skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kind of apples to oranges. Many people have tried to build models to write code. And while some have managed to make some progress, compared to us, the structures and algorithms are crap at best. Even though those NN's are RNN's, you can look at GAN's for an analogy: they can make some really photo-realistic images but there is a problem - the fact that you can't give them well defined rules: "cats have 4 legs and 1 tail", "people most commonly have two eyes with matching eye colour" or "cars are symmetrical". Until there's a solution to that, I doubt we'll see a machine writing good code. But to be fair, I'd be incredibly excited to see one - that opens up so many doors - we could start finding cures for incurable deseases and cures for deseases we know very little about, accelerate every aspect of our lives - space exploration, climate change, aging, transportation and so on. If anything, seeing a model that writes code a thousand times better than I ever would, will not discourage me from writing code. Far from it, I would do anything I'm physically and mentally capable of to be a part of it.

As for when it's commonplace - yes and no. It's like knowing 60 digits of pi - it works as a party trick but other than that I don't see any real value.

But again - I think we are really far away from that and I consider those thoughts to be my personal speculations at best. Only time will tell.
2 different titles:

"The rate of life expectancy increase slowed over time and life expectancy decreased after 2014"

vs

"Young people in U.S. dying at high rates"

Which one seems sensationalist to you?
> personally identifiable activity is visible to the author and/or other readers

View activity is not surfaced to users. View activity is tracked, and in a _GSuite domain_ (such as your job) an admin can audit that activity. For a standard Google account, a user cannot know whether another user has viewed that document, let alone which user. Is there a way you're seeing this that I'm missing? If so I'd like to know about it so I can raise it as an issue.

If you're thinking about docs/sheets/slides presence, unless you've been shared directly on the document the owner (and other users) only see "Anonymous <Animal>".

If the document is shared to you comment/edit access, that comment/edit activity _will_ show up in the document's activity stream, but at that point the owner of the document already knows you have access by virtue of sharing it to you.

I realize you probably don't have much incentive to believe me, but as an engineer on Drive I can say that we take privacy incredibly seriously.
> Death rates among young and middle-age adults stemmed mostly from suicide, drug overdose, obesity and liver disease.
> These are mostly deaths of despair

All 3 factors are caused by China (and US globalists). China/globalists killed the jobs in the suburban US, which caused despairs, suicides, and obesity. Overdose is caused by abundance of cheap opiods, coming from China
I once thought I could do better than gdb....

So I dug down into the bowels to see why it's so lame......

Oh my.

The hideous complexity imposed by (multiple) CPU designs, OS interfaces, the vast mismatch between the code as written and the code as compiled. The complexity of the DWARF standard....

Sigh! Sorry gdb dev's... I'm sorry I ever thought bad of you guys...

You guys are doing way better than I'd ever do.
What do they tend to recommend in terms of generating passive income? Just investing in index funds and high dividend-yielding stocks (Ford, AT&T)?
Avg public school teacher:student ratio is 16:1, avg school meal costs $2.48. This may be a non-negligible effect.

Given the strong correlation between some breakfast vs none, and school performance, it would not take much to affect the outcomes by feeding hungry kids little snacks.
Distributed, community cellular networks will be highly viable with open/public spectrum.
There was research work that showed a causation between smart phones/social media and increased loneliness and depression rates.

I wonder how we can increase awareness and ethical decision making around our industries actions.
Does anyone know of a way to draw figures that look like old-fashioned textbook illustrations, which I believe weere hand drawn in India ink? My father's physics books from the fifties are just beautiful.
Tell HN: Creepy Facebook Ads
Here is the sequence of events:

1. I was talking to a coworker about a brand of shoes.

2. He sent me the link to the website on slack on my desktop.

3. I opened the link on my desktop and visited the site. No facebook activity at all.

I open my facebook app on Phone and bam, I see an ad for the same shoe company.

Is facebook tracking cookies cross site ? Is this possible ? I mean how else they knew. Are they listening to conversations ?
Interesting. I know what you mean, but to speculate: maybe they saw the ritual as a requirement to perform, rather than a privilege, as evidenced by their giving it up so fast.

So perhaps their satisfaction with a playback signifies that nothing, in their minds, is lost.
What’s missing from this article is that Nobu Iwatani previously worked for defense and foreign ministries in Japan. He is no “civilian”.
Every time I hear that term it's typically university students (and their professors or related groups, in this case Georgetown Law) co-opting that label and projecting their ideology on an idealized group of people whom they don't have much in common with (besides some vague anger at society and elites) - yet are convinced they know what's best for them... often pushing mass centralized systems as the solution.

Systems that these same people will just happen to control and then later the 'vanguard' never actually gives up said power to the working poor. This story has repeated itself in history a bunch of times and it continues to.
Are you talking about Global Nuclear War?
Lol sorry, didn't think this comment would be taken seriously, it's a reference from The Big Hit

https://youtu.be/Iw3G80bplTg
Nope, two character TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs, and New York definitely isn't a country.
Do you not think the military itself would faction? Because I'm not convinced it would act in a single way. Generals have defied presidential orders.
This has a lot to do with your point that "they deserve it" being not useful to improve things. How about we give that project a tool that just doesn't have this dangerous functionality?
You'd have to try to make countries like Russia play along, probably by trade sanctions.
Even if the drama doesn't personally affect you, the internal drama can have technical implications, like key developers leaving the project, or forking it and you end up with multiple similar, but incompatible, products. OpenBSD splitting from NetBSD is a an example of that happening.
> Give the world-champions each a copy of AlphaGo on equal computers. Have them play Go against each other WITH computer assistance.

Two problems with this plan: (1) the best players at human vs. human Go are likely not as good at playing on a human/computer team, and (2) it may be that the world champion human/computer team is the one that defers 100% to the computer, which seems uninteresting.
with laptops, it really pays to make sure your kernel as recent as possible
I'm not going to jump on the JS hate-train. I develop for the web, I use JS every day. I like JS, I think it's reasonable for websites to use JS. I think most of the people who hate JS are either misinformed or just angry that the web has made programming accessible to a new generation of non-programmers. Fight me.

But all that said, seriously, a lot of current websites don't require JS to function, and if you use an extension like uMatrix, it's trivial to re-enable it on the sites that do.

I have Javascript disabled by default on my personal computer at home. It's not, like, trivial to use -- you will find a lot of broken websites. I wouldn't turn off JS for my parents. But if you're technically inclined, turning JS off is really, honestly not a problem. You just enable it whenever a page doesn't load.

Most news sites I visit work without JS, it will speed up a number of sites dramatically, and (when combined with a few other settings) it can be a huge privacy increase too. It's worth considering, particularly for portable devices like laptops.
What prey, would you do with the list of 5.5 million gun owners? Basically, 4% of US adults.
Trade policies and immigration decimated the United States middle class. The rich got rich. It’s pretty simple
of course, Crimea is Ukraine
I 100% agree, there's a valid point to be made but the performative outrage is juvenile and frankly embarrassing
Can you not just disagree with it?

Why do you need to ban it?
Huh, what makes you think army or cops would not support totalitarian side? Typically, in turn toward more totalitarian, army and cops are first target for recruitment.
LOL.... Oh AXIOS... How much are you making in Ad Rev off of that over sensationalized title? You almost triggered me for a minute! J/K. We seriously have to do a better job at titling our writings. This is unacceptable.

How is this trending at the top of hacker News? It's almost as if this article was positioned at the top rather than gaining popularity to be at the top. Explanation please!
> Futurama was right: nuclear winter cancels global warming

I'm not sure it does (I'd love to read an accurate model of it) but I get your point. It's a very compelling point.

I wish humans didn't need the threat of nuclear weapons to keep the basic needs of other humans in mind, but since they do... there you go.
Russia doesn't exist now, because it renamed itself into Ukraine, to avoid confusion with bloody Russian Empire.

Russian Federation ≠ Russian Empire (doesn't exist) ≠ Russia (now Ukraine) ≠ town of Russia (now Old Russa).

BTW. Romania ≠ Rome (now Italy).
There are very clear, well-documented instances of Google being objectively evil

Look, the English language has a limited range of words for describing malicious acts. We have simple words like bad, wrong. We have more complex words like criminal, illegal, immoral. We have nuanced words like suboptimal, misguided, psychotic, naive. And at the extreme end we have evil.

Is there a word for something/someone worse than evil? I'm struggling to think of it. You'd have to start saying things like, well, maybe Google is evil but Hitler/Mao/Stalin were really really evil. There just isn't anywhere you can go from there.

Google is not evil in any mature usage of the English language. You may not like its business model, perhaps you think Google should charge you money for its services and dispose of the ads. You may disagree with some of the decisions its executives make. But nothing Google has ever done even begins to justify using the most extreme words in the English language, not even close, not even remotely in the same general area. If you describe Google this way you're saying they're the worst thing that could possibly exist, which is foolish in the extreme. It's just crying wolf: why would anyone pay attention if one day you discover an organisation that is actually doing much worse stuff? Nobody will care because they'll just write you off.

Now you're assaulting the character of a person you don't know for no good reason.

The "assault" is simply me evaluating the likelihood of competing claims, based on (in one case) actually having met and had direct experience of Ms Adkins when I used to work at Google, and in the other case public words and actions of someone I never met. Based on that evidence I judge it likely that Google's claims are true, albeit, this is only a weak judgement as it's ultimately he said/she said.
His videos keep popping up in my feed and I keep ignoring them because every single one has a breathless title and click-baity thumbnail. I've seen buzzfeed ads that were less irritating.
> I'm a startup only guy and my gf has worked at most of the big guys (FB, Goog, msft, LinkedIn, Amazon). I would hate the idea of working for any of those companies and she would not really be comfortable with the uncertainty I face all the time, even when the startup is well funded. Neither of us is wrong.

I've done all of the above. I started at large companies (Sun, Raytheon), spent 15 years at early, mid, and late stage startups, ended back at a big company by acquisition, and am now at one of the mentioned "big guys."

Each environment had it's own advantages and disadvantages, each of which was weighted differently depending on where I was in my own life's journey. As I look back from the perspective of 20+ years (still a long ways to go!), each of those environments taught me invaluable lessons. Obviously the pay is fantastic, but that'll be less important once the kiddo is out of college and a big dent has been made in the mortgage and I'm less worried about my company running out of cash at the end of the month!
Indeed, particularly if one eschews chasing after some ephemeral and meaningless concept of "status".

The article repeatedly frames the professional class' decision making and motivation as pursuing status or in joining the ranks of the upper-class elite... Perhaps I live in a bubble, but this is not a trend that I observe at all among my peers, most of whom are (young) professionals.
It looks like you created your account just to create this baiting response. Without defending the Chinese Communist Party, which is a scourge upon the Earth, it IS possible to have a happy, meaningful, and productive life in the United States at the same time. I certainly haven't figured that out myself, but I believe it is possible. Your use of the term "globalists" leads me to believe you are borderline trolling, however.
Are you Ukrainian? Have you been to Crimea? A language becoming official (which was only very recent) does not magically make everyone fluent. Sure, Crimeans probably all know some A2 level Ukrainian from media. But they are not fluent and are likely speaking Russian or Tartar at home.
It's not trending. It was posted 20 minutes ago.
Isn't saying AI is the future of Go like saying cars are the future of sprinting? I mean who cares if machines are faster/better/smarter than us at any particular task? That is true in millions of ways where humans still enjoy competing against each other. Maybe what's needed is just a perspective change where we stop thinking of Go as being against any other agent and make it, like every other human competition, against other humans.
This:

> life expectancy decreased after 2014

is explained by this:

> "Young people in U.S. dying at high rates"

Unless something terrible happened, lowered life expectancy for 3 years in a row should be unacceptable and warrant sensationalism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/theres-something-terri...

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/921858

https://www.healio.com/primary-care/practice-management/news...
Shame. I wonder where we fall in the saga of the collapse of the Roman Empire?
I don't log that many points as it is: about 4K data points per run in total (windowed average loss and LR every 25-30 batches, eval metrics every epoch), for all metrics combined. I also log the same data to TensorBoard, which renders everything pretty much instantaneously with no issues at all, even though I tell it to not downsample beyond 5K samples per graph.
Can this same strategy be leveraged on zero-fee stock exchanges? Why is crypto the target here?
> I guess the value of everything is purely subjective.

No, that's not true. The value of scientific knowledge, for example, is in its power to allow us to make reliable predictions about our environment and the consequences of our actions. That's not subjective.

> The historical context is definitely part of what makes art interesting.

Sure, but the historical interest in a work of art should follow as a consequence of the (subjective) quality of the art, not the other way around. If I were to make a painting, no one would (or should) care, but not because my painting would not have an interesting historical context. It's because I have no artistic talent and any painting I would make would be a bad painting. And 500 years from now it would still be a bad painting.

To use a more realistic example: Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill were both painters, but no one remembers them for their art because it wasn't very good despite having an interesting historical context. Quality art creates an interesting historical context, no the other way around. Or at least that's how it ought to work IMHO.
With how much housing and healthcare costs just living makes you feel guilty.
One thing I hate about annotation in general is everything is siloed.

For example, I have an app on my iPad called PDF Viewer (I think) which is pretty good and has lots of annotating features. I've often used it to highlight pieces of text I'm interested in, or references I might want to follow up on

The follow ups never happen though because the annotations are locked in this app, I can't say, look on my mac to see what I've 'clipped' recently from the app on my ipad, or most other apps for that matter.

Ideally what I'd like is some sort of central place where all my 'clippings' go in a seamless manner, be it from PDFs, photos, websites, whatever.
Why I Voted to Sell .org
The one that is based on a scientific paper is less sensationalist.
Unless you need CUDA, the solution is to use AMD.
In fair conditions and against a top-performing chess bot, simply no seems like the correct answer.

If you're asking how a human can contrive a scenario to beat Stockfish/Leela, that seems like just a conversation that devolves into what is and isn't too contrived.
Yeah "technically not perfect" pretty much sums up my experience with it :)
When? Civil war involved armies and so did war for independence. Natives lost.
Whatever you think about this issue, what kind of snowflakes do we have on HN who can't handle reasonable disagreement? Downvotes on such a reasoned disagreement is just sad.

Edit: Just for context, there were downvotes initially on my grandparent comment, which has since changed.
He was freed:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/11/15/national/crime-...
Ubuntu, like many Linux distros, is a system you can make your own, that is the reason why people who called themselves "Hackers" preferred to use Linux distributions.

It is very nice to have a good set of software offered in a central repository - that is how software is distributed in many Linux systems - but many Linux users tend to customize their systems to their own needs. This is very easy to accomplish with Linux, that is actually the point in using it.

You should try it and maybe you can experience that it is also a very self-enabling experience to get out of that consumer mindset and finally start to "own" you operating system. It will also make you a better developer.

From what I know there is no pre-installed Amazon advertisements, at least I did not see such a thing for many years with Xubuntu - this is a very slick variant of Ubuntu that comes with the XFCE Desktop. You see, you can even change the desktop environment quickly.

Even if there was something installed by default that you do not like, I am sure as a proud HN contributor you will be able to learn quickly how to "apt remove package-i-do-not-like". Overall it is very recommended to dive a little bit into the fantastic package management system - this is also a very good learning experience for aspiring developers!

Only one warning: if you once understood what "software freedom" really means, there is no way back, also you will look with a mixed feeling of compassion and incomprehension on people that are still using commercial operating systems, which simply can not compete with that level of freedom - which is really worth jumping some obstacles in the beginning, but these are very minimal nowadays.

Have fun!
Few 2020 US presidential candidates are using a basic email security feature
So, other than simply not using the site, is there anything a user can do to avoid third-party tracking at sites like these?
ok, you can replace that word with "mood and the general train of thoughts at the moment". Happier now?

Everyone knows what it means, and it is way shorter than what I have in the quotes. Pretending it isn't a legitimate word (despite it having an actual entry in the dictionary) doesn't make you look more impressive.
TL;DR

Ubuntu 19.10: Gnome 3.34 is fast, like “make old hardware feel new” fast.
What I really meant was...well..things other than gaming (come on HN, think big). Why make music if AI started making the "best" music?
This is a really good idea. It means there needs to be standard way to specify the relevant location for a note inside each media format.
This is not what my comment is about. I am saying that irrespective of the less sensational paper title, the conclusion of the paper is worth sensationalizing.
That’s exactly why the master shouldn’t have quit.
This has been already found for checkers, but players around the world still play it. If the way is too complicated then we cannot apply it unaided.
I deal with much the same thing as a Shakespeare scholar. You'd like the works to stand on their own, but there is something to be gained from studying the corpus as it evolved. When I go to perform a play I treat it as if the audience is seeing a brand new work for the first time, but my process is informed by what I know of the other works and the context in which it was written -- including what I know of the author.

It's unfortunate that conspiracy cranks take that up as a power trip rather than a serious way to study the plays themselves. And that there's a countervailing effort (dating back to the author's lifetime) to attribute lots of things to him -- it would be great if Edward III really were by Shakespeare, but the evidence is circumstantial at best. We can study it to see if it informs us in any useful way, but the combination of weak attribution and weak play means we don't get much of anywhere.
and here i was thinking that a falling birth rate spoke to a more sustainable future in the face of climate change.
I mean it's pretty much a race between nuclear war, nationalist authoritarians gaining power, backwards social policies, concentration of wealth among the 0.1%, climate change, financial crashes...

There's so many things getting worse seemingly all the time it's hard to really keep track of it.

Edit: The various surveillance states, re-emboldening of nazi's, the looming threat of Civil War in the United States, a handful of corporations attempting to own and monetize every aspect of life...
I've woven this sentiment into my philosophy.

I feel computers (and the networks between them) are a natural evolution of our hive mind. When we first started taking spoken language and committing it to writing, we created a hive mind that extended beyond a generation. Prior to that point, everything was passed on through observation of other humans (observing behavior, observing speech, etc.). This meant everything had to pass through, and be mediated by, a human brain. Once we committed that to writing, we had a direct line back to the original brain that created the content unencumbered by the mushy grey bits that have consumed and regurgitated it since.

I feel we are still iterating on that. Cataloging our collective minds and building ever low latency systems to navigate those catalogues. Computers are just an extension that improved our ability to catalogue and retrieve the contents of each other's brains in an incredibly low latency way.

We are part of a hive mind. Our industry is actively building the load bearing infrastructure that supports our hive mind.
"true" or "not true" is probably the wrong way to frame this. There's no reason Google or Apple should want to be involved in deciding the truth, but they do to be a source of useful information.

Knowing whether or not you're going to be crossing a border is useful information when you're physically close to that border. When you're viewing the same map from 1000km away, the political status of the border is probably more important to you than whether or not you're going to be stopped by border guards.