skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's certainly ironic, but most places I've been to pronounces it like the word "ally". At least it's easier than the even more obscure "i18n" and "l10n" for "internationalization" and "localization".
> I don't expect this state of affairs to drag on through the whole of 2019

Seriously?? The exit is so incredibly complex I can foresee the ramifications dragging into decades. The border problems alone are going to be a political quagmire, to view this sort of thing is a 12 month trifle is short-sighted to say the least.

The exit will split the country in half, how on earth can you have 'clarity' when there is basically zero bi-partisan agreement politically and socially?
I'm sure anyone born from anyone is capable of learning about sugar. The sugar industry should at least be partially blamed considering how hard they try to make it look like sugar is not a problem. Also making it more confusing for the consumer by labeling it different things.
Yeah i tried doing that. The conversion is so bad with multiple random line breaks in a single line, and some unicode characters not getting converted etc. It was a bad experience.
meh. // as a programmer for 37 years, and a person heavily familiar with technology -- meh.

That is 80s level crap right here, he didn't seem to know people yet. Fair enough, but still.

The future is nothing like this man thinks, plus he doesn't understand the power of organic tech (the brain) - or the idea that any intelligence is hampered not by speed but by the density and depth of the "graph" it has to explore to provide context for any given answer.

Just my 2c -- I'm sure I will get hammered for it sometime in the future.
Hi fellow Hackers,

I often tend to procrastinate when I begin working on a task thus preventing me from finishing my tasks faster. I know it is very hard to focus at times especially with all of the distracting tools such as Facebook, YouTube, email, Slack etc.

I have built a tool called Focus Window which allows you to focus on a single application at a time. This tool has improved my workflow tremendously for 2018.

I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.
It's impossible to predict the location of a bouncy ball when thrown in a small home with a cat present. Now extrapolate that to all of human activity twenty years out.

Because we are confronted by speculation at every turn, in print, on video, on the net,
in conversation, we may eventually conclude that it must have value.
But it doesn’t. Because no matter how many people are speculating,
no matter how familiar their faces, how good their makeup and how well they are lit,
no matter how many weeks they appear before us in person or in columns, it remains
true that none of them knows what the future holds.

http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/
If you consider the time needed to pass the legislation necessary to prevent this, then yes.
You guessed... Correctly.
Well - I started with freecad using some good tutorials which can be found on youtube. Most times it works but in certain everyday functions I feel there could be more smoothness (like for example if you want in a sketch a complete parallel path in x distance) My understanding is that Fusion 360 has such functions. Another thing which could be done better is fillet functions (to get round corners) I think this a good example for something you use often (rectangular corners just don't look professional) but often don't work out as expected.
Lately I use openscad for my stuff but getting fillets with this is a major pain...

To sum up: FreeCAD is not bad - there are some good tutorials and so on and it certainly can teach you how to construct something 3D... but save often and save early (and best some different versions as well)
On the other side I expect a more professional handling from Fusion360 ... and of course there are additional features like finite element simulation....
This health startup lets you monetize your DNA
That's the saddest thing. Apple copying flat UI from Windows Phone, which is dead now.
I was making more of a general statement about the dynamics involved. Of course, then you have to look at it case-by-case.
Poverty has been falling consitently and we, as a species, is more than able to meet everyone's needs, we simply choose not to because we're greedy and short-sighted.
Robots are autonomous mechanisms. These are waldoes. Not to belittle the purpose and sentiment (and kudos to the effort to better enabling those with physical restrictions), but an androideqsue waldo is just not a robot.
But as a tax payer you will pay for the enormous cost on the (public) health care system created by this epidemic of high sugar consumption. Personally I'm not sure why I should have to pay for the type II diabetes bills for the people who ruined their health with bad choices.
Europe went through the same things - from largely rural extreme poverty, to dirty industrial cities, to modern clean, wealthy Europe. Heck, these very photos show a step in that process, from 50 years ago, when Scotland was in the state you're so horrified about imagining China in today.

And yes, working 12 hour days in a smog-infested city is better than extreme poverty. Life isn't a socialist realist painting. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Vaccination is better than no vaccination. Water from a tap is better than water in a bucket that you have to walk to get. Etc. People don't move to the cities because country life is getting worse; they move because city life is better.

Is income a pretty measure? No. But it's a good proxy. It's more fine-grained and less messy than something like birth rate.
Infinite Data Structures in JavaScript
In the US, an RX is in the "mid-size crossover" class. Things are bigger here, including the RVs themselves. Check out the pics, it's the size of a small apartment: https://asktog.com/misc/countryCoach.html
Wikipedia has this handy overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Supranational_European_Bo...

Unfortunately as a citizen of one of the founding members of the EU, I don't even recognise half the flags in the diagram.
Most of the "discussion" on this topic spins out of this blog post: https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/03/jwt-json-web-tokens-is-ba.... Which unfortunately is:

1. A bit unnecessarily abrasive and hysterical in its style, and

2. Comes from a PHP consulting firm, promoting their own alternative proposal (which hardly anyone else seems to discuss or use). So I think #1 above is really about drawing eyeballs and selling services, more so than providing clear information for a newcomer to follow.

JWT does have its issues, though. They basically break down into two points:

1. Because of its distributed nature, there's no built-in way to invalidate a JWT prior to its natural expiration. You have to roll your own approach for this, typically some sort of whitelist or blacklist mechanism (which defeats some of JWT's advantages).

2. By default, the spec and its major library implementations allow JWT's to specify a number of different signing algorithms (including "None"!). This is dangerously nonobvious for newbies.
Best practice is to configure your code to only allow a limited number of algorithms (i.e. one).
One thing I have been working on recently is cooking, especially from scratch and attempting to keep it healthy. One big thing I have noticed is that a lot of food (once cooked) has a very short shelf life (usually days), and if you have something with few ingredients, it requires quality ingredients.

For prepackaged/premade foods, one would want food to stay good for longer than days once cooked/made, so it can be transported to a store, kept at a store for a while, purchased, stored at a home until eaten. Or even at a restaurant/fast food place, the same thing applies. A lot of those places have a significant amount of premade food.

Applying that same concept for profit, if the food is to be cost effective, lesser quality ingredients are needed.

It seems that to have the food be cheap and stay good for a while, this is what happens.
Influence Network • programminglanguages.info
If you crack open a real spectrum analyzer (not some hacked together SDR toy) you’ll still find plenty of distributed and analog circuitry. That’s what it takes to get spur-free performance.
That gives them the ability to functionally accomplish nothing, so it doesn't move the needle at all.
You're right that Spectre and Meltdown are not related to SMT, but that doesn't invalidate the wider point about hyper-threading and side-channel issues I think.

Parent may have simply meant TLBleed/L1TF (Foreshadow) instead of Meltdown/Spectre.
This is an overly dramatic way of saying that the average 10 year old has consumed 1.8 times the current sugar recommendation.

Average 51-year-old has read 4 years' worth of books
It's worth remembering when these were written.

> Most people own more than one PC, though the concept of what a "computer" is has changed considerably. Computers are no longer limited in design to laptops or CPUs contained in a large box connected to a monitor. Instead, devices with computer capabilities come in all sorts of unexpected shapes and sizes.

Doesn't seem like much of a prediction these days, but from the vocabulary of the past the iPad and smartwatch would qualify, and they weren't easy to predict at the time.

I remember telling my mum in the early 2000s that one day (I didn't realise quite how soon) all phones would just be touch screens. She didn't believe me, or thought she'd be dead before it happened. It is hard to imagine the future.

I'd say we're tracking behind on a lot of these but I don't think he's so far off (and it'd be interesting to check again in just a couple years). For instance:

> People communicate with their computers via two-way speech and gestures instead of with keyboards.

In the parlance of the past, touch screens, virtual assistants and face unlock all qualify.

> Most business transactions or information inquiries involve dealing with a simulated person.

Our bar for a "simulated person" is quite high these days, but again look at it from the perspective of the past. I quite often have chats with services of varying sophistications that try and emulate a natural conversation. I'm not fooled, but that isn't the prediction.

> Pinhead-sized cameras are everywhere.

Quite literally. I have a couple looking at me right now.

> Cables connecting computers and peripherals have almost completely disappeared.

Most of my peripherals actually are wireless. "Almost completely disappeared"? Sadly not. But we're probably talking years, and this was written twenty years ago.

> Rotating computer hard drives are no longer used.
> Massively parallel neural nets and genetic algorithms are in wide use.

Speak for themselves.

> Thin, lightweight, handheld displays with very high resolutions are the preferred means for viewing documents.

This one is interesting because again if you immerse yourself in the time it was written, paper was a very common occurrence on a work desk. Now? Rarely.

> Worldwide economic growth has continued. There has not been a global economic collapse.

Not as far off as it might seem.

> "Virtual sex"—in which two people are able to have sex with each other through virtual reality

Increasingly true. Check back in 12 months.

> Three-dimensional nanotube lattices are the dominant computing substrate.

Oh.

I actually think that, all in all, and taken in the spirit of the time, these are surprisingly accurate. Many are of course way off, but I personally think they show a rare prescience.
>This is a persistent failure of well-known futurists, probably because it's more interesting to predict rapid advances than slow ones.

Given his belief in a technological singularity, and the underlying assumption that infinite, exponential technological expansion is not only possible but inevitable, this shouldn't surprise anyone. All of his predictions are essentially religious prophecies of the coming of the Eschaton.
What I learned about procrastination while scaling startup to 4.2M users
> Setting foot on Hyrule Field in OoT after crawling out of the cave of 90's 2D games was momentous for me as well

Interestingly enough the experience was the complete opposite to me at this very point, it was immediately obvious I just exited the "tutorial" to set foot on a fake open world rigged with artificial gates. I suppose Baldur's Gate† (the first one and its later expansion, not the second one which I didn't enjoy nearly as much) and games like Fallout or The Elder Scrolls series spoiled me, and all I could see in OoT was, although hidden with great care, an expansion of the DooM key system under an uninspiring story.

† Yes it was out one month later but I didn't got a hand on a N64 til a friend had one a couple months later. Oh, and how much I hated that controller.
How did they confirm that the mitigations weren't still being used? If you're still using separate page tables for the kernel, well of course it's going to remain slow. The point of the fixed silicon is so you don't need the mitigation, not that the mitigation gets faster.
> I graduated with a Comp.Sci bachelor with a similar GPA. Spent around 10 years as a programmer in the industry and came back to get into the masters program. I was almost laughed off (a good thing) stating I would have to do another bachelor.

Can you expand on this? I'm similar right now. Want to go back and get my masters. Graduated in CS about 12 years ago. Mid 30's. What do you mean about having to do another bachelor? I have not heard this before.

> Sold my house, got rid of all my stuff and enrolled in pure math bachelor's. Best decision of my life.

I recently just bought a condo downtown. One because I never plan to move again and rent goes up at least 3-5%/year and two because I can easily rent it out if I do end up leaving. The University of Minnesota is only a mile away from me at the moment. Mortgage is probably a little high for a grad student/TA salary considering I'm making well in to the 6 digits right now. This is my only debt and all my stuff is not much. Mostly things I can't really sell for much now or are required to work and live (computer, desk, monitor, clothes, eat, sleep). I have a couch and a TV to relax outside of work.
>Dedicated lanes don't do much to help;

Actually, they do. Take a look at the MetroBus infrastructure in Mexico City[0] for example. Buses run on time, on an extensive, dedicated lane network.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrob%C3%BAs
Found the way how to hack GitHub storage
This seems to match my napkin calculation of this prediction being off by around a factor of 10^5 (~100.000 processors being needed to match it). Although in the grand scheme of these predictions that's probably not too way off what it probably shows well is that the exponential curve Moore's law had given us is definitely not holding anymore. Since Kurzweil had used it or something similar to extrapolate his numbers this seems to bring into question the whole premise of the singularity prediction.
All this money, time and effort in an attempt to market new low sugar cereals, these are the same company’s who: 1. Have been marketing their product as part of a balanced breakfast for decades, and 2. Continued increasing the amount of sugar while actively lobbying against any attempts to regulate marketing their sugary products to kids.

Here is an idea...get rid of the sugary cereals and sugary milk entirely and feed your kids bacon and eggs for breakfast, with water.
Of course it would help, since an overloaded intersection causes a large backlog and waiting in line (for multiple light changes) is how each vehicle pays the cost of the backlog.

With dedicated bus lanes, you skip the backlog and cross on the next light, so intersections do not undo the advantage of dedicated lanes.

You don't have to take my word for it - just ride any good dedicated lane system at a high traffic time and note your relatve speed of progression versus car traffic.
Either bring more to the discussion or abstain from commenting. What exactly are you trying to say?
And yet. It's a rough heuristic, good enough for its purpose.
If I didn't make any mistakes 20 quadrillions are equivalent to 20000 TFLOPS. Wikipedia says you can get 12 TFLOPS with a high end graphics card for 1200$.
4000$ inflation adjusted is 6000$ which means you can get 5 of those for a total of 60TFLOPS which means he's off by a factor of 300.
If you used CPUs instead (which is probably what he meant at the time) you can get 225 GOPS (integer operations, not floating point) for 374$ with a Core i7-9700K (source: wikipedia). With 6000$ you buy 16 of those for a total of 3.6 amazing TOPS, which makes Ray off by a factor of 5000.
Maybe in 2019 we'll stop using JSON/JS for everything
> But the Mueller report, so far, has uncovered

No, it hasn't. There has been no report.
Ever notice a lot of automation and innovations are motivated by laziness. Maybe not laziness in the sense of to lazy to do something, but in the sense of it is so mundane i don't want to do it.
Just FYI: lots of images in this article don't show on my end.
That might make some sense for the web, but doesn't explain it for iOS and macOS, etc.

Apple started pushing flat design just as we were getting high-resolution retina displays for phones. Since the UI art wasn't defined with a vector format, the minimalist icons for flat design was still being provided in big multi-resolution .pngs, so there was little or no savings on resources.

So those UI image files could just as easily contain detailed shaded and/or textured images that make the most of a high-res color display.
The database backend does NOT qualify... If your DB machine is exposed to the outside world, using this exploit is overkill and there are plenty of other easier vectors of attack.
Flexible scheduling-as-a-library in pure python
You can't really get a lot of GPU cards for $4000. Even two-year-old mid-range cards are $500/ea. The current high-end cards are $1500/ea.
It's a news article, after all -- and fundamentally more about, you know, people rather than technology. So in that sense the distinction hardly matters.
My limited experience taught me that doing anything mathy in Java is painful due to types (well, more lack of math-specific built-in types). The input/output is usually going to be in primitive types while the library likely uses some home-brew custom typing(or Commons, if you're lucky) for Complex numbers, matrices, etc. So you have to do the type conversion song-and-dance.

The Python libraries never seem to care. Just give them a list of a list of number-ish values and off they go.

Java might have some great ML/Math libraries, but the fact that Python dominates data science suggests that my experience is a real-world pain-point.
A robust system is typed. A robust ecosystem is typed.
Everything else is evaluated and dependent upon some agency.
I wonder how much Intel knew of this "bug" and went ahead and shipped with it because of the speed increases.
I always thought this is how we should clean our houses (when we pay other people to clean our houses). Robovacs are great for smoothish floors, but most other cleaning tasks are too complicated for autonomous robots. With a good humanoid robot controlled by someone living anywhere, it would be easier.
I've worked in this space for educational software. You hit the nail on the head. Detecting what people do with their hands is easy. Building a UX out of that is hard.
That's the fallacy of technocrats. The Soviets used to think that with their centrally planned economy. You should probably see Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation documentary. It's an eye opener.
If you interpret "calculation per second" as a FLOPS [as measured on LINPACK], 20 quadrillion is 20 PFLOPS. 20 PFLOPS puts you at #7 on TOP500.

A looser interpretation is that you could count the number of integer adds you can push through a second multiplied by vector width. The CPU component of this would be in the region of 1.5 GHz (AVX-512 clock-speed) * 64 (8-bit adds/512-bit vector) * 2 issue ports * 10-20 cores (I don't know where the $4,000 in 1999 dollars hits in terms of pricepoint here [1]). You're looking at the region of low single-digit TOPS here. I don't know enough about the physical architecture of GPUs to estimate their theoretical headcount here, but I'd be surprised if you could push much past the teens of TOPS on those machines either.

So, for the price point he predicted, we're off by a factor of 1,000.

[1] I'm counting physical cores here. Hyperthreads don't add more actual ALUs, they just let two independent threads fill these up with operations.
Your Twitter timeline: 10 years ago if you followed the same people
Chicago's Deep Tunnel: Solution or Cautionary Tale?
Top right quarter of that image... I can name maybe two flags and that's only from European sports, the rest are actually a mystery.

Give me the names and i'm sure i would know them, ask me to point them out on a blank map and we're straying back in to embarrassing territory again.
The case against Clinton was flimsy and grasping at straws, whereas the case against Trump looks to be incredibly damning. I think that'll make a difference this time, though party lines have become even more ingrained...
I have used open cascade in one of a projects at my work. I can sum it up with following:
- documentation is not much, i often had to debug and dive into the source code to find out what was happening
- the examples are cool and all, but if you want to do something more complex - you are on your own, the forum is not really much alive, you often need to wait some time until you get some kind of response

What has helped me a lot is this project https://docs.xbim.net/- a .NET Wrapper for OpenCascade and an IFC Reader. The source code is easy to understand and i could just dive into it and see how to handle some of the more complex Open Cascade functions.
Modeling Polymorphism in Django with Python
The "fixed silicon" at least so far mostly seems to be hardware implementations of the existing software mitigation techniques with very similar performance characteristics.
Why basic jobs are better than basic incomes
PPP per capita is a better metric, but far from ideal.
What an insane oversimplification. Look around, the tech industry is filled with incredibly smart people that don't take care of their bodies.

Overcoming bad lifestyle habits is a challenge for many, especially those who inherited those habits as children. But we can absolutely do better than "fat == stupid".
New Year’s resolutions: What to know about starting something new
Agreed. In my experience, the cost of reasoning about a code base is much higher than the cost to type the code in an editor. And reasoning about a code base in a language like Java using an IDE like IntelliJ is much less costly than reasoning about a large code base in a language like Perl using VIM and the terminal.
This is shocking awful. Of course the tunnel is small. It's a demo/test tunnel. This is like arguing in 2007 that SpaceX is a dead end because the Falcon 1 is a small rocket.
>The frustrating thing from the perspective of an individual differences researcher is that Taleb is not at all correct about IQ becoming less predictive of performance at higher levels! Studies pretty consistently show that IQ is a valid predictor of performance all the way up the scale, so that, for example, someone with an IQ of 145 is likely to perform (at school, on the job, etc) better than someone with an IQ of 135

He has already addressed that point early on:

"If you renamed IQ , from “Intelligent Quotient” to FQ “Functionary Quotient” or SQ “Salaryperson Quotient”, then some of the stuff will be true."

He also includes a graph of "correlation of IQ with different aspects of job performance" pertaining to that: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/750/1*RlEAvb8KejpEBFWslw...
Absolute treasuretrove, thanks for sharing!