skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> In order to predict the most probable next word in a sentence, a model is
required not only to be able to express syntax (the grammatical form of the
predicted word must match its modifier or verb) but also model semantics. Even
more, the most accurate models must incorporate what could be considered world
knowledge or common sense.

So, the first sentence in this passage is a huge assumption. For a model to
predict the next token (word or character) in a string, all it has to do is to
be able to predict the next token in a string. In other words, it needs to
model structure. Modelling semantics is not required.

Indeed, there exist a wide variety of models that can, indeed, predict the
most likely next token in a string. The simplest of those are n-gram models,
that can do this task reasonably well. Maybe what that first sentence above is
trying to say is that to predict the next token with good accuracy, modelling
of semantics is required, but that is still a great, big, huge leap of
reasoning. Again- structure is probably sufficient. A very accurate model
modelling structure, is still only modelling structure.

It's important to consider what we mean when we're talking about modelling
language probaiblistically. When humans generate (or recognise) speech, we
don't do that stochastically, by choosing the most likely utterance from a
distribution. Instead, we -very deterministically- say what we want to say.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to observe "what we want to say" (i.e. our
motivation for emitting an utterance). We are left with observing -and
modelling- only what we actually say. The result is models that can capture
the structure of utterances, but are completely incapable of generating new
language that makes any sense - i.e. gibberish.

It is also worth considering how semantic modelling tasks are evaluated (e.g.
machine translation). Basically, a source string is matched to an arbitrary
target string meant to capture the source string's intended meaning.
"Arbitrary" because there may be an infinite number of strings that carry the
same meaning. So what, exactly, are we measuring when we evaluate a model's
ability to map between to of those infinite strings chosen just because we
like them best?

Language inference and comprehension benchmarks like the ones noted in the
article are particularly egregious in this regard. They are basically
classification tasks, where a mapping must be found between a passage and a
multiple-choice spread of "correct" labels, meant to represent its meaning.
It's very hard to see how a model that does well in this sort of task is
"incorporating world knowledge" let alone "common sense"!

Maybe NLP will have its ImageNet moment- but that will only be in terms of
benchmarks. Don't expect to see machines understanding language and holding
reasonable conversations any time soon.
They are planning to do this with Market Street in San Francisco. I attended an informational meeting (open to public) about this and other nearby streetscape improvements. Many of the people present were afraid bikes will be running over pedestrians, the fear fueled in part by the recent proliferation of electric scooters. I don't agree that this is the right concern, but I just want to illustrate that the idea might not be popular with the general public.
Bonds ARE debt.
> The median household income per capita in the poorest states in India is under $1000/year. Just the cost of the toilet is much higher than the median monthly household income of one person.

This is a myth of sorts.

You'll find there will be nice smart phones in most households so a toilet is far from impossible.

Subsistence farmers drag averages down (Since they don't earn money) so their out of state kids are often above the average and can well afford the £60 for their family home.

The issues are not money but culture and supply chain.

Watch -
The surprising truth of open defecation in India | Sangita Vyas | TEDxWalledCity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V35Vw29tay0
That might do what i want if it can be made to not sort. I hate things moving around on me. Ill give it another look, the battery thing has been bothering me lately.
I guess I'm not sure I understand how this relates. Everybody already does do this. You are allowed to drop your bike off at a bike rack or on the sidewalk out of the way of traffic if you're brave (or have more faith in your neighbors than I do).
To add to this, Sense8, Queer Eye and A Series of Unfortunate Events. Just shows how far deep the solid content goes. I'm still a fan of HBO and I don't think the transition makes sense, but Netflix absolutely has a lot of good stuff of similar quality. I think the transition is a bad move because if they go the other way, the production of junk may result in a net loss of top content which is what makes them good, regardless of how little/much junk they produce.
> They can work practically anywhere and make the same amount of money

You are contradicting yourself by saying you’re in a boom town and also they can move anywhere. (Can they move to Thailand? I can move to Thailand as a programmer). In a mine in Australia you can make 6 figures standing at a gate and letting trucks through, or higher to drive the truck, but it’s specific.

I think their mobility would definitely be worse that a programmers.

> I'll stick with my first hand experience. Have you ever worked blue-collar or just second had info as you present.

I don’t think anecdotes are a good example here. Something like https://data.gov.au/dataset/taxation-statistics-2013-14/reso... would be better.
Our shop adopted microservices, and it's just about the biggest time-sink I've ever seen: about 4x more code than necessary. There was no identifiable organizational need for them; our team is both too small, and the authority flow here is not well-suited for cross-sharing of services. Don't ignore Conway's Law. Technology alone can't force groups to coordinate/share, they have to accept it first.

The newbies and Pointy-Haired Bosses fell for it because big vendors are pushing for it. I suspect they want you to get used to them so they can rent you every little service they can dream up. So, they sell it as Magic Legos, hoping each Lego block becomes a billable block. Instead, we have Legos glued to pasta.

Don't be a sucker, tread with care.
"And does blockchain offer an alternative tradeoff that we might like better?"

Why do I care about limiting the options to blockchain?
I can't find it now but there was a great blog post about parallel processing of large data sets just using Linux streams from the command line. They ended up comparing a single laptop (iirc) against a Hadoop cluster and coming out ahead.
They raise prices.

They start selling the data (oh wait it's google, just terrifying services based on their data).

The abandon large amounts of costly hard to maintain infrastructure and the city crashes.
Not as much as I would like probably
Yes, it can matter quite alot. There's a reason British colonies faired better post independence than those of other powers. The British typically left behind a better developed local administrative apparatus, legal system, and business network. Japan's colonization of Taiwan followed a similar strategy, and it's a significant reason why Taiwan is today a very modern nation, industrially and politically.

Imperial relationships that too heavily emphasize resource extraction--minerals, labor, etc--leave behind a tinderbox.

China is in some ways the worst of the bunch in this regard because they completely abstain from any local development. Even when China "invests" in a country, they literally ship in their own workers and project managers.[1] The locals don't learn (and have no incentive to learn) how to do mundane stuff like project management and budgeting, and expectations that all government is corrupt are left entirely undiminished. Worse, the initiatives allow corruption on heretofore unheard scale.[2]

I don't mean to equivocate the modern reality with colonialism. Colonial powers inflicted many unforgivable injuries upon local populations. In terms of national autonomy there's simply no comparison between 21st century Chinese imperialism and colonialism. But the aftermath of colonialism has taught us much about the dos and don'ts of national development.

[1] Because Chinese development initiatives in Africa and South Asia are not only about securing resources for China, but also function as employment programs for the Chinese labor underclass.

[2] Look at the 1MDB scandal. $1 billion was originally smuggled out of the country through Saudi Arabian channels. But the paper trail was too obvious. To cover his tracks it appears that Prime Minister Najib took a loan from the Chinese Development Bank, nominally to help pay for a Chinese Belt & Road Initiative-sponsored project. The loan was used to pay 1MDB debts, and the project costs (with a corrupt payment structure) born by the government using the regular budget. In effect the money was laundered after the fact because they did such a poor job of it the first time. It would be much more difficult to hide corruption this way using European, American, and Japanese banks and development programs; and if they did and the public caught wind, there'd be serious repercussions. Indeed, one reason 1MDB was discovered and the country able to hold the PM to account is because of the strong, British-derived technocracy and legal system, and the paper trails that passed through Western banks. The Chinese simply don't care, at any level. Their Belt & Road Initiative is in some ways like dropping fentanyl onto entire countries of heroin addicts.
Vice news is great

Some of what they do is great. Some is biased in a disturbingly pointed way.
That's a very slanted title.

Its not any "harder" than it used to be pre-legislation. Some cops are just whining that their favorite watering holes got drained and they cant sit around all day filing subpoenas anymore.

All this means is that if you can still find hookers online, rest assured you're two steps ahead of the police. They'll go back to tossing massage parlors in the meantime.
You might be confusing it with the new California law (which would apply to snark.ai, per their own terms doc) that requires any renewing service offer that can be initiated online to have an online way to cancel.

https://www.perkinscoie.com/en/news-insights/california-upda...

I don't think that extends to full account deletion, though, more about stopping recurring charges.
I have no stake in this whatsoever, I just have some questions that maybe you (or somebody else) can answer, as I'm finding myself agreeing with the parent post.

- What does blockchain have to do with HPC? What advantages does this give me versus current solutions?

- If I was concerned of the privacy of my data, why would I put it on an unproven, public, immutable ledger? We all know what can happen when even minor bugs rear their heads in these types of applications.

- Where does machine learning come into the equation?

- Why would I want to use this rather than AWS/GCE/etc.?

I guess really what I'm asking is, what problem is this solving? Just curious :)
I think I understand what you're saying and I agree that no software developer should willingly write code that will be used to break or circumvent the law. I believe that if I was put in such a position that I would walk rather than implement the feature. I don't think we are alone in that feeling, I believe many developers feel the same way.

I worry that a feature meant to circumvent or break the law will not be easy to spot. Many projects are broken into smaller pieces that interact, many times the laws or rules change from state to state. Even in regular day to day work I'll see a feature request that effectively undoes another request. Often developers are working in areas in which they are not subject experts.

I think it's easy to write code that could (or even will) be misused; it may not look troubling until it's interacting with the larger system.
> Plastic litter is everywhere in India due to lack of litter management.

Certainly this is true. But assume that litter management improved in India: they would still have to dispose of the plastic litter.
I was very disappointed when I realized this wasn't the study of giant Chinese babies.
> has founded entire subfields of computer security.

Mind to provide a pointer? Generally new to Dawn's work, and I think many readers here have a similar background.
There is literally no difference. The value of Aramco is the discounted value of all future cash flows. So selling 5% in an IPO is equivalent to selling 5% of all future cash flows (discounted appropriately). This allows them to diversify now rather than later/gradually.

There are other non-financial advantages of having at least partial public ownership of a publicly owned company like Aramco, like increased transparency and accountability.
why would a company trying to build a product be a greater fool example? you mean all startups that fail at very high rates are also that?
Generally I agree, but after you've picked off a few low hanging fruit, you'll end up with the profiler pointing at the function which does most of your grunt work, at which point you'd expect that to take up most of the time.

Once you've got this pretty optimized and it's still taking up the lion's share of your execution time, you have to look elsewhere (probably changing your overall approach or applying some higher level optimisation) to improve things further.
Got rickrolled in 2018 gnarf :(
oh yeah, I can get behind that.

If you need an app on both Android and iOS quickly, have low quality concerns and only one web dev .. RN is a no brainer.

It kinda occupies a completely different valley of the fast/cheap/good graph
Philip Guo's "The Ph.D Grind: A Ph.D Student Memoir" is an amazingly well-written and sage chronicle of getting a Ph.D at Stanford from 2006-2012.

http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4179982
Paying people across borders.
https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...
Its a slightly grey area. This would be seen as illegal because it is an "agreement" to "limit or control production" which is prohibited by EU law article 101(1). However article 101(3) allows these agreements if it "contributes to improving the production or distribution of goods" and "allow consumers a fair share of the resulting benefit".

In a case in Australia [1] LNG producers had to apply to the government in order to coordinate shutdowns. The regulator concluded that they could approve this on the basis that there it was "likely to result in a public benefit" and that "reducing competition in the acquisition of maintenance services is unlikely to be significant" [2]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/australia-lng-regulator/aust...

[2] https://www.accc.gov.au/public-registers/authorisations-and-...
Thank you for all the "insider-baseball" references to explore! I did leave out the '5G is necessary for networked cars' but it is all good...
Deadwood.
Do you own some of this? Are you associated with the project in some way?
So the argument is that level of hit-making is unsustainable? Would Apple's practice of coming out with market-defining new products be another example of this hit-making practice? Perhaps the strategy to "reliably keep a Game Of Thrones or True Blood in the pipeline" isn't viable long term? Eventually, everyone is going to miss a beat then go bankrupt.
People in Venezuela certainly do send and receive USD from abroad, it is obviously the only way it gets into the country. You can go to a grocery store and buy food with USD. This is what people are actually doing. I suppose you can try to convince the people at your local grocery store to accept cryptocurrencies but good luck with that. And good luck using cryptocurrencies in a country that suffers from frequent blackouts of both electricity and internet.
I also enjoy watching circus clowns at the circus, but I don't want them driving our bus. He should have kept his day job.
I wouldn't say that premium cable is over. Rather before you used to pay $60 + premium channels a month to have cable tv. Now you pay $15+15+15+15+15+15+15 ... + 75 for internet connection that doesn't have data caps.

Personally I think the de-bundling of cable TV and the getting rid of ads (i seriously never understood how we can pay for cable tv and still be forced to watch ads) is a great way for the market to move forward. It shows you that the consumer does ultimately get the final say so.

However, I do not believe that costs are getting cheaper. If anything they are just going to keep going up and up.

Also the crazy level of competition going on right now to produce "service selling" original content, is in my views creating a situation where we keep getting a sub par product out of the deal.
No harm. I’m operating on too few myself today.

In a word: magic thinking has been with us for a long time. It was old when I got into the industry. Various personalities have lampooned this bad behavior, or still are (eg, Mike Judge with “Silicon Valley”) which seems to slow our roll, but not really fix anything.
The Deadly Explosion Behind America's Whipped-Cream Shortage (2016)
> Netflix introduces new programs like Google introduces new chat programs.

Yea, and they both have equivalent staying power.
From a quick look at the Sagefy code, it seems you've written your own web framework, including your own database layer. Was there a particular reason you didn't use a framework like Django?
Noticed the year 2015 has several unique distributions. Curious what the insights are.
> You ... have no idea if I have access to the new information or not

You assume that you can obtain on information before HFT, possibly because you're talking about a different type of HFT than I am.

Can we use a clearer example? Let's say that we submit a limit order to buy 10 shares of AA (American Airlines). Before the order is fulfilled, two AA planes collide (the new information). In response to the new information, any trader would agree that the stock price should drop significantly, and it does. HFT will quickly sell to our previous uninformed trade, which we are not able to cancel in time--that's the unfair advantage. Please explain to me how this is not "fastest trader takes all".
>Real ale is an arbitrary definition

In the same sense that any term has an arbitrary definition. The Campaign for Real Ale coined the term to defend the practice of cask and bottle conditioning of beer. Beer is only real ale if it's unfiltered, unpasteurised and is served without additional carbonation.

There are plenty of breweries producing real ale on a large scale; many of them are subsidiaries of AB InBev, the world's largest brewing business. Filtered and/or pasteurised beer is more convenient to ship, but other food and drink manufacturers cope just fine with perishable products.
How to Download Photos from Instagram on PC
I read that in early June, scooter hire was halted in San Francisco and companies had to apply for licenses, which were expected to be issued by the end of the month. Any update on what is happening there?
References abound but here’s the top one https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/01/27/h...

I’d think twice before making roads from (even more) toxic chemicals.
I get HBO, binge on the new show, then cancel after a month. They have some good content, but not enough to keep me paying $10+ or whatever each month.
That's the term the SEC uses to explain why a fair market is important. If ordinary investors and traders believe that low latency traders have systematic advantages over them, they will lose confidence in the market and choose not to participate.
YouTube plans to spend $25m fighting fake news.  how
> pocket is an instapaper clone with the same business model.

No. Pocket is owned by Mozilla.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...
> the "national OS" is still is the pirated Win XP from around 2005

I wonder why China doesn't adopt a national policy of moving to an OS it can control, such as Linux? (Possibly in conjunction with Wine for backward compatibility, or if they want something more Windows-like, maybe ReactOS.)

Whatever limitations an open source OS stack may have, surely with enough funding those limitations could be overcome, and surely the Chinese government can afford to fund that.
How on earth did you interpret my comment as about "writing style"?
Could you stream the data into memory as it is created so that loading data isn't in the critical path?
How is Chrome DevTools "miles better" than Firefox Developer Tools included with Firefox Developer Edition?

I checked your blog to see if you've written a detailed comparison. I saw that your latest blog post is about writing your first user script in 2018, and you didn't use the term "user script"[1][2]; instead, you used the term "Tampermonkey Scripting" as if Tampermonkey originated user scripts. Do you have enough experience with web development to adequately compare Chrome DevTools and Firefox Developer Tools?

[1] https://wiki.greasespot.net/User_script

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Userscript
I can type `console.log(blah)` into a text file and hit save much faster than I can search for the same file within Chrome right-click and then come up with a working conditional breakpoint dependent on the context around it and type this into a tiny input field.

If you understand the code and are currently writing it, it's almost always faster to debug with a `console.log`[0]. This seem to be the case whether you are coding in a browser or running unit tests: reaching for the debugger is slowwww.

To me, the debugging experience everywhere seems broken. Why is the only tool we have a breakpoint? What if I don't want to 'block' and just want to mark a point in the code which I want to capture a selection of information about? Why not let me visualise or filter these points, and then click through to see the callstacks and the state that was collected?

The whole DX seems to be built around the premise that I want to laboriously step through when I debug. While in 99% of cases as soon as I see some values I instantly know what I have done wrong.

The only times I normally use a debugger are when debugging problems on production sites, or when debugging complex problems in other people's code.

[0] This might not be the case, if your IDE is extremely
well-integrated with your text editor to the extent that you
can add breakpoints as easily as you can add log statements.

Edit: I just checked and the latest version of VSCode has LogPoints. Perhaps that means others see room for improvement, too.
According to the FTC [1], price fixing is almost always illegal. From the link: "An agreement to restrict production, sales, or output is just as illegal as direct price fixing, because reducing the supply of a product or service drives up its price."

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

edit: Forgot this is about Europe. Relevant EU page: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/sell-abroad/free-compe...
How do you make a show like The Sopranos without cuss words? Not too many mobsters earn an Eagle Scout medal.

And if you tell me that The Sopranos wasn't realistic, I'd say you weren't paying attention to the news in the NYC metropolitan area. Many/most of the show's plots were, at the least, "inspired by actual events".

You can always watch the Hallmark Channel on basic cable. Not too many cuss words there.
What I really love is that (when the server is working) you can

ssh brow.sh

And then have a graphical browser from anywhere :D.
Sorry for the delay. I added your con.
This is great! Going to try this out
Yes. Boxers. Loose pants. No hot baths or saunas. Good luck!