skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> XMPP is unreliable without a bunch of extensions.

and

> XMPP typically uses reliable stream transports, so even without extensions it's pretty reliable.

are really saying the same thing. TCP doesn't protect from losing data that's been sent but never received due to dropped connections, which in practice happens a lot, especially in the mobile world. That even seems to be acknowledged in the explanation. A more honest answer would just point out the extensions.

Apart from that, I agree. Hopefully XMPP in the IM protocol incarnation can reunite the pitiful, broken up messenger world.
"If your company owns this is, what shouldn't they be rewarding you generously for making it?"

Cause they have more power than you. That's about it.
My favourite online resources to learn Go from scratch
This can be good when companies and incentive structures are set up to reward it. The entire concept at the core of SRE is "if you have skilled engineers do your ops work, they'll automate as much as possible, freeing up their time to work on bigger and more interesting problems". At Google, automating a huge swath of your own job is one of the fastest ways for an SRE to get promoted.
How hard would it be to compile the HDL into C that could run in an emulator?

A couple years back I was looking into MESS code and observing how ordered it is and how much work would it be to do the reverse - starting from known modules (CPUs, CRTCs, etc) to compile it into an HDL.
I was thinking more along the lines of don't post stuff online you don't want anyone to know, but sure you could make a whole big deal arguing against a straw man too if that's your bag. There's also some fundamental industry practices that want changing but if you want to do anything more practical than stomping your feet, avoiding posting personal info is a good start.
Once upon a time I was working on a network of TOR routers. The idea was that I could go to a coffee shop and filter their wi-fi through my personal TOR router for enhanced security. Taken to the next level, you could link many of these together for a mesh network of sorts.

The problem I encountered was explaining the concept to laypeople. This can be an issue in the "capital-heavy" and "sleeper" markets.
I've had very good luck changing the behavior of junior developers and moderate luck changing the behavior of mid level developers that are hungry for a promotion. I can count on my fingers (couldn't say if that's one hand or two) how many senior devs I've gotten to come around.

If you're interested in progress and growth, I can say with a high degree of certainty that what you don't want to do is apply to work on a very stable team. These people are always confident that they know what they're doing - even when they agree that the outcomes aren't great. They've had lots of time to practice their rationalizations and that kind of cognitive dissonance can be pretty jarring/aggravating.

By definition, starting your own company or contracting will avoid that situation, but you don't need to take your ball and go home just to get the right kind of environment.
Big and small players are interested indeed, from WD, Alibaba and Huami to 'some 300 companies already looking at or developing with RISC-V in China'[1], but not because RISC-V is so wonderful, it's just not bad and just enough for many tasks - and it's basically free.

[1] https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1333...
Because we haven't figured out a large body of non-leaky
or resilient abstractions yet. If a higher level construct was indeed a true superset of lower level functionality, or was robust enough to be applied to a wide variety of situations, then it would be okay. Right now in web software, because we optimize for development velocity so heavily, the tools a smaller product would reach for are fundamentally different from the tools a very high load service would. Until we can come up with a set of robust higher level abstractions that scale well (or better than they currently do) then we'll be stuck where we're at. Thread pools will saturate, GC will stutter, sockets will timeout, and all sorts of stuff that higher level abstractions do not capture well.

(I kept this post vague but can offer concrete examples of you'd like)
Only if your employment agreement says so. Most people hired as programmers, yes, that's true. People who are hired as other things, and end up automating things, well, that's not so clear.
C and systems programming to learn how software works.

Paraphrasing Churchill:

I would make them all learn [python|java|ruby|etc]: and then I would let the clever ones learn C as an honor, and assembly [MASM|NASM|GAS|etc] as a treat.

An educated person should know a bit of latin and ancient greek. And educated computer science person should know C and assembly.
the SEC uses income thresholds of 200k for an individual and 300k for joint (two years in a row). Should people in the middle class be able to invest?

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=8edfd12967...
"Much more effort"? Right now it implements a library and a language on top of that. Making it just be a library would cut the work in half.
Similar thoughts cross my mind every time I'm passed by a cyclist with a $2,500 bike wearing technicolor corporate spandex.

When I was very young, and about a third my current weight, I rode my bike from Montreal to Vancouver with a bunch of friends.

They all had the latest $500+ touring cycles. I had a brown $99 generic bike from Toys R Us.

We all got there at the same time. And since my bike was far less engineered and precise than theirs, mine broke less often and could be repaired much easier.
I'm intrigued. I'll have to read the book. For me, the distinction between it's raining and whether I believe it is raining rests on the distinction between experience and concepts. (This doesn't appear to be the Kimhi's thesis, if I understood the NYT article.) I first read about this studying Buddhism.

I know it is raining when I experience the sensation of rain. The truth of my experience can't be disputed. My experience may even be illusory, but it's still my experience. "I heard the sound of rain in my dream."

On the other hand, a belief ("it is raining", "there are no black swans") depends on conceptual thinking, which is instantly invalidated by a counterexample or discovery of a logical error. Beliefs are useful, but must be held lightly, subject to experience.
Looks like he always takes the first author slot!
From where I'm standing (studying symbolic machine learning algorithms) the obvious next step in machine learning and AI is the combination of sub-symbolic, with symbolic approaches. It's just, nobody has quite figured out how to make it all work yet. There are reasons for this, not all technical, but it seems to me it's the easiest "next big thing" to at least try.

I 100% agree, FWIW. I believe that figuring out how to properly integrate those different regimes will be a Big Deal.
I think hydrogen should get a huge push because it completes a zero impact ecosystem.

If the hydrogen is powered from solar/wind, then fuel cells process that into heat for homes, electricity for lights, and purified water for drinking.
I probably got bad tax info then, not surprising. I guess that's at least equitably unfair, then.
Exactly. Automate away the mundane tasks, so you can spend more time on the interesting tasks. In some regards, programmers are fortunate to have this ability; many careers do not have the skills to automate away the boring parts of their own jobs.
Related: U.S. President James Garfield constructed an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.

https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematic...

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/presidenti...
It's a tech demo, and it's a damn impressive one at that. The reporting just isn't great.
You're right. Fewer and fewer people care about privacy, private property, and liberty in general.

The reason most trade liberty for security / convenience, is that liberty requires responsibility.
1. You get a state-of-the art training loop that includes the latest research findings such as 1-cycle.

2. Yes. You can make everything project-specific if you want to. e.g. Image segmentation datasets are just slightly modified Dataset classes.

3. fastai extends PyTorch in a very Pythonic OO sense, so I think the only speed issues could come from that, and maybe maintaining a few extra dicts in memory. If it's about i/o, probably not, if it's about parallelization (for nlp), definitely not. In fact, I can't think of a way in which there's a significant speed penalty.
When a Dancer Gets gas
I built a web app that help events organizers build mobile apps
Hi there.

I am looking for someone to test my app, it's a small web app prototype to help event organizers build cross platform mobile apps, the main concept here is building blocks and cloud storage. With these two modules I can automate the whole process. I mean any kind of informative app without complex business logic can be built that way, I'm thinking about portfolios, small businesses apps, etc..

The idea is not new, similar services already exist but what I'm offering is very cheap compared to what you can found on the market. Also many features are still not implemented... like accent color, logo, etc.. The finished product of course will be an APK and IPA files.

The technology I'm using is google firebase for the cloud and react/react native for the web/mobile app, if you wish to learn more there's three easy steps:

1 - Sign up and add some data via your dashboard https://eventmob.herokuapp.com

2- Download expo app

iOs: https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id982107779

Playstore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=host.exp.exponent&referrer=www

3- Scan this QR code to access the app

https://expo.io/@usfslk/event

4- Log in using the same account and explore your fresh new app

Adding data can takes time and that's why I created a prebuilt demo so you can do it in two steps:

Explore the app and makes some changes, you'll see the app get updated instantly.

Log in using these credentials:

email: blvckasvp@outlook.com

password: 000000

Please take into account that both apps are just prototypes and many features will be added later. Also when you publish no account will be required to view the app, you can still sign up to submit feedback and receive push notifications

Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks
wow, i never knew about that! just reading through the comments, i don't particularly find anything offensive with Michael's responses. am i missing something?
Why would one need to become a contractor to switch gigs every 2 years? Seems like that’s the new normal with employers not wanting to invest in employees anymore.
Transformer has gained lots of traction since it was introduced, and has become kind of a standard model for translation now, being better in many/some cases for machine translation. The transformer is different to the previous recurrent neural network (RNN) model (LSTM usually) (together with attention) in that it does not use RNNs/LSTMs at all, but just attention instead (that is why the paper was called "attention is all you need" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 )).

However, note that there was an update by Google recently, "The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Recent Advances in Neural Machine Translation" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.09849). This paper now shows that you can get similar or better performance with RNNs, while training is more stable and can be parallelized more easily (however, requires more computing hardware, if you want to train it faster).
I think there's a much more simple, and clever, explanation. We're looking in the wrong direction. Bloomberg recently ran a story [1] that Amazon is planning on opening up to 3,000 more cashierless 'grab and go' stores by 2021. They are clearly planning on trying to take over physical retail, and this is quite a nasty attack on current players such as WalMart or convenient store type locations.

These companies will not be able to compete with Amazon's cashierless stores. And they absolutely will not be able to compete with them at $15/hour minimum labor costs. This will require these companies to start transitioning to automated systems. But this would be a PR disaster -- firing huge numbers of people earning a hair above minimum wage to replace them with machines? Yeah that'll go over well. By contrast since Amazon is coming in with [relatively] near 0 employees from the get go, they won't face such issues. And an even better side effect here is that this would have a double feedback mechanism. Amazon improves their image of working to do more for their employees at the same time that their competitors are ruining theirs, just to be able to compete!

They just fired a huge salvo towards physical retail outlets. If Amazon does manage to successfully lobby (or create sufficient public pressure) to enact a $15 minimum wage, Amazon could practically won the physical retail game before they even meaningfully enter it.

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-19/amazon-is...
‘Startup in Residence' Builds a Bridge Between Tech and City Hall
It's hard to say. The Emperor isn't really allowed to speak up on such matters anymore.
True that. I want to see the output of OpenRC when I boot to make sure it all looks familiar (I only reboot after a kernel upgrade really). Then I login and type startx.

I understand I'm completely out of touch with how normal people use computers. I don't care.
The problem with graphics is that it's a patent minefield. This is one of the main reasons why graphics stacks are usually so closed.
I’ve wondered the same thing. I’d appreciate a 4 hours per week-ish job that I could exploit.
I have a naive question. What is the tensorflow serving service?
Because the market actually is not easy to beat, which I think is what you're implying!
these robots may not be limited to narrow band of human vision. multi-spectral cameras, RF, magnetic, xray backscatter, Geiger counter.
Waste pickup - someone posted recently a blog from Taiwan, where they have 4/5 garbage collections per day, people simply wait till they hear the truck outside and walk out with their bag and chuck it in the back

Now this really only work in a city that is compact, and quiet enough to hear the garbage truck music

Which leads me on to Strong Towns, where the argument is that the sub-urban sprawl model is unsustainable- and that might be another indicator, a code smell if you like, that it's hard to alter your suburban model compared to the city model.
Is there anything that can be done to move voting day to Sunday or make voting day a federal holiday? As a non-native, I am curious.
I know people whose only hobbies seem to be watching TV and going to concerts, but then I have always known people like that, so perhaps it is not indicative of a trend either way.
Electric car open source project
As a non-developer, how can I hire someone (or a team) like OP that focuses on automating menial stuff and focuses on the most important?

Does a development agency that focuses on this model exist? Of course they should be paid more per hour (or other unit) than your average, less optimized agency, but the sum total should be less than hiring inefficient agencies.

(P.S. I understand the best developers probably don't want to start or work at development agencies, but assuming there are some.)
I find it ironic that the "system" that you're writing Rust code for is entirely built in C :)
It also requires a lot of careful thought, observation, and planning if you want to get a flat wall that will be easy to tape, mud, and paint, and will look good when it's complete.

Like all skills, there's a big gap between "easy enough for an amateur to do an amateur job" and "results worth paying an experienced professional to do a professional job." Until we have real general AI, robots will not be capable of the latter outside of tightly constrained situations, like assembly lines.
Why is it unethical for me to do something for personal gain, but that sort of thing is what many companies are created to do?
That may be true in some cases like testing, build automation etc however when CS engineers are developing AI services and Bots, in the long run they will be automating programmers who used to do those things by hand. So Technology will eventually disrupt Coders as well and they will have to skill up or find a new job.
Instinctively, that seems like a rather long way to bike at an age where one gets a bike from Toys R Us. I admit, though, that I've never particularly looked into the bikes on offer there -- as far as I was aware, they were limited to toy plastic tricycles and the like -- so perhaps they simply had a larger selection than I would have expected.
I think you should visit South America, everybody is either at just hanging out or doing their hobby after school/work.
To be fair (as a hobbyist cyclist myself), there are multiple sub-hobbies. The act of riding is one. The act of assembling, repairing, maintaining, and upgrading a bike is another. Some people really enjoy geeking out over the latter.
interesting that i've just started working on one of his ideas (social calendar)
I think one of the best possible desiderata for society is to reconfigure work so that we do a lot less of it, and so that less of our self-identity and self-respect depends upon it.

By the way, for those that didn't realise, this article is clearly riffing off Bertrand Russell's well-known essay, 'In Praise of Idleness'.
What is a Solution Architect?
To turn it around, would you even invest in some fund that offered this vehicle?

They would probably lose money and you would not get the promised money back.

It would be a risky investment, especially since the upside is small. Chicken and egg problem.
Well, even if we assume you're right, the Japanese certainly don't have a monopoly on ethically questionable relationships with animals (i.e., which they ought to recognize as such, given what they know scientifically).

Consider how in America people have very different ideas of how pigs and dogs ought to be treated, despite how pigs have been shown to be at least as intelligent and sentient as dogs.
Installing drywall in this sort of set-up is pretty easy. When you've got to cut holes for electrical or cabling, move around curves, do ceilings or use hoists to get stuff up... things become a lot more cumbersome and tedious.
It depends on how far into the past you want to go.

Not so long ago, my desktop was an IBM PowerPC running AIX with most (if not all) the heavy lifting being done on a laptop (that lacked a 2048x1576 22" CRT screen and a model M keyboard).

With X and an ethernet port, it was a perfectly usable machine, provided I logged on to the "server" on the other desk.

One of the projects I will do one day (no time now, sorry) is a board for Apple II's that would take over the bus and use the text mode and keyboard as the console of a Raspberry Pi-like board. It's perfectly doable to take over the 1 MHz bus and use the compute as Z-80 boards used to.

OK. That's not exactly usable as a work machine (not nearly as usable as the IBM, at least), but it'd be incredibly cool to be able to use a //e Platinum to work. Even if for a short while.

The exercise of traveling back in time is often not as much as to use the machines for actual work, but to experience them as tools to learn about the context where they existed - the time we had manuals printed in paper, where we would debug (and edit) programs on printouts on wide carriage paper with green bars - to (re)learn the lessons others learned before us that we can still benefit from.
I suspect that by "virtual machine" he means "the C abstract machine". There's arguably little relevant difference between an abstract machine and a virtual machine—for example, Android has an AOT compiler for the Java "virtual machine".
Plenty of developers automate the code writing too; toolkits, boilerplates, generators, code mods, etc are very popular.
The TCO of a Model 3 at a MSRP of $35k is comparable to what... a ICE car at $25k? Maybe less. That's assuming all the cash incentives are long gone at that point, and gas stays above $3.00. It's a bit uncharitable to call that "wildly expensive" unless your context is a new grad buying their first ever used car.

> Durability and reliability for high miles remains to be seen. Batteries are expensive to replace.

Actually, we have very good data for longevity of the Model S batteries, and it looks beyond great. [1] Reliability of drive train and suspension remains to be seen for the 3 since it's so new, but the expectation is that maintenance is significantly cheaper for an electric vehicle due to so much reduced complexity.

> ...I highly doubt there is much more to be gained from manufacturing improvements...

Says almost everyone ever about whatever the current state of the technology is they are currently discussing? Materials science is constantly improving, and it would be shocking to me if they are making the 3 basically the same way 20 years from now as they do today.

> Everything with Tesla hinges on that battery...

And hasn't Tesla proven that they are able to consistently drive battery costs down and density and reliability up? Tesla has hinted at $100/kWh costs by the end of 2018. They are at forefront of battery production, and have consistently pushed the envelope since the 900lb, 53kWh battery in the Roadster which cost something like $600/kWh to produce. [2]

[1] - https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-dat...

[2] - https://www.tesla.com/blog/bit-about-batteries
Yeah I meant "operating systems used by 99% of people". I don't mean to say you need to know C to understand operating systems in general.
If you wanted to only work 2 hours per week, do you think there's a place in the industry for you? Maybe for a freelancer or consultant or anything else where you are outside the company, but there's no place for this internally anywhere, no matter how efficient you are with those two hours. As long as that's the case, people will be incentivized to hide how efficient they can be.

The article suggests at the end that these people have a strong position to negotiate, and I wish it were true, but I just don't see it ever happening :(
Not OP, but the slides here give a really great answer to that question: https://www.codingvc.com/saastr-2017
I haven't been able to find a lot of information on him, does anyone have any good links to background info?

This is going to sound both arch and snarky, and I apologize in advance for that, but I have a point to make and I think it's topical. I'll stay civil.

Has he purchased a beachfront property and then denied his neighbors their accustomed access?

Has he used any of my childhood heroes as a legal blind to secretly sue an obnoxious media company into oblivion?

What's his attitude towards the Republic of China (Taiwan)?

I started to read about his experience during the Haitian earthquake, but I had to set it aside, to read at a time when it would be more appropriate to bawl my eyes out. (No one wants to see a grown man cry. I somehow didn't understand what had happened and learning about it now is just devastating. My God! Poor Haiti!) He stuck around and helped out, so I'm thinking he's an incredibly good guy. Can anyone help me with that?
The working from home angle is what did me in. I used to target 80% of my commute on a bike (in Chicago so gave myself some leeway for the winter).

Now I work from home that ratio. When I do go to the office it’s at a much lower % than previously because the habit provides a boost.
A Man Overdosed on an Erectile Dysfunction Drug and Now He Permanently Sees Red
Oh well I don't know about reuniting as it's been ages since XMPP exists and the IM world has never been as fragmented as now.

But for what it is worth at least now we've got user friendly clients (such as Conversations.im and new Gajim) that one can recommended to non technical people.
The Many Ways VR Is Changing How We Eat