skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are making the mistake of assuming that there is always something more fundamental to discover. It could be that we have now discovered all the pieces of the puzzle, all the building blocks are now known about. Maybe the LHC has not discovered anything new, apart from confirming the Higgs, because there is nothing more to be found.

Maybe the issue that is that we cannot work out the theory, the equations that correctly describe it all properly. Maybe dark energy and dark matter and not actually 'other stuff' but just an indication that there are errors in our theories. Fix the theory and the 'other stuff' disappears. Quantum physics and General Relativity need to be combined at some point and doing so may resolve everything! Or it could simply be that human intelligence is not capable of finding the solution. In the same way a dog is never going to understand calculus, maybe you need an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000 to solve physics.
>Maybe being native in the language makes a difference?

I think this is similar to understanding dialects. My native language is German and I can make sense of most German dialects (some are really hard tho' like Platt or Niederbayerisch). On the other hand, my English is proficient (CEFR C1/C2), but I regularly trip over dialects and even strong accents (Irish is especially hard). My personal guess is that you have memorized a much larger "network" of similar words (in meaning or sound) in your native language than in any language you learned in a structured/artificial way based on top of your native language.

Fun fact: At least here in Bavaria, we often say German is our first foreign language and our dialect is our actual native language. So we already organically learned two similar languages as child.
In 3-5 years if we are lucky, life expectancy in the US will stop going down.
I don't think you pick Amtrak to arrive somewhere on time. You bring some books, read them, relax, stare out the window, chat with people in the dining car, and eventually reach your destination. Chilling out on the train is part of your vacation. (I rode the California Zephyr from Chicago to Oakland when I was like 10, and still remember most of the trip. It was amazing, even for an easily-bored 10 year old.)

The reality is, intercity trains are not an efficient way to travel in the United States. Most of the important cities are far apart, because it's a very large country with a lot of empty space. If you need to be somewhere, book a flight. It's less expensive and if you give yourself a day of leeway you will probably never be late to your thing, barring some sort of natural disaster.

I am a huge railfan but I have accepted that the geography of the US doesn't make train travel as viable as say, Japan. Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka are the three largest cities and are comparable in distance between each other like Chicago, Springfield, and St. Louis. If New York was where Chicago is, Chicago was where Springfield is, and LA was where St. Louis is, high speed rail would be enormously popular in the US. But New York and LA are 2500 miles apart, 10% around the world from each other.

I even question California High Speed Rail. San Francisco / Silicon Valley and LA are both big metro areas with a lot of money, but SF/LA are 41% farther apart than Tokyo and Osaka. Japan got very lucky that its two largest cities are actually very close to each other. Building the Shinkansen was an enormous engineering challenge, but one that was very clearly profitable. It's so profitable they're building another Shinkansen between the two cities, taking a shorter route and using faster trains. In the US... such a city pair does not exist.

OK this is going very off-topic from your exact comment... but it's something I wanted to talk about. Sorry.
> My primary interest in any foreign language is to be able to read and comprehend literature in that language (both ancient and modern).

If I could choose to have any one superpower I'd pick the ability to instantly comprehend any language.

It's literally like exploring entire new worlds.
It was down for 5 hours since when they posted the first update. And now it's fixed.

> November 17, 2019 19:33 UTC
> [Resolved] We have resolved the issue that was affecting production certificate issuance. Service is restored.
for those interested in the different ml methods attempted for the challenge, many of the top kagglers in this contest posted rundowns of their solution [0].

for those interested in kuronet [1] and the competition alex gave a presentation here (en, [2]) as did tarin (ja, [3]).

for those interested in classical japanese literature, you can see the tools they've built here [4]. tarin is also very active on twitter [5].

[0] https://www.kaggle.com/c/kuzushiji-recognition/discussion

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.09433.pdf

[2] https://youtu.be/e2-mVBvygm8?t=1428

[3] https://youtu.be/e2-mVBvygm8?t=537

[4] https://mp.ex.nii.ac.jp/kuronet/

[5] https://twitter.com/tkasasagi
This is a common libertarian argument. And I think it'd be very interesting to see in practice. I live in a state with many toll highways and people complain about the cost. But those highways are well maintained. And they complain about the potholes on the free roads. So I think it's more of an issue of people wanting everything for nothing.

One problem with a private road system is that roads take up space and prevent people from using that space for something else. I think that property tax on road surface area would be prohibitively expensive if a private entity were to own it.

Another problem is that building or expanding a road through an already populated area basically requires eminent domain.
OK but alternately it seems clear that a lot of car seat marketing is aimed at the paranoia of new parents. (Speaking as a patent btw). Do you worry your seat belts have expired? Do you worry your air bags have expired? Do you ask an EMT / Fireman to adjust your adult seat belt?

People worry like crazy about if they have the wrong child seat, when in my experience they have no idea if the smoke detector in their house has a battery.
The same reason why you subsidize the people driving on the highways in Iowa. And the airports in Iowa as well, too.
Well it definitely started with me working on many projects since I was a kid. I soaked up a lot of knowledge across different related disciplines and my own portfolio of projects proved that. I also intentionally look for jobs that are away from the center of my previous experience, so I have a varied resume. Then I got an email from a recruiter for a contract position for mechatronics prototype engineer at google X. I brought two backpacks full of projects and for the position. Six months in to that role the manager running our research team left and they moved me to a test engineer. It was never the same and after a total of two years when my contract ended I found a new place to go. I knew what I wanted to I purposefully asked hiring managers if the role would allow me to prototype across different disciplines. Anyone that said “we have electrical engineers for PCB design and mechanical engineers for 3D printing, we just need you to do X” I would try to avoid. In the end the job I found was very special but I got here by working towards it on my daily life for a long time.
You're missing many other ways how we (America) subside driving I.E. how much of our armed forces (especially the Navy) have been built out and utilized post WWII to ensure a steady stream of oil.

On a side note, that would be an interesting PhD dissertation - figuring out the actual cost of America's car-centric lifestyle broken down locally, state and nationally.
Even supposing they beat the GNU wc, that's not too hard... try beating this one: https://github.com/begriffs/wc

I wrote it in reply to an earlier post, where someone "beat C" with Haskell.
Yeah, there's a number of surprising (but optional) inclusions. c99 is part of the "C-Language Development Utilities" optional group.
Having taken a few cross country trips and talked to fellow passengers, I don't think "refuse" is the right word - more like "reluctant". Many people take Amtrak long-distance out of necessity, especially in areas not served by airports.
oh! definitely going to check that out. thank you!
Dealing with Uncorrectable Mistakes
is this substantially different from how we do 3d reconstruction from motion indoors?
There are no courses that focus on that approach for East Asian languages, but the material exists. Many polyglots are of the opinion that reading-first is the fastest way to mastery. Not to conversational skill, but full mastery. They’ve filled the gaps.

There are good approaches to learning both Chinese and Japanese, but especially Japanese through reading. Start with Heisig to learn the characters, then a source of sentence forms like Kanji.Odessey.2001, then a couple of different textbooks to transition into longer form writing. Then read, read, read for hours a day and never stop.
A utility monopoly is different than a profit-seeking one. If Amtrak became exclusively profit-seeking, it might raise prices dramatically cut unprofitable routes (say, to poorer towns), etc. Those things might increase profits but undermine the economic benefit that was being provided.
Sure, but if your car seat is being subject to the kind of force where any cracks that are not immediately obvious are a problem you're probably dead and the kid is too.
What do the numbers look like if you include the cost of cars? Trains are paid for by the transit authority, but cars are not. Regardless, someone still pays.
I talk about this in the Storage Combinators paper[1]

In-Process REST essentially means applying the applicable mechanisms of REST in-process:

1) URIs

2) a few well-defined verbs

Benefits:

1) Common, concise and familiar API for talking about storage. (Check how much API surface there is for talking about storage variations in typical OO libraries. In Cocoa, for example, it's atrocious).

2) Paths. For some of the benefits of paths in general purpose programming, see The Programming Language Aspects of ThingLab [2]

3) Avoidance of the architectural mismatch between storage-oriented problem domains (most of them), and procedurally-based implementation technologies.

4) Composability: this is the heart of the Storage Combinators paper, you can plug these things together to obtain the desired functionality.

5) Performance, at least compared to other ways of getting similar benefits, such as (over-)used of filesystems, FUSE, Microservices for architectural reasons etc.

...

[1] https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media...

[2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90...
What you've described is why I (not a graduate of mathematics) never understood why the 'four colour theorem' is difficult to prove. I accept that it is, because it took so long and initially was only done computationally, but I don't understand it.

In secondary school I argued along the lines you describe, that you can mix three colours in a circle, and then a fourth around the circumference mixes only with at most two of the others - and in terms of the FCT is then a 'barrier' allowing re-use of the first three.

That's quite off-topic, but you suddenly jolted my memory of it. More on-topic, being colour-blind (never told which type and I can't work it out either) I find conversations about colours frustrating, and very strange to wonder if we see anything alike at all, or just learn to call the same physical thing alike despite perceiving it perhaps very differently.
Why should New Yorkers subsidize ethanol production in Iowa?

Why should anyone in the society give a fuck about anyone else in society? Maybe the answer is because people think it's better for the society, as a whole, when various things are supported by all.
German is the modern Latin? I wonder what you mean by that? It is a complex language and these three genders which are baked into everything makes it a hard to adjust into a modern world in which gender is understood as a spectrum (or multiple spectra).
I think city buses would be worthwhile even if dislikable people like lawyers used them. Wouldn't you agree?
I know Uber shareholders do not like to hear this.
That would be without ground or something.
I started working in RPA (robotic process automation) and what our team is working on will end up putting a lot of people out of work. In 3-5 years, I would expect most data entry jobs to be eliminated by the scripts our team is writing.

The scary part? I work in the health care industry. This means a lot of the heavy forms processing that goes on will soon be completely automated by robots and without any human interaction or decision making. The future is cold and calculating; without any empathy or consideration for the patient - only the bottom line for the provider is what matters.

Nearly every day I get the statistics of how many jobs our team's bots are replacing. In one instance, we had several bots that effectively replaced over 1,000 FTE's and saved the company close to $3 million. We have over 600 bots right now running which is in the top 1% of all companies in the country and they're looking to expand that number even more.

Nearly every day I feel the moral weight of what I'm doing and it gives me pause.
Some good news for you then: the US no longer needs a navy to ensure a steady stream of oil for itself.

The combination of the US and Canada has been producing all the oil the combination needs for a year or 2 now. Everyone in the industry says it is only a matter of time before the US will be able to produce all the oil the US needs. Whether that happens next year or 5 years from now depends on pricing and production decisions made by the OPEC producers.

I wouldn't be surprised if in 8 or 10 years the US will be in a position to guarantee a steady supply of oil to one of its strategic partners: the UK or Japan, say.

But this has thread has gotten off track because like grandparent already pointed out, Amtrak run on oil, too. I suppose your reply to that is that it is easier to convert Amtrak to renewables than to convert the highway system to renewables
The carrier frequency for 10b2 is 10Mhz.
I really like k8s itself and I think these yaml files are a great API layer, but the way people produce these files nowadays (templating systems and a lot of glue like helm) is a joke and in a real, even mildy complex environment becomes a terrible mess really quickly. What I really want is a typed programming language, where using normal code we describe how to produce all these yaml-described k8s resources using whatever abstractions make sense in our business.

Twitter thread I had about it a while ago: https://twitter.com/dpc_pw/status/1182022825361625088
Doing: CLI tool for remembering what you were doing and tracking what's done
It doesn't sound like you've taken either a train or a bus long distance. Even four hours on a bus can be downright nauseating. Amtrak coach class beats flying for comfort. Never mind the people who have some money, but are adverse to flying, so they book sleeper cabins.
The idea is that the gravity of a moon affect the trajectory of the other moon and vice versa, until they are in resonance. It's a bad analogy, but it's closer to Lamarckism than Darwinism, but it's still a bad analogy. There are nothing similar to random mutations.
Ask HN: Anyone mind sharing their experience with the Recurse Center?
I just heard about the Recurse Center, and through looking it up, reading various blog posts and whatnot, it looks like a really great place to become better at programming from the way it's set up. Fully self-directed, overlapping batches, facilitators that help you out, it all seems great.

However.... there are a few yellow flags with the program that make me kind of uneasy.

First and foremost is the race/gender requirements for the grant. Now, I really don't want to get into the politics here. I don't have an issue with the requirements per se. HOWEVER, from my experience, a company that would put this type of restriction on a grant like this, tends to be... shall I say... political.

Secondly is the 4 social rules. They're all "don't" this and "don't do" that. All negative things. There aren't really any positive ones. Seems kinda weird to me.

And the third one is the review titled "One-sided to the max" on switchup (https://www.switchup.org/bootcamps/the-recurse-center-aka-hacker-school). I'll let it speak for itself.

So anyway, what I'm getting at here. As someone who doesn't care for politics, would going to the Recurse Center be a bad idea? Or are all of these things not very pronounced? It makes me kind of uneasy since they're all public facing. But the way politics are in tech these days, sometimes you just need to play the game... so in that sense I would understand.

Anyone with first-hand experience with the Recurse Center wanna shed some light on this? Anonymously is fine with me, due to the sensitive nature of the topic. Thanks.
I just did Miami -> Philadelphia and Chicago -> Seattle over the past month on Amtrak.

First leg was 15 minutes early to Philadelphia

Second leg was maybe 5 min late. Not bad for a 3 day, 2 night trip.
The intent of Amtrak was to take the burden of passenger rail off the private railroads, lose money for a few years, and then quietly shut down. It's long been in a political gray area, just popular enough that the government wouldn't dare close it, but not popular enough to be funded and managed like "real" modes of transportation. So it's stuck in the '70s and probably always will be.
Having worked in this field for a while, you should look at tiered and tagged assignment. E.g. escalation tiers / priority assignment and assignment by browser language / geo up. From what I recall these were important as you look at supporting large organisations. Customisability (design) and pre-chat forms were also headline features.
I'm pretty sceptical, personally. I'm male, therefore not tetrachromatic, and long ago I had this idea of representing high contrasts as pure rgb values.

For example, if you hold up your hand to shield your eyes from the sun, that's a pretty challenging situation to paint. But the way the after images of the sunlight interact with the silhouette of the hand suggested to me that the idea could be conveyed by painting a shimmering primary colour halo around the hand. And sure enough, Antico's paintings look much like what I had in mind.
"HTML on the internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes there should be a browser that understands its format."

This is the fundamental reason the modern internet is centralizing to a couple of entities.

"This has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS."

Yes, the modern browsers have taken us back at least 20 years when it comes to UI design, component based programming and distributed systems. The web is an endless stack of kludges, held together by duck-tape. I can back this up, in case you don't believe me.

But, we should ask ourselves how it became such a stack of kludges. And I think Alan hits the nail on the head.

"At the very least, every object should have a URL. I believe every object on the internet should have an IP. It represent much better what the actual abstracts are of the physical hardware to the bits. "

Beautiful insight. The URL does not scale from a systems perspective. In my designs, I see myself often using UUIDs and negotiation to transfer knowledge about entities. The URL (and RESTful communication) is an annoyance. It fixates the location to something arbitrary. I can only use one hierarchy to denote the same object. I cannot easily renegotiate how the same things are named in my systems. And, the worst: the type of the object is often included in the url. `https://foo.bar/person/123` fixes the type 'person' to the object 123.

URLs nowadays are an abomination. Most are not durable, contain excess information and suffer from projecting the information against an arbitrary axis.

Finally, all developers should at least once have implemented their own compiler. It is not a hard experience at all and can be done in around 100 hours by someone with a medium skill in programming using a good text-book. It gives a truly fundamental insight into systems design and should simply not be skipped.

W.r.t. tools: I assume any programmer worth his salt has build at least some of their tools! Perhaps I should start asking this at interviews. If you don't understand how your tools are built, how can you even begin thinking about building tools for others? And how can you understand, without attempting a crude build yourself? All the hard things are already done, the literature is there, the books are written.

So, anyways, you make a bold claim: "most of what he said was wrong." This is awfully vague, I am afraid. Lets make it a challenge. Except for him making predictions, I challenge you to come up with a couple of statements from Alan Kay, and we'll discuss it.
Yes, but the language has to be APL, with comments in Esperanto.

Even is you make infrastrcture coding as simple as SQL DDL, you have still said naught of the specific application's schema/design.

Once you are past a dirt-simple, low-traffic LAMP app, I'd expect all bets are off.
Actor-based programming really interests me. The concepts behind erlang and smalltalk seem to be the closest to an ideal model for the amount of distributed computing power we have today.

It seems like we should be able to formalize a generic meta-programming language that describes discrete components. 'actors' would be concepts close to functions that receive inputs and return outputs, everything inside would be generally considered synchronous. These actors speak to other actors via addresses. That idea was all outlined by alan kay. Furthermore, these actors can live anywhere. They can be running on a single CPU, live across multiple threads, cores, processors. Ideally you just throw more processors or remove processors from the mix and the system distributes.

Where the rubber meets the road is all the communication mediums. The lowest abstraction is your actor return address is a stack pointer. The highest is the return address is another system (what we currently do with RESTful communications).

Once all the inter-actor controls are sorted out, there would need to be a system of dynamic resource distribution. The profiler/scheduler should be able to identify things like
- this actor is handling 85% of traffic, distribute the actor to 6 cores
- the cost of the route from a core to a core on the same processor is X, the cost of the route to a core across a network is Y
- distribute actors that have the most cross communication as closely as possible
- payload size would also need to come into account

on top of that, tooling that identifies workload-specific needs could also be identified:
- this set of actors should be considered critical and available on % processors
- take into account things like inter-region availability.

A lot of these concepts have already been hashed out and you notice the parallels to things like network architecture. Ideally in the end a 'system' would simply be a pool of usable resources e.g. SYSTEM1: my laptop, an AWS server, my phone, my watch. Computation work is unevenly distributed to the system based on route costs, computational power...even storage capabilities and peripheral access (printers, cameras, etc). A new actor would get initialized in the network and it could be scheduled on your desktop or your tablet. Eventually your system would just become an amorphous workload.

My desktop might begin distributing subsets of things that currently run locally to my AWS server because it's closer to the public API i'm accessing.
If actors were generic enough they might be identified and made a reusable pool for multiple applications.

Sorry for the stream of consciousness.
It's $50 per month for all their products in their new program... This isn't insane but is still pricey when you're in an MVP mode.