skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great example of a product that has 10 little reasons why it's better than pre-existing alternatives, but seems to lack 1 killer reason why it's better. I don't think it would have passed my personal sanity check for startup ideas [1].

I predict that the team will eventually discover one or more niches where they can leverage their platform to build a differentiated value prop specific to those niches. For example, the niche of "investor databases" with the differentiated value prop of "letting entrepreneurs filter down the list of all investors to find the top 100 best ones that they specifically should try to pitch".

Each time a specific niche and value prop is identified, it will motivate building cool new functionality into the platform. The platform can evolve as a union of these niche-motivated features.

I suspect that a lot of the features that exist in today's horizontal-minded v1 won't be needed because they were conceived of without reference to any specific differentiated value prop.

[1] https://medium.com/@lironshapira/how-to-sanity-check-your-st...
About the cutesy names: yes, that was probably a mistake. We’ve looked into fixing this but I feel it’s too late to change the terminology now without causing even more confusion.

Glad to hear MacPorts works well for you!
Should you ever decide to come back to Homebrew, we’ll be there for you.
What would they take over? Massive liabilities?
It's like a combination of Reddit and Google+ Circles
Oh yeah, agree absolutely. I don’t plan on “selling” this toy outside its original intended audience, just the timing was funny :)
How would you use spectrogram diffs for training?

I'm not sure what would be useful "subpatterns" of sound. In language modeling, there are word based, and character based models. Given enough text, an RNN can be trained on either, and I'm not sure which approach is better. For music the closest equivalent of a word is (probably) a chord, and the closest equivalent of a character is (probably) a single note, but perhaps it should be something like a harmonic, I don't know.

Unlike faces, music is a sequence (of sounds). It's closer to video than to an image. So we need to chop it up and to encode each chunk.

Ultimately, I believe that we just need a lot of data. Given enough data, we can train a model which is large enough to learn everything it needs in the end to end fashion. Primary achievement of GPT-2 paper is training a big model on lots of data. In this work, it appears they only used a couple of available midi datasets for training, which is probably not enough. Training on all available audio recordings (either raw, or converted to symbolic format) would probably be a game changer.
"Why would I be pitching to a VC if I already had a company in the first place?"

One possible objective of acquiring venture capital is to turn a promising product into a scalable company.
Watch Now: SpaceX to Launch Falcon Heavy Rocket Nasa Kennedy Space Center
Are you talking about contributor.google.com?
Yeah, I totally agree that for the sort of problems that Google or Amazon faces, blockchains are a terrible solution. There are well-known best practices for scalable distributed computing, and blockchains are not them.

I'm equally convinced - and I suspect I disagree with most HNers here - that there are also some problems for which blockchains are the only solution - they just don't work with centralized data stores, mostly because nobody would trust a single entity to manage that data store. Google isn't even looking for those problems. In general, Google does not look for problems, it takes problems that everybody knows about and looks for solutions. There are thousands of entrepreneurs in the cryptoverse who are looking for those problems.

There was a time, early in its history, where Google was willing to take a solution - download the web and keep only the links - and then find the problem (search) for which it was the solution. And then they leveraged that solution into all sorts of other problems - webmail, navigation & directions, news, academic papers, video, etc. But the thing is that this is a risky business: most solutions in search of a problem don't actually solve anything, so the time spent solving them is wasted.
How ridiculously patronizing. Could it be that privacy arguments flogged to death on HN don't connect to the reality of the majority of people? Or that the arguments are not being expressed in an relatable or understandable way? Or that they share different values than you? No, it's the children who are wrong. I'm sure it's just group-think that blinds them to your brilliant ideas.
More than rural Americans or urban Americans? I'd assume that rural people everywhere drink more because there is less else to do, at least before the modern era of electronic entertainment
> Google could fire 30% of their workforce with no disruption in service/revenue.

Isn't that true for a large amount of large tech companies?

I was under the impression that a large amount of the workers are working on incremental improvements to existing services or working on new features/services entirely. If those people stop working that shouldn't disrupt the service and you shouldn't see the revenue fall until a competitor catches up & out innovates.
The ROC and the PRC _are_ independent countries. They don't say they are, but clearly they are. The PRC already basically (that qualifier probably isn't necessary) is an ally of the United States.

I don't disagree with your point (Chinese fears of encirclement), but the way you present. It's already the case and China is trying to invade Taiwan to change it. It's all consistent with China's attempt to phrase Taiwan as being separatist as opposed to the truth which is that China is being militaristic and imperialistic. It's dangerous double-speak and needs to stop.
That's hilarious.

In the UK they need permission from 2 senior prosecutors to DROP a rape prosecution.

But the need permission from the DPP to even START prosecuting a false rape accusation.
AFAIK, Riemann's hypothesis is not quite canon but many mathematicians posit that it is likely to be true due to a variety of "evidence" they feel leans in that direction.
"I've never actually owned a phone that stopped working for any reason other than negligence on my part"

Well, I have. Specifically a Nexus. No experience with iPhones though.
I like this list a lot more than Sam Altman's How to be Successful.

Sam does have some excellent pointers about everything from compounding your impact to having an exploring mindset. But his list feels as if it's written mostly from the perspective of a racehorse breeder who wants to win the next Kentucky Derby with one of his beasts. (Doesn't really matter which one. Also doesn't hugely matter if some of the others collapse during the quest.)

The 80,000-hour author is much more in step with advice that can help people at almost every decile of achievement.
Jude from Golden here. Yes we will work very hard to keep to scientific consensus and reach that level of quality or higher. Please bear in mind this is not only crowdsourcing but there is automation in the collection of the information, that too will have its fair share of issues as well no doubt :> There is likely opportunity to auto detect cranky/racist/gaming behavior and we have some plans in that area. Feel free to shoot over ideas as well if you have further thoughts.
News just from today: "Whistleblowers: Company at heart of 97,000% drug price hike bribed doctors to boost sales" - https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/health/mallinckrodt-whistlebl...
None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling. Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products. I agree that was the wrong person for the job. But you can't even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with.

I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them.

Ultimately, it's on Page, though. He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to "get along" when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide. I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn't have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)
> learned the quirks

Why waste your time learning that? Just learn the material. I'm often bemused by the effort people put into avoiding learning the material, much more than it would take to just learn the material.
I don't know if I can agree with the notion that software is bringing more flexibility. Software and other computer-based systems breed a type of 'systems thinking' which is very efficient and rule-based. And reality is neither efficient or rule-based. If the software doesn't have a field to enter the correct data, how do people react? Do they conclude the software is wrong? No, they conclude the person is wrong and must be fit to the system provided. Software systems are often very general, and they achieve this by ignoring the complexities and specificities of individual situations.

Software makes it almost impossibly tempting to reduce human situations to factors and linear approximations. While these may often work well enough, they also fail often enough to cause trouble. Hundreds of years ago, a work was written which I believe was quoted by Donald Knuth in one of his books that I've never forgotten: "Make game of that which makes as much of thee." That, to me, sound like the most cogent advice to anyone living in the modern world. If you are seen as a factor to be manipulated, maximized, or reduced, it is only fitting, appropriate, and ultimately, moral, for you to respond in kind.
I knew a biker who had a beautiful girlfriend he was thinking of marrying. Every winter he tore his motorcycle apart in the living room and rebuilt it with incremental improvements. His buddy said to him, Will she let you overhaul your bike in the living room every winter? So he asked her. She said, Hell no!

He ended the relationship right then and there.
The Dead May Outnumber the Living on Facebook in 50 Years
I'm Director of Engineering at Creative Commons and part of the team that is working on CC Search.

We've been working on the product for over a year and we are just out of beta today! One of CC's goals is to encourage the use and remixing of CC-licensed content, and we hope that CC Search will help make that content more discoverable. The current version is very much an MVP and only searches images, but we plan to add more content types in the future and index the ~1.4 billion works out there under a CC license. We would love any feedback you might have.

Also, CC Search, the associated API, and the scripts we use to index data are all open-source and developed completely openly. Our sprints and roadmap are public and we welcome contributions from the community.

Relevant links:

CC Search code: https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog-frontend/

CC Catalog API code: https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog-api/

CC Catalog code: https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog/

2019 Vision: https://creativecommons.org/2019/03/19/cc-search/

Roadmap: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19yH2V5K4nzWgEXaZhkzD1egz...

Active sprint: https://github.com/orgs/creativecommons/projects/7

Backlog: https://github.com/orgs/creativecommons/projects/10

How to contribute to CC projects: https://creativecommons.github.io/contributing-code/
> There are about 6,000 prosecutions, and about 2.5k

So 3500 NOT GUILTY verdicts huh? And none of them could possibly be false accusation?
It would also be really simple to sftp a single application to a /cgi-bin/ directory on a shared web host. You don't need to know anything except STDIN and STDOUT, and none of that CI/CD or VCS boilerplate to worry about. Instant web applications. It'd probably be much simpler than using Lambda.

I don't have anything against FaaS as a concept, but it almost always leads to crappy operation. The simplest examples of it working are crowded out by the attempts that ended up redesigned as normal applications.
Whataboutism, whataboutism. Major argument on HN to drop the conversation. It's a comparable example. You know, like a relevant case showing that things are possible without supplier support. Some people here behave like they are totally square headed. Do not deviate an inch away from an example or you get accused of whataboutism. Geez.

> There are also FAR fewer Teslas out there than there are iPhones and iPads.

Which ultimately makes sourcing iPhone / iPad parts even easier.
After reading this article, all I can say is ... ugh. What I really wanted to know was "Where does the energy come from?", and the article didn't answer that at all.

The world doesn't really have a "carbon" problem, it has an energy problem, and right now carbon fuels are the cheapest, most abundant source of energy. Even if you somehow got carbon capture to work, you're still going to have to power it - with solar, or wind, nuclear, geothermal, whatever. At that point, then the question just becomes whether using the storage medium of gas is better than the storage medium of something else, like batteries. But the article doesn't go into the core question of where the energy is coming from to turn CO2 into gas.
Parts of Wikipedia articles (e.g. some infoboxes [1]) are actually sourced from Wikidata, which is licensed under CC0 [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_person/Wikida...

[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access#Basic_imp...
Hi guys, how are you?
Good enough. And, as I said, that's a totally viable way to do it. It's just not what I do.
Aaah, living the Topre Life I see? Great to see these babies outside of the mech keyboard subreddit.
If I put images in the internet, how can I tell your search about them/about the license?
that entire article can be reduced to "nanotubes"

since its a YC company though maybe we could get the underlying story?
But they do. Everything they sell in Australia has a 10% sales tax, it's just as far as the article is concerned that's the buyers paying tax, not the sellers.

Consumption taxes are the simplest way to stop tax avoidance, but it's taboo for many people who can't comprehend mechanisms to balance out flat taxes.
The AirPods are the one thing I actually lose (and I've lost a number of times). But I always manage to find them eventually.

The fact that I can't send a sound to them (somehow) when the case is closed is moderately insane. All it can tell me is that they were somewhere near my house when I last used them. That doesn't help me understand where they went to after I put them back in the case and misplaced the case.
There's no way this is a net energy producer right? So it only makes sense if it's powered by carbon-free sources?

Basically this has two uses then:

- As a stop gap till batteries and electric vehicles take over from ICE. Although if it generates carbon-neutral jet fuel that would be very useful.

- Maybe as a carbon capture device, except that gasoline doesn't seem like a great way to store excess carbon. Although the article indicates the carbon could be converted into other materials. That part isn't very clear.
I think the point is that a conjecture or open question can be canon. Hilbert's problems are an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems

The P=NP question would be an example of a canonical unsolved problem in CS.
Well, as long as Tesla is the only one, it's not a big deal if you can live without a Tesla. But people are naturally concerned that it might lead to a change in the way others do business if it is not regulated.
Was that a Kobayashi Maru joke? Cause that sounded like a Kobayashi Maru joke......
>Along with this Apple has a history of having customs destroy third party refurbish parts when being brought into the US.

Apple doesn't "have" customs do anything. Customs enforces the law. Those parts are counterfeits, and importing them is illegal.

If they're not off-the-shelf, Apple has exclusive deals with their suppliers and forbids them from selling those parts to anyone else. Whatever you're buying as a "3rd party refurbish part" is either a fake, defective because it failed QA, or excess bulk that Apple didn't purchase. It's usually one of the former. Talk with some people in the device manufacturing biz about this - I've heard stories about suppliers getting customer support calls about QA issues when it turns out the distributor for the parts was selling both legit and counterfeits without the supplier or manufacturer knowing!

And this is a tricky issue - if I manufacture something abroad you're damn sure I want the feds to help prevent counterfeits from being imported. Doesn't matter if it's the final product or part of the supply chain. And in as a supplier, you're not going to manufacture something longer than you make money off it, and the repair volumes don't justify anything.

That said, I think a middle ground here could be a limits on exclusive deals between suppliers and manufacturers, and stricter "use it or lose it" policies on IP held by suppliers. So if Apple isn't buying batteries from FooBar corp anymore, they should be able to sell the batteries the previously did to repair shops stateside. Nothing nefarious there.
I had a friend collect calling me from jail for 8 days. It kept showing up as Scam Likely, so I wasn't answering. One day I decided to answer it in order to leave an awkward conversation and was shocked to learn what had been going on. I bailed him out that day and vowed never to trust a Scam filter again.
sorry i was referring to microdosing lsd.

everyone has their experiences, personally i know a few people whos smoking habits have been detrimental to themselves.

i think theres this mantra of "its not addictive - legalise it!" when there are other qualities of these substances that may cause issues, however it's very hard to place weed on a scale of consumption benefit compared to other substances.

For me, smoking a lot of weed deprecates my memory significantly, something which i value quite highly, things like sugar and nicotine to not do this.

dire effects of these habits are also hard to quantify - i value mental health over physical health... i'd rather be addicted to cigs than be addicted [sic] to weed!
This is really, fundamentally important technology. Emissions reduction will not work: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nations-are-not-r...

> The authors of the report stated in a press release that the kind of drastic, large-scale action the planet desperately needs has yet to be seen, even though global emissions have reached record levels at 53.5 billion metric tons in 2017, with no signs of peaking.

> Cities, states, the private sector and other nonfederal entities may be best placed to take bold actions on climate change. According to the report, the globe may need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 19 billion metric tons by 2030 to close the 2 C gap.

That's a 35% reduction in global CO2 emissions over the next decade. It's not going to happen. CO2 emissions are growing like this: http://folk.uio.no/roberan/img/GCB2018/PNG/s11_2018_Projecti.... The U.S. and EU could go back to 1960 levels of emissions and it would cut only about 3 gigatons. China alone increased its usage 3 gigatons in the last 10 years. The rest of the world increased its emissions by that much in the last 15. Bringing Indian emissions up to Chinese per-capita levels would add 7.5 gigatons.

A 30% reduction is taking the world back to 1990. The U.S. has added maybe half a gigaton since 1990, and the EU actually dropped about a gigaton since then. (The difference is largely due to the fact that the EU28 countries grew only 8.5% since 1990, while the US grew 30%.) But the rest of the world has added 15 gigatons since 1990. That 15 gigatons represents a shift from desperate poverty in Africa, India, and China to lower income status (though still many gigatons away from the standard of living enjoyed in the US and EU). That cannot be undone.

The only serious solution to climate change is carbon recapture.
They have to. They're under investigation by the New York State Attorney General.[1] That sort of thing usually doesn't end well.

[1] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/attorney-general-james-annou...
Françoise Sagan, The Art of Fiction No. 15 (1956)
>they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse.

Which is a good thing considering how much of the population's life is already intertwined with and recorded by Google. I can't imagine anything more dystopian than a Google issued currency.
Sadly (and weirdly) it's not symmetrical. The law specifies a minimum termination notice of only two weeks from the employer. Most people assume the two weeks notice applies both ways (and it's generally fine), but it's not accurate and can bite you if you have a litigious former employer.
Thanks for replying! I agree micropayments are incredibly difficult to make work, as is evidenced by the race to the bottom advertising model that seems to be everywhere all-the-time.

I hear from you that you want to essentially cover 10 billion topics, and essentially validate that they exist, but that says nothing about validating the content of what someone is saying about it, nor organizing it, etc.

I hear lots of AI buzzwords, but essentially I don't see any staff that would leverage all the thinking humanity has done on organizing, validating, and cataloging information. Where are the information scientists? The librarians? The archivists? The journalists? The philosophers? Etc etc etc.

Essentially you are talking about a profoundly /human/ endeavor that requires input (IMHO) from many corners of human knowledge to do in any way that begins to approach wikipedia (or even an encyclopedia, much less a library) in terms of quality and scale.

I hear buzzwords, and see an alarming lack of acknowledgement of how difficult these questions are (or even that they exist).

However, you have the $$ and the people, and I'm just here hiding behind a keyboard criticizing. Clearly you've convinced more people of your ideas than I have of mine, and by all means it's a noble goal, so I wish you the best of luck and will be interesting to see what you are and what Golden looks like in a decade or so!
A successful example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton
> Why should Apple own the repair aspect?

I guess that would be relevant if they were trying to retrieve all spares back. Them not wanting make sourcing spares easier does not mean they own the repair aspect.
Why do you use an external server? Why not use UDP multicast or something?
Facebook will let users chat across Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp
What does their pay have to do with it?

Low paid people are adults too, and capable of interpreting peoples sarcasm.
Bitfinex, Tether and the NY Attorney General: Everything Is Fine
Perchance to Dream
I Dream of Canteens
Thanks, glad you like it.
Although stored data can be contraband and the court may not see it as different from a drug search. I think it’s unlikely we’ll see this succeed but I’m hopeful.
I tried to think of any mathematics that used to be canon but isn't anymore. All that comes to mind is the Principia Mathematica, demolished by Gödel. Is there mathematics that has just become unfashionable, not because anybody found anything wrong with it, but just because it turned out not to lead anywhere interesting?

It would be hard to claim that such mathematics existed coeval with (non-avian) dinosaurs.