skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once again, there is a general conflation of evolutionary algorithms and learning without a differentiable error function. I've presented this argument again with a discussion with antirez here on HN [1], but the crux of is that Reinforcement Learning as it stands is optimization over (maybe)-non-differential errors. For AlphaGo there is no gradient, per se, that says you will optimize your wins if you go this way (now, it is optimized by training towards the win-rate "score", which could be an error score) -- look at REINFORCE for other variations. Evolutionary Learning and Reinforcement Learning as two sides of the same coin.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652138
Waiting for one of these demos to include animated characters. Not holding my breath.
People have and are using bitcoin in legal transactions. Legitimate companies accept it, legitimate customers pay using it, and legitimate products are traded for it. This is reality.

If all you want to continue posting emotional comments on how much you hate bitcoin, then by all means I wont stop you. but to attempt to dismiss the currency as a toy strikes me as delusional and a bit sad. Approach this issue (and any other) with a level head. Don't let emotions take control you like this.
I would never start any business with friends or families.

Anything with lots of money involve can hurt relationship.

With that said there were other points in there too and pitfalls that OP did early on that are good lessons. I think another thing to consider is that he didn't have a lawyer or accountant from the inception to go over the legality of 50%-50% and administration role.

It's a sad article but the ending was bright and I'm glad he's taking it as lessons learned. It'll help other people too.

edit:

The pivot from B2C to B2B is interesting. I never actually consider this but reading this now it's more of a "No duh" moment.
There are a couple of factual errors here. First, the difference between backprop and evolution is smaller than the author indicates. The error signal used in modern backprop training is stochastic because it is computed on a minibatch (which is why it's called stochastic gradient descent). This stochasticity seems important to achieving good results. And the most popular evolutionary algorithm in the deep learning world is Evolution Strategies, which effectively approximates a gradient. Ordinary genetic algorithms are not gradient-based and have recently shown promise in limited domains, but can't compete with gradient-based algorithms for supervised learning.

The key claim in the article, that gradient descent could not discover physics from equations seems, like it is a statement about neural networks, not gradient descent. Given sufficient training data, a neural network can probably learn to model physics. I sympathize with the concern that it's very difficult to translate a neural network's knowledge into human concepts, but I see no reason to believe that optimizing the same system with an evolutionary algorithm would make this problem any easier. You could e.g. try to do program induction (which was supposed to be the future of AI many decades ago) instead of modeling the data directly, but choosing to perform program induction does not preclude the use of a neural network. Neural networks trained by gradient descent can generate ASTs (e.g. http://nlp.cs.berkeley.edu/pubs/Rabinovich-Stern-Klein_2017_...).

[Edited to remove reference to universal approximation; as comments point out, even if a neural network can approximate a function, it isn't guaranteed to be able to learn it. But I am reasonably confident that a neural network can learn Newton's second law.]
I open sourced an EventSourcing implementation/experimentation in C#
Voxels always where the next big thing. The problem is they dont just demand ressources n^3 for all dimensions- they demand n^6, if you want to go into fine grained detail depending on closeness to the actor.

Cube: Sauerbraten did go there, and it uses something like oct-trees to store these tesselated, refined voxels.

And that is where the whole concept crawls on the shore to die - the tooling for this to work with all that has been invented before is just- not efficient- to sculpt in voxels, you basically send marching cubes through polygon models.

Personally that was the point where i dropped it- because- when i have polys allready- and dont need the destructable physics (they ruin gameplay &performance anyway most of the time) - then why bother.

Its one of those technical superior solutions which never seem to surpass the legacy solutions (like Rust and C). My assumption is, that one day, the polygon world will just eat the voxel world- having a .toVoxel.ApplyPhysicalModel(Sand).AfterPhysicsRestDo(ToPoly), and thats what will remain.

Very small cubes of dust.
The same happened to me. The French megacorp I was working for told me that my diploma level had a wage ceiling that they couldn't break. They offered to pay for training so I could get the required diploma in parallel of my work over a year or two. That was actually a very decent offer, but I was fed up with studying at the time so I just left.

Now I'm working in the USA where nobody cares. I don't consider myself a rocket scientist, but it's still quite sad for France to see all the comments about other French people that were similarly pushed out.

Last time I went to a meetup in SF about tech work in France, one of the French employers advertising there answered a question about the FR/US wage gap with "we aren't looking for mercenaries", essentially trying to fault workers' character for daring to ask for more. If I ever go back to France, it will be with solid plans on how to work remotely for a foreign company if the situation hasn't changed.
Salimans et al evolved weights in convolutional neural nets -- the same structure of network that works with deep reinforcement learning -- to play Atari games from pixels. https://blog.openai.com/evolution-strategies/

So you can make it work with generic models. Although as you say, many of the big successes like the Backgammon players and Kosa's work on electronic circuits used domain-specific models.
Why? I'm not interested in writing an email protocol and really don't care.

Also my last comment already links to a new protocol. Perhaps you should look at that.
Trivia: the article says the Z80 had "full compatibility" with the 8080, but that isn't true. Here and there programs failed because of it.

In the 8080, most ALU operations set the "P" (parity) flag to indicate if the result had an even or odd number of 1 bits. On the Z80, that flag would be set the same way for logical operations (AND, OR, XOR), but for ADD/SUB operations it was used as an overflow flag -- not carry out, but it indicated that the 2s-complement result wasn't able to accurately represent the result.

There were also some changes in the way the half-carry (nibble carry out) flag was handled in some instructions too.
OpenCL 2.2 API Specification
It seems from the sentence that he himself has done both, he is not claiming that the original comment's author has done both.
In Swedish, V and W were treated as the same letter and mixed together when sorting (in the phonebook, in database software, etc) until 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet#Uncommon_lett...
Petalisp: A DSL in CL intended for high performance array-based computing
From the author: https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/8f6wez/petalis...
Given sufficient data, according to the Universal Approximation Theorem, a neural network can learn to model physics.

The ability of a system of linked functions to approximate any continuous function seems rather far from the ability to "learn modern physics".

It would seem like knowing modern physics would involve symbolic calculations rather than just approximating the behavior of any system.
Forget about broad-based pay hikes, executives say
The Handlebars template engine works the way you're talking about. The "each" helper loops through an array. You can put in an "else" block for when the array is empty.

{{#each paragraphs}}
<p>{{this}}</p>
{{else}}
<p class="empty">No content</p>
{{/each}}

--- https://handlebarsjs.com/builtin_helpers.html
> However IMO the best 'rigorous' model of programs is maintaining pre and post conditions. Escaping early when the post-condition is satisfied is compatible with this model (like with e.g. return/break/continue). Escaping in two different ways is not.

Escaping in two different ways really isn't a problem for that kind of analysis. You just have to make sure that the post-condition is satisfied at each exit. For/else is actually a great construct for that, where the else branch is used to achieve the same post-condition as after a break, which would be more difficult if there were no difference between the loop exiting with a break or by exhausting the iterator.
So how do new people get in? Vitamin F, for family and relations. If you can go through a company and alot of people have the same name, you strt to grasp how such systems work.

It really limits how far and where you can go to whoever your parents and family had connections to.
Escape the Brexit. Many EU startup gone to London for some reason.
Assumption: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1486...
Those points describe a large number of public intellectuals from across the political spectrum, most of whom I would not consider dangerous.
Having one's followers be dismissive of opposing views is not necessarily bad. Darwin shares that distinction.
> But the following varnish does not remain damp like previous ones, which were made of linseed oil from Aux boiled with garlic to extinguish them and rid them of fat, and also with wheat.

Ah, so the onion in the varnish was actually supposed to be garlic, and that was disused! It all makes so much sense now.
I'm a little ticked off at how far I had to read and how much time was wasted before figuring out this was a joke. I guess I'm to blame for how long it took.
Because if you had data you'd be like, "here's the data."

If your guess is right, we'd see differences in the effects of Jim Crow depending on what part of the country people lived in. Well, do we? I don't know.
That seems reasonable. I think he spent so much time in a classroom that it's colored his speaking. He's too used to leading students to the point that he's trying to make and waiting for them to make the final leap of logic instead of just saying what he's trying to say.
It can be an issue everywhere, not just in France.
The only correct response.

Lasing out against noise or heat I can understand, but unless electricity is being subsidized, I can't fathom the line of logic people take to justify lashing out against how someone chooses to use electricity they're pay for.

I suspect it's due to irrational hate rather than sound reasoning.
Did you beat one of the sparse matrix packages? Or were you comparing with a library for dense matrices?
Right, there are many tricks for special cases, even when the matrix is not sparse. One example is Toeplitz-Matrix multiplication as described in https://math.mit.edu/icg/resources/teaching/18.085-spring201...

That paper is light on details but, for example, in R you can define the function for toeplitz multiplication as below. This has given the matrix multiplication part of my code a >100x speedup before.

'%t*%' <- function(A,v){
n <- nrow(A)
x <- as.matrix(c(A[1,], 0, A[1,][n:2]))
p <- c(v, rep(0, n))
h <- as.vector(fft(p)*fft(x))
out <- Re(pracma::ifft(h)[1:n])
return(matrix(out, n))
}

all.equal(A %t*% v, A %*% v) #TRUE
I really can't stand JP, I'm glad to see more people coming with articles opposing him. I feel like in a lot of cases in interviews he rambles off and touches on so many different points that people have a hard time responding to him. I think the author of this article tries to touch on this somewhat.
I found something on hn a few days back and i am trying to carry it around and make it a part of me.

"""For someone who hated routines and felt trapped. The simple advice that schedules are my friend and I should schedule my day in a way that would make me happy when I go to bed. Been doing this for 2 months now. Never been more productive or happier. """
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17159515

The thought that the schedule should be one you are happy about is very powerful. I am trying to incorporate that into my daily routine.
There's been a lot of work done in the last 5 years on animating voxel characters. You can probably do a google search and find some papers to your satisfaction. It is something of a challenge though, in that voxels used as an atomic unit can't deform. I can't remember what tricks are used, but I believe it requires pervertig the voxel engine to add exceptions/complexity to deal with animation.
I'm a Ph.D. student in a pure math field, and just coming from personal experience, the overall relationship with TeX is a pretty strained one. The overwhelming majority of working out is done by hand on paper or a chalk board.

That said, as an experiment, I did about half of my Master's thesis work in TeX. Without quick feedback on the rendered formulae, I had a much harder time reasoning through things, so having a comfortable text editing environment seems crucial.

That said, I wouldn't recommend using TeX as a scratchpad. It just doesn't map well to the sets of tools that we tend to use: mini diagrams, arrows between parts of the page, strikeout and circling text, etc.

What might work is something like e-paper that renders a handwritten document into text. Ideally, we could turn letters into Unicode and diagrams into vector graphics, providing tools to edit and embellish the rendered versions if desired.

It's extremely common to edit equations and diagrams on the fly, so I would probably feel friction with anything other that doesn't seem to just magically "prettify" whatever I handwrite at it. Seems like a really tall order though.
Can someone please explain simply?
I think you're slightly missing the point. Absolute power doesn't mean your subjects won't rebel. Nor does it mean there are people beyond your sphere of influence.

The likes of Cyrus the Great by any reasonable measure had absolute power but obviously no influence over, say, China.

Absolute power here really means that the ruler's power is unchecked. In the US for example, the president's power is checked by Congress and the courts. This is really the rule of law. The typical model for monarchs of old was quite simple: whatever the monarch said was absolute.

As an aside I recently listend to Dan Carlin's 3 part series on the Achaemenid Persian Empire titled the Kings of Kings (~20 hours of listening) and thoroughly enjoyed it. It spans a ~200 year period from Cyrus the Great to Alexander the Great and it covers subjects such as the Egyptian rebellion and how harshly the Persians came down on the Egyptians (if you believe Heroditus).

What's interesting about the Persians is just how critical this period was to the development of Western civilization. He raises the point with something like the light bulb if Edison hadn't invented it, someone else would've.

But there are two events in this period that changed history in ways that could've had completely different outcomes. Cyrus the Great reportedly freed the Jews and rebuilt the Temple and it can be argued if that hadn't happened, it may have spelt the end for Judaism and all the offshoots (so Christianity and Islam too).

The second was the Battle of Marathon, which was a turning point that stopped the Greeks being ruled by the Persians and probably greatly influenced Western civilization ever since.
Does anybody have a source for this? The publication doesn't doesn't exactly have the best reputation.

A lot of things are currently built on top of serialization, from JMX to almost everything in Java EE including servlet sessions.
iPhones to unlock doors using NFC
Wouldn't a sliding scale that get's more more expensive beyond typical medium household levels prevent penalizing normal household/commercial usage? For example, a simple rule like 90th percentile usage and above is charged 25% more.
> I would expect that for a loop, an else clause would happen when the loop does _not_ finish normally, or if they loop is empty

Suppose it worked like that and you had this code:

for i in l:
A()
if B():
break
C()
else:
D()

Wouldn't that be equivalent to:

for i in l:
A()
if B():
D()
break
C()

What your suggested else is doing is providing a place to put code to execute after a break in the loop, but we already have a place for such code: immediately in front of the break in the loop.

The only place that comes to mind where this would be useful is situations where you there is more than one

if ...:
D()
break

in the loop. With your suggested kind of else, you could move all the D()'s to an else after the loop.
> Those who are satisfied with doing the absolute minimum to keep a 9-5 job are not suddenly turned into great inventors if offered more money.

That may be true, but that doesn't mean the converse isn't true, which is what's being alleged here, that a great inventor can be turned into an absolute-minimum employee when given insufficient reward.

More specifically, I think you're conflating the typical "inventives" that employers use (which I what I believe the studies have been about) with credit, respect, and/or an ownership stake. Even the article has a quote about it being not about the money.

> They would put in their absolute best even if they were doing something for free/opensource.

I'm speculating here, but I would expect that would change if they had to do that contribution under someone else's name, especially if that someone else were a manager and not an engineer.
Huh? Judging by every other comment in the thread, the point of for/else is that breaking does not trigger the else clause. The else clause is triggered when the loop condition is tested and fails... but Python's for doesn't have a loop condition.
Some of this was due to syntax of their assembly languages. 6502 had letters for different addressing modes, whereas Z80 used parentheses for a memory lookup, e.g. LD A,(HL) uses HL as a pointer, loading its pointed-to value into A (IIRC).

6502 had more addressing modes, but some of them, if not all, could have used Z80 style syntax. After all, it would just be a different the assember (i.e. compiler) frontend, generating the same target machine code.
> We take our privacy and security practices very seriously

This is verbatim what Amazon said a few days ago when they responded to the privately recorded conversation of a Portland woman being sent to an arbitrary contact. I get they are trying to make people feel safe by saying this, but I read this more as "wow, if you take it seriously I'm frightened by things with less priority"

I don't expect any company to care about what happens if it doesn't affect their bottom line. However, I do think the terrible PR they get will eventually effect their bottom line, but who knows if they will connect the dots or blame it on a bad marketing campaign etc.
Easy for you to say from the comfort of the first world, but there are other places in the world without the luxury of a functional banking system. Granted there are a lot of idiots trading, which is why I trade myself (easy prey) as it affords me living funds without having to be subordinate to poorly-implemented scrum processes and egotistical brogrammers.
My three cents:

1. Learn bash. It's the glue of the *nix world. It's not complicated but it's foreign enough that it's worth spending a few weeks really understanding.

2. Learn Javascript. It's the C of the modern era. Practically every piece of software in the world has to interact with Javascript, and the value of it is only increasing.

3. Learn C. It's the Javascript of the old world, and the foundation on which most of modern computing is built. If you need to get two things to talk to each other, the answer is usually C. Fortunately unlike its younger brother C++, it's a fairly straightforward language to learn.
On an unrelated note, can we talk about why aviation has moved away from the biplane? Biplanes gave us the first heavier than air flight. Therefore we should keep flying biplanes forever, because they gave us these great gains in our lives.
I can't believe they discussed plurals in English and missed the most interesting piece!

The -s endings came after Norsemen conquered England, and the introduction of it was from their language, connected to old French. This also is why in English, you have words like "ox/cows" and "beef": the Norsemen who were nobles essentially influenced the English to use their words for the animals since they were served as food to them (beef), while the English people who slaved in the fields raising the actual animals (cow) continued to use their ancestors' words for the live animals. This is why we have different words for the meat of the animals (beef, poultry, mutton) vs. the actual animals (cows, chicken, sheep).
And for that, you could again look at what Minecraft-like games have come up with.

Minetest, for example, groups its "voxels" into cubic chunks, which are then loaded depending on a max distance and presumably some sort of a ray tracing approach to figure out, if the "voxels" in such a chunk are visible.
They pretty much use Radeon HD 7870s, though...
I love Python's for-else feature. I've used it on a number of occasions, and have found it to be useful and to cut down on code.

However, I agree that the use of "else" is horribly confusing. When I teach "for-else" to students in my Python courses, they are often surprised by the functionality, and doubly surprised that the word "else" is used. I often joke that it would be a great feature, if only they had chosen something a bit more intuitive and memorable instead of "else", such as "if_we_exited_the_block_without_encountering_a_break". Slightly more seriously: While I realize that adding a keyword to Python isn't in the cards, a word such as "nobreak" would be easier for people to understand, and would stress the point of the functionality.

The fact that Emacs always tries to indent the "else" of a "for-else" to align with an "if" inside of the loop, rather than the "for" with which it matches, speaks volumes. I mean, if Emacs is confused, then how are we mere mortals supposed to remember?

So when I use "for-else", it's almost always in code that I am writing for myself, and that I don't expect others to read or maintain.

Don't forget that there's also "while-else", although I can't remember the last time I saw that actually used.
You've just described almost every humanities professor I've ever had. I didn't need an article that long to hear a pot call a kettle black.
The Three Body Problem series

Just great, modern, adult scifi books that describe scale of time and space really well in a constantly surprising plot
Apple to unlock new NFC features in iOS 12
One hard part is putting aside the stuff you wanted to get in there, but then you remembered you only have one lifetime.

Worse yet, you keep finding more and more great details, which you wouldn't even have noticed when you started, but now have the experience to appreciate. Then spend more time wondering whether anyone else would care about them.

Either "Great artists SHIP!" eventually overrides, or else ... the quicksand wins.

(Read earlier today that Tolsoy originally published 'War and Peace' serially, then heavily rewrote -that whole thing-. Ay yay.)
One thing to consider is that your co-founder might not actually be your friend. It's easy to think you have a relationship with someone that you spend a lot of time coordinating with that might not truly exist. I believe most problems in any kind of relationships are based on expectations. It can be devastating to realize that someone else doesn't actually care what you think unless it serves their agenda and result in feeling used or exploited.

My advice, which I have failed at many times, is keep business compartmentalized and separate.