't interact with plant and animal life to anywhere near the extent elevated CO2 levels do.
A practical problem is that it is hard to communicate with the other side of the sun.
>"Buses make you wait in the rain."

There's this thing called a bus shelter. They're actually really inexpensive to put up. Ask your city why they're not putting them up.

>"Buses get stuck in traffic very easily."

No more easily than a car. Bus-only lanes work amazingly well to mitigate the problems of traffic and congestion.

>"Buses create traffic and make it worse with their size."

Buses take up much less space per passenger than cars, so it's kind of ridiculous to make that argument.

>"Buses idle diesel fumes as they stand in traffic."
>"Buses are noisy and idle outside of homes."

Natural gas buses and electric buses and being phased in, they're both quieter and cleaner than diesel buses. And bus lanes reduce idling time significantly.

>"Bus stops in front of homes are filled with noisy people."

Oh no, people. How horrible.
Are you re-installing, or re-starting, a VM for this?

If you're re-installing from scratch each time you're possibly doing that wrong.

An installation from scratch, in any case, should only ask you hostname, domain name, maybe wifi details (probably not for a VM), partitioning preference, and package / function (set of packages) --- none of this stuff benefits from a flashy / GUI installer.

> ... I just need a linux kernel and a reasonable package manager.

That last bit - that's kind of my point.
I don't think you understand at all. The NRA isn't what is powerful. The NRA is the public face of the pro-gun movement, but the reason it is so effective isn't the NRA--the NRA is the tail, the people are the dog.
RKBA is a true grass-roots movement of real, actual people who vote on a single issue. It's not a particularly well organized movement, and most of the time there is a ton of infighting, disagreement, and back-stabbing. But all have the same fundamental ideal about freedom and liberty.

Many gun owners are very good intentioned patriots, solid, hard-working Americans. However, the group is extremely diverse and intelligence follows the bell curve. Most don't understand how government works, refuse to fight the way the left fights (dirty) and allow themselves to become corrupted by the fight. Were it not like that, the movement would tear government to pieces and totally reform it. That may be about to happen anyways, but not through them. You have no idea what sleeping giants live out there.

Quite simply put, the NRA is often more a controlled opposition that the real power behind the movement and that guns stand in for freedom/liberty which is what it is all about. True citizens have real rights with teeth. The kind of teeth that despots fear.
A similar frustration I have is when you ask a specific question and get a "Why would you do it that way? Rearchitect your app this way!". That's not reasonable, outside the smallest of applications, regardless of if the underlying advice is sound.
Swift has sum types, not union types.
Sounds like the community might be a reason to use Vue over React ;)

In all seriousness this is a problem I've run into before as well. I once reported a bug and the lead developer of the project responded saying he didn't think the bug existed. Setting the hostname in the config to the server's IP address was irreversible even if you change it later -- the site would redirect back to the raw IP and outgoing emails would have the raw IP in them. Many other users were commenting about the issue with no response from the maintainer, and I ended up finding a workaround using one of the "developer options" which was really just a one line ruby config change. Then, the author wrote like a one paragraph response saying that you should never set up the software like that and not to use that workaround because it's a "developer option". This bug went unfixed for about 2 years after that. And this is a relatively common and high profile piece of open source software. The whole thing was just bizarre, especially how positive my experiences with other open source projects (some third party Spring packages and Go Dep in particular) have been.
One company owns all the main dating apps. That plus the dynamics of the dating market means they don’t have to compete much, and instead focus on monetizing. They definitely don’t have to compete on tech, it’s pretty irrelevant in the dating market.
> everything the US and the NATO does is to protect Israel

"Everything" is pretty strong word. Let's see if it's born out: https://www.nato.int/cps/ua/natohq/news.htm
Personally, I have a reminder on my phone set every morning that tells me to review the list. Before I did this, I always had this gut feeling that I had forgot something even though I was very strict about always adding a task for everything.
Not sure why Barber/Salon would not also use robot assistant built by Apple or Microsoft or some other non-Google company to answer the phone. It will be interesting to see two robots built by two different companies conversing with each other and agree (?) upon making an appointment.
Introduction to Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine
Hitachi Pulls Itself Together in the Datacenter
I think he lives in Singapore. Consumer protection rules there weren't great from what I remember, although I only tended to buy a few things for the office from Sim Lim square
I bought a lemur in 2012 and had consistent issues with overheating that caused the laptop to shut off. Bought an external fan, but that helped very little.

Ended up buying a Macbook Pro.

I did use a gazelle at one of my jobs, and had fewer issues with that. In general though, I'd be extremely chary of buying system76 in the future. They're basically just rebranding generic Clevo laptops with very little value added imho. If I absolutely needed a Linux laptop I'd preferring dual-booting a Mac using rEFIt, buying a Dell XPS, or virtualizing.
> there is a risk of the AI manipulating us...

I always wonder (seriously, not joking) if some computer will pass the Turing test because we are getting dumber and adapting to the way apps understand us instead of the reverse. Personally, I double check when I send text or voice instructions to bots.
Haven’t we met before? On doppelgängers and perception
Funny, i thought that extensions where "here be dragons" territory where the APIs may break at any moment etc.

Meaning that it is a fig leaf from the Gnome devs to power users.
You mean "union type" where you say "sum type". AFAICT Swift does support sum types.
>don't parse HTML with a regular expressions

Even if I agree with you (I don't know because I've never been in the situation where that was a thing I was considering and weighing against other options) what I'm arguing here is that if someone asks how to do that then you should either tell them along with the admonishment or not say anything at all. But don't go around being a dick by yelling "haha that's the dumbest thing ever and I'm not going to tell you because of best practices"
This is one reason why we should be building SkyTran systems instead of pushing more traditional public transit.
Come to Copenhagen and see how a unified public transport system is supposed to work. My tickets work for all buses and all trains equally.

Don't blame public transport as a concept, blame private profiteering and corruption.
A bit of me likes to think that, given the extent to which speculative fiction has grappled with questions like these, and given the degree to which the tech industry coincides with speculative fiction's readership, we already have all the answers to said questions.

We do, on the other hand, also have many fictional examples of how to abuse this kind of tech.

In the end, though, I think it's fair to assume that we have a number of decades before solutions become truly pressing.
Show HN: TensorFlow Performance Profiler for Development and Production
> Fixing the bug and having synchronized patches out by yesterday was an industry-wide effort, one that deserves praises, compared to the jumbled Meltdown and Spectre patching process.

Is this a fair comparison? I feel like the patching techniques must have been easier to develop than for Meltdown/Spectre. Furthermore, if this affected the same kind of people in this community, maybe this time around benefitted from the communication channels of the previous exercises.

Maybe this isn't a comparison to try and badmouth the previous iteration, and instead just tried to show a general improvement in the industry—I just find it a bit unfair.
This is true, and I use transit quite frequently, but even in Toronto you have to put up with some pretty shitty people.

I've been punched randomly for no reason[0]. I've had to put up with someone masturbating at the back a bus. People playing music right from their phones or just generally acting rude.

I'm still for transit, but aspects of it aren't great.

[0] I was just walking off the subway and this tall, muscular, mentally-ill-veteran-looking-guy hit me as hard as he could with no warning. I saw stars and nearly blacked out even though he hit me in the upper shoulder. He then marched onto the subway I just came out of like nothing happened.
Many years ago I used to use light weight window managers. I remember using icewm after I got fed up with enlightenment, but I think it was Fluxbox that I kept for a long time -- up until about 2010.

However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.
Best Motivational Books Young Entrepreneurs Wish to Have Read
The sheer number of ads and propaganda by the ruling party actually convinced me that the elections weren't going to be rigged. No one in their right mind would have invested so much time and effort winning a battle that has already been won
XUbuntu is great, and the distro I use for my desktop, but I'd also suggest checking out Ubuntu Mate 18.04. It's "old school" similar to XFCE, largely without animations to slow things down, and the 18.04 version replaced the old menu with brisk-menu which is fast, super key activated, and has search (basically it works a lot like XFCE's).

Ubuntu Mate uses gtk 3 and probably in general more modern technology than XFCE, with a similar style. Definitely worth considering.
Combine this with something like lyrebird and it going to be really easy to scam people on scale.
As much as I agree, I think the internet also now has expanded to serve a different class of user, one who "wants" or "expects" to consume, vs. the earlier groups who self-selected as knowledge seekers/explorers.
When I sent my ThinkPad X220 to Lenovo for service under warranty, they sent UPS to my house to pick it and sent it back to me via UPS. All for free.
Exactly. "Best" practices don't always turn out to be the best, after all. "Better" practice might be a better (heh) fit.

It's often more useful to look at anti-patterns and avoid those (still with a grain of salt) than it is to go looking for a pre-existing "best" solution to your specific problem.
Click Click Click. You are getting tracked
Apparently most bovine-sourced methane comes from the burp part of the cycle rather than the fart. Manure may actually come in third when it comes to methane and the cow.

Like humans (86%!), I suspect most carbon that passes through a cow is exhaled as carbon dioxide.
>Sounds like the community might be a reason to use Vue over React ;)

I've run into these "no I'm not telling you because of best practices" people in every single "community"
Some quotes I like below. I assume the resolution will be something along the lines of "thank you for pointing out that .withgoogle.com needs to be added to the whitelist. ;)

> 2. The second issue is that Chrome allows its own products, and a few other select sites, to autoplay audio. JavaScript API changes should be all or nothing — currently this API change (with the secret 1000+ site index and MEI) favours major players like Google, Instagram, Facebook etc. over small independent artists and content creators.

> Here are some of the many Chrome Experiments listed on the official "Experiments with Google" page ( https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ ) that are now broken by this update.

> Note that there is no indication that audio is muted, and no option to enable audio in any way. Also, these experiments *designed for Chrome* all have audio that now works properly in Safari and Firefox on desktop, but not in Chrome.
Using xubuntu now. You're right. It does just stay out of the way, and that's what I want.

The applications delivery the value on the desktop, not the desktop environment. The DE vendors (Gnome/Unity in particular) need to work that out and just get out of the way.
Just using EC2 is a corner case. The huge benefit is the wide variety of hosted services you get to take advantage of and not roll on your own.
Reader mode handles sites like these perfectly, as well.
Yup, love Google inbox. I just wish there was an API so I could create inbox reminders programmatically. That would be so nice!
Same.

If they did a simple non tiling WM that had those little things in it and wasn't a piece of crap, I'd be there like a shot.
How Minecraft Became an Online Business – Health and Wealth Tips for Gen X
Simone Giertz on why we all should be making useless things
Growing a Chatbot Business to $9k in 1 Month
Yeah, now Ars(e) is "in love"...
This is a good excerpt for those who don't have time to read this:

The Center for Applied Rationality promotes double-cruxing, a specific technique that helps people operationalize arguments. A double-crux is a single subquestion where both sides admit that if they were wrong about the subquestion, they would change their mind. For example, if Alice (gun control opponent) would support gun control if she knew it lowered crime, and Bob (gun control supporter) would oppose gun control if he knew it would make crime worse – then the only thing they have to talk about is crime. They can ignore whether guns are important for resisting tyranny. They can ignore the role of mass shootings. They can ignore whether the NRA spokesman made an offensive comment one time. They just have to focus on crime – and that’s the sort of thing which at least in principle is tractable to studies and statistics and scientific consensus.
Personally I feel KDE is still kind of horrible. I would much rather GNOME.
Speaking as a technical writer, if that many vendors misinterpreted the documentation then it was the fault of the documentation.
Apple scraps €850m Irish data centre after planning delays
If you enable it you will find that the results are very blurry. It's unusable, to me.
I am not saying there is no risk. What I am saying is it is nearly impossible with the machine learning/deep learning technology we have now (AI simply isn't smart enough). The training data Google obtained could be from Google voice calls by people which is available for free in the US (I am not sure about this).

What I am sure about is that the current AI will fail badly without the training data.
Ubuntu with MATE works as well.

I used Xubuntu for a while but I was always fascinated by how bad a couple aspects of XFCE are. They maintain documentation [1] on oddball ways of resizing windows instead of just giving people what they want. I suspect MATE just does what most people want out of the box.

[1] https://xubuntu.org/news/window-resizing-in-xubuntu-and-xfce...
Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other execs talk about Google’s plans and ambitions
Can't "instances representing you online" be cryptographically signed in a way?
No! Just add elastic tabstops support!

http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
>"No one is saying we should ban private cars from cities"

I am actually saying that, at least for the city centers.

Ban private cars, or charge a non-trivial congestion fee. Let commercial vehicles with a business purpose drive there, for deliveries and work, and let taxi services operate. But get rid of the space-hogging private cars.
I don't own either. Do either broadcast a (bluetooth?) signal that they are activated and available? As opposed to being turned off.

My concern being, an unknown / unseen device could record your conversation - even if Alexa / Siri were off - and then covertly upload that later. Yes? No?

This is going to get ugly.
Nice. Two of my old fetishes rolled into one. And it does seem to play at least a somewhat decent game of pinball as well.
> They are constantly trying to sell subscriptions to O365 and One Drive.

There is exactly the same argument against Apple trying to sell iCloud.

WRT ads in MacOS Skype. I can't seem to find them (I am not a seasoned Skype user though). Is it Windows+Skype specific?
Imagine if all the data for training they had were public emails from mailing lists. We would instead be worried about how the AI would be turning us into insensitive trolls.
Nice workflow, thanks for the tip.
You don't have to have a cluster to run spark scripts, setting master to `local` (and running it on one machine) is often enough for small anounts of data.
I felt the same way. Then I sold my car and I cannot believe how much money I am saving, it's actually a little bit ridiculous.
You can have a windows partition on a machine that is primarily Linux. First install Windows and then install Linux and there's no issue. Windows 10 today does not require a licence to operate it will not lock you out if you never activate.
Odd, mine works. Are you perhaps using wayland?
Maths in a minute: The axioms of probability theory
I commute by cable car too, here in La Paz Bolivia http://www.lapazlife.com/the-worlds-highest-cable-car-ride/
There's a story on the front page right now about how sea weed reduces methane from cows.
1: I really don't see how CL or Clojure are any more complicated than, say, Rust or C++. If anything, CL and Clojure are simpler, just different.

3: Most useful libraries are portable between different CL implementations. The choice is really "CL or Clojure or which Scheme implementation?" Not to discredit Picolisp or Shen, but those languages feel very much (esp. Shen) like a research language. Picolisp has more of a convincing productivity story, but doesn't seem like it has the momentum of existing competitors and I fail to see an advantage in using it. Depending on your goals, the choice between Lisps can be pretty simple.

5: Portacle is helping in this area by making it much easier for a beginner to learn CL without fussing with setting up SLIME and Emacs. Clojure also has an IntelliJ plugin, cursive. For Scheme, Racket seems like a painless way to start learning.

6. You can easily go multi-core in CL. It isn't as easy as Clojure, but it's definitely easier than C++ or Java (the language).

7: Clojure has access to all of Java's libraries. CL does struggle compared to Python in this area.

8: Lisp related books are among the best in CS. SICP, LoL, etc. are timeless.

The Lisp family of languages definitely have room to improve, but the ecosystem is healthier today than 20 years ago, for sure.