skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's no such thing as the greater good in evolution, and humans aren't the goal. We're only one of millions of species, and we're fairly recent. Evolution isn't progressing toward any goal. It's just what can survive and reproduce, which changes depending on the environment. A large rocks slams into us tomorrow, or we have a runaway green house climate change, and the equation changes big-time for which organisms are fit.

The reason we have complex multi-cellular life forms on this planet is because the environment was stable enough to allow such a thing to happen. Bacteria and viruses might be the only life on a majority of inhabited planets.
Despite backlash, Microsoft sticks with controversial “GVFS” name
Fraud-resistant, privacy-preserving scheme for tracking user visits to websites.

It's since been cited against other applications, but for the specification, not the claims. I described what seemed to me like a fairly obvious scheme for feeding fraud patterns back to authentication servers (Fig. 5).

https://patents.google.com/patent/US9853964B2
Android Screen Stabilization Using Accelerometer
Well all these species probably has role in horizontal gene transfer. They also help keeping animal population from growing too big. However it is very unlikely that any of this factors has any global effect. Some areas of the world don't have mosquitoes or ticks, in others they were eradicated with DDT and other chemicals. Observed negative consequences didn't have anything to do with eliminated targets.

It's possible that in some local areas some animals would be severely affected. But even in that case climate change already changing natural balance. For example ticks are almost culling deers. It is better to find new equilibrium while humanity still can have some control over the ecosystem.
RAII isn't only about exceptions (although it helps greatly); see Rust for example.

RAII is about any scope exit automatically cleaning up resources. Exceptions is a big one, but so is return, break, etc. Having it happen automatically in all cases is a win for robust software (in my opinion).
I looked into getting a patent and realized they are basically useless. Why bother for the cost and enforcement?
I love Spam in general. It's a fantastic breakfast meat. Short of ham steak, there's nothing better.
Apple has said that 90% of the "genuine" chargers on Amazon are fake and they've sued some sellers [1]. They haven't sued Amazon, and this story is probably why.

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/10/19/apple-amazon-charger-lawsuit/
I'm just here (on HN) to make conversation. As far as I know, my comments here are in no way causing any scientists to be held back from rushing forward with their plans to do anything at all, whether mosquito related or not.
Quantum computing is all about the tensor product. This is, roughly, how "and" works in the quantum world. Learning about tensor products by calculating with matrices is dizzyingly complicated [1]. But there's another way, using string diagrams [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronecker_product
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1787
No, if the company ultimately became a huge success, the radio station would claim $15,000 in very early equity.
Imo Docker doesn't have too high a learning curve at the start. It's just when you move up to docker compose, Kubernetes that it can be overwhelming.

My opinion is that when you're starting out, just go with a PaaS like Heroku. You can simply maintain a separate dev/prod branch and it'll automatically update the server.

All the issues you mentioned can be solved it just takes some investment somewhere (time if you do it today yourself / money to pay a PaaS or someone else to do it).

We personally use Kubernetes to solve these issues since we get stateless builds and simply have environment variables that change things like database connections, api keys, etc between our various environments. But again this took a few weeks to setup.
Here's something I didn't know before it happened: a company can list you as an inventor on a patent application and file it even if, instead of signing the documents for the legal dept, you respond with a list of prior art. But that's probably only likely in large corps which file lots of research anyway.
Phrased another way this is a great example of why the breakdown of a cumulative score (verbal vs quant, etc) is important on standardized tests.
>> The other upside of this hype is that it ends up attracting a lot of really smart people to work on this field, because of the money involved.

The hype certainly attracts people who are "smart" in the sense that they know how to profit from it, but that doesn't mean they can actually do useful research. The result is, like the other poster says, a huge number of papers that claim to have solved really hard problems, which of course remain far from solved; in other words, so much useless noise.

It's what you can expect when you see everyone and their little sister jumping on a bandwagon when the money starts pouring in. Greed is great for making money, but not so much for making progress.
amazing work on just pi!
Tenable | SF / Bay Area | ONSITE or REMOTE Software Engineer, Principal Engineer

Tenable is a rapidly growing network security company. We’re expanding our engineering team to keep up with our rapid customer and revenue growth.

Tenable.io is the first comprehensive cyber exposure platform. You will be joining a team that is building a streaming data pipeline using Kafka and Java/Kotlin. We are also building connectors to 3rd party applications using a FaaS (aka serverless). This is a great opportunity to have a significant impact.

In terms of skills, you should be able to develop, deploy and maintain a microservice written in Java/Kotlin or another language that runs on the JVM, that exposes a REST API, calls other REST APIs, parses and produces JSON, reads/writes to/from a data store (PG/Aurora...). It's a plus if you understand how to instrument your code (telemetry, logs, etc.), and ideally understand retries with backoffs, ideally circuit breakers, etc. If you already know Kafka that's a plus. AWS, GCP or Azure experience is needed.

I'm the Sr. Director of Engineering, Data Services (Data Science and Data Engineering). You can reach me at aahmed @ tenable.com. Please put "HN" in the subject line.
Yeah, you don't need a QR code with React Native, that's a nice feature of Expo...but you can always plug a USB cable in and deploy your app that way.
Except Amazon doesn’t list it. The vendor does.
learning by trial and error will never generalize well
As someone said, "C is an improvement on its successors"
The editor is from Microsoft
https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor
People have been complaining for a long time now that Amazon is hard to trust because of how many counterfeit/knockoff items get mixed in among genuine ones in their warehouses.

There was even a guy who lost his Global Entry status (trusted traveler program run by US Customs) because, unknown to him, he'd been thrown under the bus when a suitcase he ordered from Amazon was seized at the border for being a counterfeit:

https://lifehacker.com/your-amazon-order-might-lock-you-out-...

Amazon itself tends to keep quiet about this, but consensus in the various stories is that their system's set up to make it hard to know the origin of particular items, or to keep third-party (and potentially counterfeit) items separate from ones sourced direct from the manufacturer.
Maybe you would, but I wouldn't. First, those are unrelated skill sets. Second, lots of people excel in one area and suck in another. That's completely normal.
My bad reading.
Interesting paper from 2002.

Nowadays, a popular method for imaging and viewing cuneiform tablets is Reflection Transformation Imaging (RTI) [1], developed at HP, and used among other things to image the Antikythera Mechanism [2].

You can view RTI images in your browser; here is a randomly selected cuneiform tablet in conventional [3] and RTI [4] form (click on the image and move your mouse around).

The web page of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative at UCLA [5] is worth a look, if you are interested in the intersection of computing and cuneiform. Among other things, they have started a project in machine-assisted translation of cuneiform [6].

[1] http://culturalheritageimaging.org/Technologies/RTI/

[2] http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2006/oct-dec/antikythera.html

[3] https://cdli.ucla.edu/search/search_results.php?SearchMode=T...

[4] https://cdli.ucla.edu/search/rti/rti_view.php?loc=P236609_o

[5] https://cdli.ucla.edu/

[6] https://cdli.ucla.edu/?q=news/machine-assisted-translation-c...
Don't forget to come back here when you ultimately publish your findings. I know I'll be keeping an eye open.
>> While it's a good idea in principle to publish failures, in practice it's a bit more tricky. So a particular model didn't work. Does that mean the model is fundamentally flawed? Or that you weren't smart enough to engineer it just right? Or that you didn't not throw enough computing power at it?

And yet the field seems to accept that a research team might train a bunch of competing models on a given dataset, compare them to their favourite model and "show" that theirs performs better - even if there's no way to know whether they simply didn't tune the other models as carefully as theirs.
Investigation Shows Coke Doesn't Give Back as Much Water as It Uses
> Getting patents is a lot like branding. The trick is to call old things new names.

This sad reality is why a lot of engineers look at patents like (to use the article's own analogy) cannibalism.

Patents, IMO, would be fine if they were only granted for truly novel inventions. Jefferson's writings on patents make it quite clear he would be pretty aghast at the current state of the patent system and the prevalence of "X, but for Y" patents.

See, for example: http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letter...

"I assume it is a Lemma, that it is the invention of the machine itself, which is to give a patent right, and not the application of it to any particular purpose, of which it is susceptible. If one person invents a knife convenient for pointing our pens, another cannot have a patent right for the same knife to point our pencils. A compass was invented for navigating the sea; another could not have a patent right for using it to survey land. A machine for threshing wheat has been invented in Scotland; a second person cannot get a patent right for the same machine to thresh oats, a third rye, a fourth peas, a fifth clover, etc. A string of buckets is invented and used for raising water, ore, etc., can a second have a patent right to the same machine for raising wheat, a third oats, a fourth rye, a fifth peas, etc?"

But today we have SO many patents that are just "X, but on a computer". The need for true novelty has been completely lost, and with that the system has become a nightmare.
If you’re a foreign company selling on Amazon, even through a shell, you should be bonded and insured or whatever the equivalent that home contractors are required to have. If an electrical contractor can burn down my home and so can your shoddy product, they should require the same minimum insurance.

Edit: all companies, forget foreign.
That is why I bought from Amazon and not Chinese companies. little did I know Amazon is No better.
Texas Supreme Court decision another small victory for Airbnb
I don't claim to have any answers, but I found all of this interesting and surprising. I wondered about a couple of things. What happens if the do_stuff_to_foo is actually defined (and what happens in that actual function)? And is there a difference between value semantics and pointer/reference semantics?

These questions were my take-away from one of Chandler Carruth's C++ compiler optimization talks, I think it was this talk.
https://youtu.be/eR34r7HOU14

My take aways were that the optimizer gets a huge chunk of its performance by inlining. And with value semantics, the optimizer can "cheat like crazy".

So I defined two different variants for do_stuff_to_foo

Original Pointer/Reference Semantics:

void do_stuff_to_foo(foo* a)
{
a->x++;
}

Value Semantics:

foo do_stuff_to_foo(foo a)
{
a.x++;
return a;
}

In both cases, the compiler emits effectively the same output for C and C++ (I only tested clang.) (The main difference was name mangling. I omit stuff for brevity.)

Pointer/Reference Semantics:

Lcfi2:
.cfi_def_cfa_register %rbp
incl	(%rdi)
popq	%rbp
retq
.cfi_endproc
## -- End function
.globl	_blah ## -- Begin function blah
.p2align	4, 0x90
_blah: ## @blah
.cfi_startproc
## BB#0:
pushq	%rbp
Lcfi3:
.cfi_def_cfa_offset 16
Lcfi4:
.cfi_offset %rbp, -16
movq	%rsp, %rbp
Lcfi5:
.cfi_def_cfa_register %rbp
movq	%rdi, %rax
popq	%rbp
retq
.cfi_endproc

Value Semantics:

Lcfi3:
.cfi_offset %rbx, -24
movq	%rdi, %rbx
incl	16(%rbp)
leaq	16(%rbp), %rsi
movl	$1036, %edx ## imm = 0x40C
callq	_memcpy
movq	%rbx, %rax
addq	$8, %rsp
popq	%rbx
popq	%rbp
retq
.cfi_endproc

What I find interesting here is that in both the C and C++ , the memcpy now appears. And in the C case, there is still only one memcpy, not two.

So as I said, I don't have any answers and really don't know what the take away is. But RVO no longer seems to be a factor in these variants.
I wonder how this will apply to solar glasses. Amazon has to require standards and insurance from sellers.
> But today we have SO many patents that are just "X, but on a computer".

This is a lot less common than it used to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...
How is this news? Or why did anyone waste time or money investigating it? Just evil marketing lies.
and then there's the guy whose back in the city who knows the world is designed by aliens and that nature is artifice, all decent processor architectures are designed using dataflow HDL languages and the notion of "bare metal" nature is a delusion held by hipsters and unix greybeards
But those smarter people don't take all the jobs, make all the decisions for you, or control all the wealth. It all depends on what happens when and if we have AGI.
It is highly useful to be able to see the source code of the platform you are developing against, for research/reference purposes. Obviously that's not possible for Windows developers, but ReactOS at least provides an example of how a compatible implementation might do things.
If you contributed, you have to be named as an inventor.

This is quite distinct from whether the submission is actually patentable. If you didn't think it was, you are able to file to bring the prior art to the attention of the examiner.

(Again: I am not lawyer.)

(Edit: I defer to the comment from patentatt)
The manufacturer should have to be required to maintain liability insurance with a claims process. If Amazon doesn’t enforce that standard, it should have to stand in.
Tell the story not the news. Wow, well done.
The wonderful thing about C is that bad coding can't hide. The programs blow up early and loudly. In safer languages, the memory bombs go away through garbage collection / safe pointers / borrow checking / etc, but all of the uglier and quieter mistakes are still very much there.

Knuth and von Neumann took the same approach to PRNGs back in the early days...
What happens if we find out China is committing atrocities like ethnic cleansing? Will we implement some economic sanctions or will we send in the troops?
> I honestly have no idea why it is this way.

An endless supply of passionate, naive, and young talent. I guess at least 50% of my graduating CS class at one point or another wished to create a game. Far fewer wished to create a database engine, an operating system, or a B2B web service.

When you have that many people who want to make a particular type of software, getting a chance to do so acts as something economists call a compensating differential. Working on games is actually part of a game developer's compensation, and thus the companies can afford to pay them less in other ways.
One thing that was common when i worked in retail was if you worked overtime without pre-approval from your manager, you won't get paid for those hours. The one guy that complained was fired publicly for being lazy. No one else took the risk.
Wow - this is exactly the kind of work I want to do. For two decades I've been writing boring software to make rich people richer. I've been looking for a way to use my experience for something that really helps people. It makes me wonder if there is a list of dev/tech opportunities for similarly impactful organizations.
Woah! I totally missed that. This is a first. And it's free for Reason 10 owners. The product key was already in my account when I logged in. And is has a scalable UI.

I wonder if this is a foretaste of things to come? Maybe Thor next? Please?
> I honestly have no idea why it is this way.

Think of an actor coming to hollywood. It's not that different.
And better depends on what one values. Intelligence and efficiency are only two of the things humans value, and it's debate-able how much they're valued against happiness, relationships, status or finding meaning in life. Efficiency isn't a metric to use in personal relationships, for example.
But 99 percent will never create any of those things. They will work on them but never create it.
So...a couple issues with this:

- You'd have to commit to doing that forever. Malaria is ridiculously hard to eradicate without going after the vectors, and you'd have to be providing a continual course of it. You're not talking about "An African run factory to make this cheap" - you're talking about a robust continent wide distribution system. That's not an easy thing to do.

I've run into these kinds of problems all the time thinking about interventions in Africa - a lot of them posit an availability of infrastructure that isn't there.

- The combination of drugs in Malaron slows the development of resistance, but doesn't stop it. What's your plan for drug resistant malaria?

We're already preventing millions of people from dying now. This isn't an all or nothing campaign.
just scrape startpage.com
> For the few legacy programs that need to be run on Windows- JUST RUN IT ON WINDOWS.

This works as long as you can get the version your application is compatible with and have hardware that version of windows can run on. At some point one of these will not be possible anymore and your choice will be either Wine or ReactOS.
Here Together: New Facebook TV Ad
Also see https://github.com/analyticalmonk/awesome-neuroscience
Who says that AGI will "replace humanity"?

Actually, I think I can answer this- it's the Singularitarians who promote this idea. Unfortunately, their fantasies have tained the meaning of "AGI", making it synonymous with an evil (or amoral etc) paper-clip maximiser and the like.

A much more realistic sort of AGI, on the other hand, one that we could turn on and off as we pleased, would be a great tool in understanding our own, natural intelligence. Or it might be the case that we'll only ever achieve AGI once we have a better understanding of our own intelligence.

In any case, there's really no reason to assume that AGI will necessarily replace humanity.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103635

The blog post the article is actually about: http://matpalm.com/blog/counting_bees/
That would make sense to me. Not to over simplify the issue but I would settle with Amazon having skin in the game period. They seem to be extremely good at engineering ways to deflect responsibility (financially or ethically).
The original poster (OP) was suggesting that acronyms should be written in expanded form once, like I did with OP at the start of the sentence, and then used by acronym for the rest of the article, like I did in the middle of this sentence. That way people who don't already know the acronym don't need to go look it up, and people who do know the acronym don't have to pause and think about it, and it still saves time and typing by the author.

Many writing style guides, like APA [1], suggest this form.

[1] https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/21/
You. I like you. I hope FGPAs become more commonplace and efficient.
It's important to remember the desired goal - secure cryptography, and in that case even if the NSA is a known-bad actor, they might still be the best option to achieve an optimal outcome.

There is a name for the kind of table below but I have forgotten it. Essentially on the balance of outcomes, a situation (of engineered choices, of course!) where the NSA is involved still produces, given unknown factors, a potentially better outcome than a situation where the NSA is excluded.

Bad = 0.1, Fair = 0.5, Excellent = 1.0

Cipher Author | Known Weak | Security | Likelihood | Security*Likelihood |
Academia | No | Excellent | Bad | 0.1
Academia | Nationally | Fair | Fair | 0.25
Academia | Internationally | BAD | Fair | 0.05
NSA | No | Excellent | Fair | 0.5
NSA | Nationally | Fair | Fair | 0.25
NSA | Internationally | BAD | Bad | 0.01

SUM(academia) = 0.31
SUM(nsa) = 0.76

(Does anyone know what this kind of table is called? Can someone do a version that makes more sense? It's 4am and quite a few beers were involved :))
An inventor has to sign a declaration stating that they attest to the patent application, the company can’t get a patent without it.[1] So if you don’t execute the dec, they can’t get the patent granted. They do have up until that time, however, so a company could hypothetically put your name on it through prosecution without your input, but they can’t get the patent issued. But by sending them prior art, they do have to forward that on to the patent office, to fail to do so would be a clear violation of their duty to disclose.[2]

You could also anonymously submit the prior art, in the case that your company chooses to violate their legal duties but you also want to not get fired.

If you believe that the patent may be valid, but you for some reason insist that you in fact are not the inventor, take it up with your attorney first. If for some weird reason the attorney still insists on listing you as the inventor, you could probably take some kind of legal action either at the PTO or in a federal court to assert that you’re not an inventor. Usually this happens in the case that someone is trying to assert that they are an inventor, however, for obvious reasons.

But, if the company does get a patent for something even though you may disagree on the merits, you may be obligated under your employment agreement to be cooperative in signing the dec and assignment, but that’s a matter of contract and employment law, not patent law.

[1] There are provisions for hostile, missing, or deceased inventors, but if your objection to the patent is only technical or prior art based, that’s probably not the appropriate way to handle it.

[2] The duty to disclose is a BFD. If your middle management is oblivious or ignorant, run it up the flagpole to an attorney. Someone with an actual license to practice law and preferably admitted to the patent bar. They will listen to you, I guarantee it.
We can already do all those things with dumb automation; no need for AGI.
Would you mind posting the video? That sounds great.
Absolutely. Work should definitely proceed in parallel. The marginal utility of an extra dollar to a more or less fully funded research activity is small, even after factoring in the effect size. That same dollar spent on another disease could have much more benefit. Even without considering the varied research interests of scientists, or without considering any other human factors in the labor supply, the maximum benefit to humanity is not going to be achieved by throwing all or most money at a single disease.