skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Eg., your sight is defective, ie., in many cases: your sample is biased, not big enough, etc.

You can't expect a statistical test to comb through your experimental procedure to check whether or not you did it right. (Least of all, to comb through your personal medical history. ;) )

>Any observation is consistent with an infinite number of models.

I'm afraid that slips below the "get out of bed in the morning" pragmatism bar. Although it's a provocative idea, concluding that conclusions are impossible because you could be making a mistake or hallucinating would lead to, literally, not getting out of bed in the morning, if you took it seriously.

At the end of the day you just have to hope that the human beings reading your paper will be able to tell whether or not you did the experiment right. Any statistical test just walls off one way (or a few ways) in which you could fool yourself.

>Surveys of hundreds of articles have found that statistically non-significant results are interpreted as indicating ‘no difference’ or ‘no effect’ in around half (see ‘Wrong interpretations’ and Supplementary Information).

What we really want to avoid here is requiring every paper to have a twelve paragraph Sophist disclaimer about how knowledge is impossible. ;) Just because the text doesn't say "oh and by the way there could be gnomes in the LHC that are fooling us to entertain themselves," doesn't mean that the author wouldn't begrudgingly acknowledge it as an epistemic risk.
There are some many google results e.g. another one https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8557341
Absolutely not.

Atheism is about belief, agnosticism is about knowledge.

They are complementary.

You can be atheist/agnostic, theist/agnostic, atheist/gnostic, theist/gnostic. It's a matrix.

Also there are two flavors of atheism: those that believe there is no god (a minority in my opinion, and that position requires a burden of proof).

And there are atheists who simply reject the claim that there is a god. They say there might be a god, or maybe not, but that people who claim there is a god have not presented enough evidence for that claim to be accepted.

If I look at a grass field and tell you there is an even number of blades of grass in that field, you are not going to accept my claim.

Does that mean you think that number is odd?

No. You're just saying I have not provided evidence for my claim, and therefore, you do not accept it. But you are not taking any position yourself.

That's atheism.
Big Poo says you should always PR into the "master" branch. Never commit directly to it.
I worked at a company and our team was the first to move to the open floor plan.

I convinced my manager to get us all Bose headphones.

Several people from other teams (all of which had private offices) raised a stink to the CEO, who refused to approve the purchase, leaving my boss to foot the bill by himself.
Thanks! Those are good ideas!
I am heavily reminded of OpenStack, which was designed by committee to help large companies' IT departments compete against AWS (and flopped), and AWS, which grew out of a flat file storage service (and very much succeeded).

It still amazes me how warty and ugly production code can be sometimes -- yet it works and puts food on the table. Meanwhile "beautiful" systems like Plan 9 languish on an old wiki somewhere.
Just a guess, but wouln't ops/devops work be a better fit for prisoners? Sitting for hours in front of a monitor, trying to solve an algorithmic puzzle doesn't seem to be the kind of hobby that gets you into prison. Conducting a complex operation, assessing the risks, hands-on work with hardware, even being on-call and saving the day when outage hits, that's more like it.
It's assumed that large centralized platforms make the problem worse but I'm really not too sure.

When I first started using the internet, AIM was still all the rave. I'm not sure exactly how but I got into the habit of joining random chatrooms and messaging random people on AIM. As a minor I was under way more threat there than I think kidfluencers on YouTube are these days (..so many 'asl?' comments). The major difference was that advertisers were not on AIM.

Eventually I got deeper into the rabbit hole and started to see the underbelly of the internet, things were much more of a maze back then. Even today, knowing all I know about how to find the worst of the worst online -- I mainly stick to huge platforms, anecdotally it's a lot harder to get caught up in the maze online than it used to be. Maybe that's a good thing, everything is out in the open for these platforms to mitigate.
If you only care about how fast the system will be, you only need to compile the compiler twice, not thrice. Probably that is his problem and why it's taken him 7 years so far. He should have compiled the compiler thrice...
The problem is that the common meaning of "atheist" has always been someone who does not believe there is a God. "Anti-theist" is a specialized term. It's sort of like the issue with "hypothesis" and "thesis" meaning different things to scientists than they do to the rest of us.
> is eating a chicken you raised on your land worse for the environment than consuming the equivalent number of calories from fruits and vegetables imported from another continent?

Out of the universe of possible alternatives one could present, this pair seems rather carefully chosen.
This is good advice. I hate nickle-and-dimey stuff too, so yeah, good point.

You know what else I hate? Fucking Keurig. I hate the packaging, I hate the shitty brewing machines that don't brew hot enough or saturate the pods, and I hate the racketeering company. Nevertheless, one of the most consistent compliments I get in reviews is about this dinky little coffee and tea station we have set up on a bread rack. Nothing fancy, just a Keurig and another normal coffee machine and some boxes of tea and cocoa and stuff. To me it looks kind of chintzy, but a lot of guests are super charmed by complimentary coffee pods and variety packs of tea. So I grit my teeth and keep the little drawer stocked with pods.

Toilet paper again: at some point I intend to install bidets in the bathrooms. Toto makes one that reviews well. Then I'll put up some signs with cute bears and bunnies and a maybe a folksy limerick about conserving and some encouragement to wash before wiping. If people used them it would cut way back on our paper consumption.
> I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that.

He seems to understand it perfectly whereas you seem to be mischaracterizing his words
I think we should further make a difference between the existence of a god and religion.

Atheism is significantly driven by the rejection of religion.

The existence of a god can be discussed and indeed we do not know. However religions are backward ideologies that should really be relegated to the history books.
I don't know, there doesn't seem to be any mention either way, if it's not pre-rendered it is slightly better but still, I don't understand why a packed room at GDC of all places would be wowed by this.
> That's a pretty rich position for someone claiming he's an agnostic, "someone who doesn't know".

There might exist a being that defies everything we know about physical reality! But not other humans anywhere or anywhen. That's just highly improbable, not purely speculative and outside the bounds of what we understand to be reality, so I reject it as impossible.

eyeroll
I was hoping there would be more content here. Maybe a blog post is needed to further explain the problems of medium.
I believe that if you're trying to understand what macros do from a fundamental level, treating them like functions with different semantics is a very good learning method. You implement them in a SICP style interpreter and then write a few. Totally clears up the mystery.

I'm not arguing with you about what happens in any production lisp. I'm sure you know more than me, but I do understand how they're implemented in practice, and the warts that brings - eg no (apply or <list>), and first class macros are so esoteric purely from the runtime cost that they're barely even written about in the literature.

I'm just saying the mental model of where macros fit in in an interpreter has value, and that view has not changed. In my opinion you're an expert coming in correcting a bunch of people attempting to learn the basics, and you're not wrong, but you are muddying the waters.
> I'd rather hire people whom got B's in school and had a social life than automatons who got A's.

Depending on the school and program, I would say that you don’t necessarily have to be an automaton to get As. Knowing how to do coursework strategically goes a long way in facilitating both getting As and having a social life.
I’ve spent a lot of summer trips hiking around small vacation towns in Colorado, and I’ve always found regular hotels to be a great way to do it. Occasionally I need to drive a bit more, but it’s not too bad.

What I like about hotels is the consistency of service and cleanliness, availability of nearby food or other services.

Don’t get me wrong: even though I’ve had some bad experiences with individual hosts on Airbnb, overall many host rentals are nice too.

I just don’t understand your negative comments towards hotels. They pay their taxes, they bear their own costs of demonstrating compliance with the law, provide a good standard of safety, cleanliness and service.

Obviously the hotel lobbying sucks, but I don’t see how anyone can think it’s worse than what Airbnb does. The hotel lobby is gaming a system in terms of competition, but from within a system overall that is not trying to in principle externalize all the burden onto citizens by skirting taxes.

Airbnb is doing something very different, trying to flip tax collection and demonstration of compliance around to make it an optional nicety they choose to extend to local governments on their own terms.
I would like to see some stats on Brazilian immigration in Europe vs USA, both legal and ilegal.

Sometimes, Brazilians in US are categorized as Latinos but in reality, outside Boston and maybe Florida, there isn’t that expressive Brazilian communities in the USA.
Many Americans consider Sully a hero. This statement will be very influential.
Yeah I could use some clarification on whether this is real-time or not. If its real-time, then its among the most impressive tech demos ever showcased. If its pre-rendered then how is it different from the films Pixar and Dreamworks put out every year? Its visually stunning but ultimately you can make computers do anything if you're willing to sit around for a 2 week render process.
You know most of the world has much more lax zoning and land use laws than the USA right? Somehow they manage to have nice neighborhoods with nice neighbors.

There's also nothing wrong with gated communities and in fact that would be vastly preferable to having a few rich people make everybody in the city abide by their own arbitrary regulations.
One would expect that Knuth's first cut would be a good one. My point is that the thing we know as TeX is not the first implementation, and that TeX is not a counterexample.

Even in the tech note you reference, at the end, Knuth is referring to improving the initial system by following related work in math parsing (by Kernighan among others). And AFAICT the final Knuth-Plass line-breaking algorithm is an extension of the original approach described in that tech note. And hyphenation also changed.

According to http://walden-family.com/ieee/dtp-tex-part-1.pdf, the two implementations (TeX78, TeX82 = TeX) are in different languages (admittedly, both Algol family):

"...Over the period 1977–1984, Knuth himself wrote two completely different implementations of [...] TEX (called TEX78, written in SAIL, and TEX82, written in WEB)"

Here is how Knuth described the rewrite from SAIL to WEB:

"I needed to work out a better 'endgame strategy', and it soon became clear what ought to be done: the original versions of TEX and METAFONT should be scrapped, once they had served their purpose of accumulating enough user experience to indicate what such languages ought to be. New versions of TEX and METAFONT should be written, designed to last a long time and to be highly portable between computers and typesetting devices of all kinds."

*

Here's the kicker: These two implementations are separate from the older proof-of-concept implementation that Knuth asked his grad students to do while he went away, back in 1977:

"Knuth then left town for the better part of two months, leaving his students Frank Liang and Michael Plass to do a prototype implementation of TEX. Plass remembers that they managed to implement enough of TEX to process “a subset of TEX input all the way to XGP [Xerox graphics printer] output. . . . Knuth . . . seemed pleased with our efforts, and proceeded to re-code TEX himself.” Knuth later noted that Plass and Liang had prototyped only a fraction of the full TEX and that it was important that he code the complete program because he learned so much from doing the coding."

So, even the prototype TeX77 was implemented twice.
> At a state level or above, distinction in any age category is a distinction.

But to the casual reader who isn't familiar with age brackets in chess tournaments, the implication is that the 8-year-old was competing in a singular competition open to everyone and won. So while it is very impressive that this 8-year-old won the state championship in his age bracket, it is far less impressive than if he had competed against all ages and won.

Sometimes clarification is just that. Nobody is taking anything away from the kid's accomplishments by pointing out that it was an age-bracketed competition unless you're hoping people are mislead into believing the kid did more than he did.
Walmart’s Chief Technology Officer Jeremy King Is Leaving the Company
This may have been one of the strongest reasons for Google Wave’s failure[0], which was alluded to many times on HN. It was too complex from the start (1M LoC), did not evolve very fast at all, started with a huge number of engineers, and was prematurely optimized (but still plagued with performance issues). As cool as Wave was from the start, Gall’s Law certainly applies to it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101201
With demand for self-driving vehicles as high as it is, yet with the lag in advancement of computer vision, I think it's about time for a serious discussion about smart roads. I realize this isn't entirely relevant, but I can't be the only one thinking that we're missing the forest for the trees by trying to solve a transportation problem while simultaneously solving a vision problem.
If distributed version control is not "complex" then what is? Git has mostly added features on top of a core model that was designed from scratch in one go.
It helps in a pinch if you’re on a really long conference call and the batteries start to run low. I’ll pop one briefly back in the case to top it off and not have to miss anything said.
Yeah, but you're not going to be seeing a big push for higher PPD displays until after all the other pieces are in place to support that technology for gaming. The market for monitor replacements isn't big enough to drive that kind of change all on its own.
Now you get it. Airbnb is providing a service there's a huge demand and need for, not some evil provider that's forcing something down people's throats.
It is absolutely my favorite my terminal. I'm happy to see it's still being actively developed.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/20/epic-games-shows-off-amaz... indicates it is rendered in real-time.
From discussions I've seen elsewhere and my own limited knowledge, I think a lot of the potential benefit in the near future is likely for the artists/designers more than the end users.

Being able to quickly place lights and design materials for a scene with realistic ray-traced rendering gets believable results in simpler fashion than by having to painstakingly recreate all the details of natural lighting with existing conventional methods.

It requires a lot more of the end-user hardware, but overall gives the artists more room to focus on things other than making sure the lighting and reflections aren't distractingly wrong.
The bigger story is the missing $2B - the story does touch upon that. Many contracts were handed out for works to companies owned by people in government or their friends and the works were not done.
Does the licensing of a dataset also apply to the trained neural network?
> P.S. please feel free to correct my figures!

Presumably the value of advertising is highly correlated to the amount of money you spend (on things you have some choice over).

Disposable income is a strongly skewed distribution (across countries, within most countries).

An average won't help you much if you want too know how much Google makes off you!
I see a lot of health-related signatures on the list. Is this a backlash because of the findings against homeopathy?
JavaScript Party 67: The great divide reprise
> I also take issue with the reverse causation you seem to imply - that somebody making 60k is a low performer.

I never implied that. The only information I gave you were the respective salaries of the high and low performers. I as a developer know who the average and low performers are but I can only guess at their salaries. I don't want a union boosting their pay while reducing mine in order to raise the "average" pay.
in an ideal environment, of course. Forgot to preface this statement, unable to edit it now.
DXR and Nvidia sounds way too locked-in. There should be more collaborative effort to do that through Vulkan and on all GPUs.
This:

When we're talking about how to take data as implying X, what is needed is: [logical reason to believe position, how the data was chosen to not bias the whole process, etc] + [data above threshold].

The data that a scientist gets "lives" inside one or another experimental box, some area. But unless the scientists also takes into account how that box and that data came to be, the scientist cannot make any definitive statement based on the properties of just the data.

The statement "Correlation does not [automatically] imply causation" and "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" both reflect this.
I just hope it doesn’t begin infantilizjnv everyone where everything must gravitate toward “Kawaii” and have big bugeyes and have high pitched voices.
People who deny existence of the tooth fairy are inconsistent with the scientific method?
Uber used secret spyware to try to crush Australian start-up GoCatch
This is a common set of colloquial definitions; nothing wrong with that. Philosophical writing, particularly with regards to theology, refers to atheism as the belief that there is no God [1]. As such, it is easy to interpret the article as saying: "the belief in no God [rather than the lack of belief in God] is inconsistent with the scientific method."

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism/
But its still owned by Verizon through Verizon Media aka (Ex-Yahoo+AOL)
I'd disagree that AAA has to do with mass appeal, as the industry uses that term to distinguish games in terms of development and marketing budgeting, not target audience. Many AAA games are specifically targeted at only the hardcore "gamer" demographic, because while that's a smaller group they are usually willing to pay much more for a game then a casual gamer will. I would of course agree that AAA can be targeted at, and appeal to, a much larger and somewhat more casual demographics as well.

My point was less about demographic and more about the network-latency concerns for specific common game-types. You cite correctly that they want to commoditize high performance hardware for a mass market, and note games like Halo/COD/Fortnight seem to have a very broad appeal. My question then becomes, can their solution commoditize high performance for the masses for these kinds of games? I'm curious to see how their solutions pan out, but there are a lot of road-blocks to achieving their goals. Graphical quality is only part of what qualifies as high performance in a game. In any FPS games like these game-play/graphical latency is a huge issue for play-ability. Developers go as far to take specific monitor hardware into consideration to shave down the latency. Stadia effectively adds a network loop connection between the keyboard and screen -- that's A LOT of a extra latency. Also, if this is going to target the mass market, then it has to work for the mass market and I think (in the US at least) there is going to be a large percentage of the population who's internet will lack either the necessary bandwidth, or network latency to Stadia's servers, in order to achieve a playable/desirable experience.
I don't see why JO would be any different from other Jcc, especially since JL is SF ≠ OF. Maybe you were thinking of the problem with INC/DEC and CF, but even then that's a problem of INC/DEC, not of Jcc.
"those predictions have either been falsified or contradict generally accepted scientific principles." ...

Well our current flavour of Science is effectively materialist and it starts effectively with the assumption that 'the universe is made up of a bunch of laws' as we try to discover them. It postulates a priori a specific metaphysical position that immediately negates anything else ... so it's going to be impossible to test what has been ruled out as an assumption.

The first order problem that materialism brings us is the inherent nihilism in the 'we are just a random bag of particles problem' - i.e. taken to it's extreme, not only is there no 'supernatural' - there is effectively not even 'intelligence' or 'life' or possibly 'consciousness'. Just the appearance of those things.

So logic, reason and science, i.e. tools which we 'the observers' developed to facilitate our understanding of ourselves, has come to negate our very existence? Or is it more likely we are caught up in our own bad thinking?

It's funny that we ignore the biggest problem staring us the mirror: 'what are we' / 'what is life' - in lieu of somewhat more tangible things like 'Dark Matter' as we stare off into space, because the 'what are we' problem does not fit well into our materialist equations. In fact, speculation about 'life' may undermine just a little bit the very premise of science, in a much worse way than string theory (assuming it ends up really being actually wrong) ever will.

The headline is a little click-baitey, and Gleisers comments I don't think are much more insightful than a decent HN comment ... but I think the underlying problem is the straight jacket that materialism has imposed upon many of our best thinkers.

The argument he presents is essentially that of someone at an intellectual dead-end, as materialism seems to be on this issue.

Emergence [1] and Bio-Centrism [2] may offer us some hints at how to rethink our perspectives to accommodate for the very nature of life itself, the expression of which I think is what inspires our spiritual inquisition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
[2] http://www.robertlanza.com/biocentrism-how-life-and-consciou...
Yep - 'don't be evil'
From the HN Guidelines:

"Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html