skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I honestly think this is what I love in sci-fi, some space opera most notably: whereas most stories are usually told in terms of space and time, sci-fi sometimes speaks in terms of scale, of orders of magnitudes — because space (I mean the cosmos, not the dimensions) is a natural playground for that.

Sometimes, when I ponder the discrepancy between quantum, or whatever's smallest, perhaps strings 'below' (in scale) or 'within' (physically), and the largest relativistic objects like "dark attractors" and meta-galactic structures (streams of 'dark matter', light nodes, etc)...

It almost seems like scale is but another kind of dimension in and of itself.

Like you've got spacetime at our human-ish scale (roughly 10 orders of magnitude smaller to larger around our size), and that spacetime behaves in a certain way, that probably Einstein describes accurately. Then you've got spacetime at smaller scales, below "quantum uncertainty" if we must place a limit, and there spacetime behaves in a much different way, the picture is very, very different.

And so there could be yet another spacetime at a higher threshold of scale, and intuition tells me it may be at the galacatic level already, because dark matter, rotation discrepancy, and those weird supermassive blackholes; the flow of galaxies, the meta-structure we see. Dark energy, if it's real, also begins at that scale (doesn't break galaxies apart, but makes holes bigger between them, the non-correlated enough sets).

Going from this idea to postulating disjointed (1+3) spacetimes forming, in effect in this example, 3x4=12 dimensions to explore mathematically, let alone physically, is a stretch which I'm certainly not willing to make (although I think that's what some string theories must reduce to, somehow, maybe reduced to a single unified dimension of time maybe?); no really this doesn't make sense in my head. It's pretty but nonsensical, like art I guess. Worth the sci-fi, not the studies.

But the feeling, the intuition really is that, and conveyed by these extreme zooming animations: a different scale means totally different phenomena, and no macro-system can be reduced to its parts in that view, nor can it be deduced from its parts (I mean, we can't even solve the 3-body problem, that's harsh on "scaling continuity" or smoothness, on the "linearity" of scales so to speak). A "basic" intuition I guess is that the 4 fundamental interactions have ranges, and kick in or out depending on a particular scale of the system.

Scales are obsessing me.
While this is fascinating and I'm glad to have read it, it doesn't substantiate that this experiment set back psychiatry. The fact that the DSM-IV was prompted or encouraged by the experiment is suggested, but there's no argument for it. Even beyond that, the article doesn't even hint at an argument that the DSM-IV set back psychiatry (except offering the bare assertion that reductionism is false).

Of course, the DSM is very controversial, and many people could fill in the argument, but this article doesn't do it.
Alfalfa Club
tl;dr

1. The typical deep neural network tutorial introduces deep networks as compositions of nonlinearities and affine transforms.

2. In fact, a deep network with relu activation simplifies to a linear combination of affine transformations with compact support. But, why would affine transformations be useful?

3. After recent discussions on Twitter it occurred to me that the reason why they work is that they are actually first-order Taylor approximations of a suitable analytic function.

4. What is really cool about this is that by this logic partial derivatives, i.e. Jacobians, are computational primitives for both inference and learning.

5. I think this also provides insight into how deep networks approximate functions. They approximate the intrinsic geometry of a relation using piece-wise linear functions.

This works because a suitable polynomial approximation exists and all polynomials are locally Lipschitz.
Land is zero sum. Single family homes consistent with neighborhood character are zero sum. Housing is not.
It should be mandatory by law to open-source APIs at discontinuation.
Mods: Would be bee’s knees if HN code rewrote AMP links to direct URL on commit, comments and submissions.
> they'd still be a orders of magnitude less dangerous than sharks, bees, and lightning.

And well, dogs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t...

BTW, since we just adopted a very sweet chocolate lab mix who according to wisdom panel has 25% American Staffordshire Terrier in him, I'll also share this article pointing out that breed is a poor predictor of bite risk:

https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/literature-reviews/dog-...

Gratuitous pic of our new family member:

https://ibb.co/thq4sRG
I like the idea. But I love sqlite. I think the perfect match of this idea and sqlite is a serialization format to and from Sqlite, in a nice text format. It could look something like this, but probably closer to the "line mode" that the sqlite3 tool implements.
Kobe Died
Imagine if software companies paid their employees royalties on the code they wrote instead of just paying for the development time... ;-)
Oh I see now https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71z-IlmfZeL... the single plug misled me to think it's just one USB C. Crafty.
Not quite. Redis is still an external database. Prevayler was much simpler, just a library.

With Prevayler, all data is kept in RAM, reachable from one root object, which Prevayler holds. All changes to the data model must be expressed as command objects. Each object is handed to Prevayler, which serializes it to a log and then executes it. Once in a while, you can snapshot the data out and start a new log. If there's a crash, you just load the latest snapshot and replay the log.

You got exactly as much data integrity as you wrote into your objects and your commands. Which without much work could be quite a bit, because you get a lot of data integrity by not writing things. E.g., if a kind of object should never be deleted, you just don't write any deletion code. If, say, account balances should never be changed directly, but only as part of properly structured credits and debits, then you just write your code like that.

Most databases, Redis I think included, are made for arbitrary operations on data. Developers add integrity and security later, hopefully. And that is often duplicative of the code base, so that one ends up having integrity checks both in the code and in the database.

I should say that made a lot of sense for the era databases came out of. Databases were a huge step forward in the 1970s and 1980s. My dad was a developer in that era and it was a big relief not to have to get a bunch of programmers to all follow the same conventions for exactly which record was stored in exactly which spot on their precious and expensive disk drives. Not having to know the minutia of the hardware let a lot of people just get in there and build business reports. But if we were starting fresh today, I don't think we would do anything like a SQL database. Redis was definitely a step away from that era, and I look forward to many more.
> Which is saying that you can only have a "vote" if you're wealthy enough.

No, it's saying you can vote if you buy a share. Are you saying that wealthy individuals in a democracy don't have an outsized advantage in shaping policy and the behaviour of government? But they have the same voting rights as you or me, so there must be something else going on…

> doing that doesn't affect the company's behavior.

You're saying that withholding your money from a company has no effect on its behaviour? Try cancelling a long standing account with a company today, like your phone provider, and see if it provokes any kind of response. You might get a free upgrade out of it.
Smorgasbords Don’t Have Bottoms: Publishing in the 2010s
I thought you 0 kelvin was the lowest possible value on the kelvin scale. How come this post mention negative kelvin values? Is it not temperature?
I guess I've been lucky to avoid literally any of this at work. However, one of my classes at university has each student rate other students in their group with arbitrary personality factors that seem like they should be subjective.

For instance, the model (we take quiz to evaluate how well we use it and how to rate each other) relies on things like "is late to meetings" or "does not fully consider everyone's ideas" to judge a student as being an underperformer. The most problematic was that it made us choose whether we are "details" or "overview" in terms of what kind of work we complete, with no room for being able to handle both (you are either the person who types individual sentences at the whim of your 'leader', or you are planning the entirety of the project and doing none of the grunt work). Speaking of 'leader', it also asks us to rate ourselves as leaders (good, mediocre, bad), and to state what kind of person we want to be led by.

I'm expecting our responses to be used to assign us to groups and given roles in each group, but we will see.

I just get annoyed when I'm stuck taking a survey that - by the nature of the questions on it - is almost certainly dubious.
Yes, I thought the same - so you have to write a server. What about locking? roll your own I suppose. Multi user - roll your own? What about hot backups? Rollbacks?

I always conclude these things are advocated by people who have no experience in large multi user systems. The same as the NoSQL movement. They'll eventually build a database server. They build a system using the cool thing which works fine when they test it on their single user system. Go live - aagghh what's happening, why are all these people trying to access my data simultaneously? and so on.

One I'll always remember was when XML was the next big thing - they decided to store the raw XML in a database. It was a commercial product, and we were interfacing to it from our system. Once we found out this we started asking questions - no no it works fine we were told, laughing at us old database guys. Went live couldn't handle 5 TPS - what a surprise, it never worked as far as I'm aware. There is this continuous circle of databases are bad, no no do this you don't need to do this, no things have changed - what do you database guys know. Its entertaining to watch if nothing else, my advice - learn SQL, and some database tuning, its not that hard, at least compared to writing your own database engine.
If wish.com has offices in the U.S. they might have to reconsider a few things. Lots of $45 Rolex watches, $3 terabyte USB drives, $5 Credit Suisse gold bars, etc can be had there. At Wish, the world is your counterfeit oyster.
Have you written up the systems you've built? I'd love to read more about the practical details. Feel free to email me or DM me on Twitter if that's better.
From the article:

> In 2018 a draft report from an office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said the risk level for exposure to the chemicals should be up to 10 times lower than the 70 PPT threshold the EPA recommends. The White House and the EPA had tried to stop the report from being published.
The only people who can be "required to accept" a price set by the government for their labor are criminal convicts and military draftees.

But yes, the government could procure services from providers on your behalf the same way it procures everything else, and that would greatly reduce dependence on employers.
What do you recommend then? I think DNSCrypt is nice for client-to-server.

Edit: nvm, forgot DoH and DoT were a thing
you can just turn off these things if you so desire - in reality the overhead is a lot less than you'd think. You'd be way better off spending the time you'd use to write half a database to optimising your application and just use a database. Or maybe you don't really need a database.
Actually, some of our customers are doing just that - taking a tarball and making it a VM image. There are a couple of things we are making now to support this use case better, e.g. ability to easily change the ip on the VM boot up.
Actually, it doesn't necessarily have merit. It just seems like it does, because people will assume that almost any vaguely-worded paragraph that's supposedly about them must be true.

See the Barner / Forer Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
Amazing books that are a joy to read:

Polya's How To Solve It is great for 'how to think like a mathematician'.

I love Knuth et al's Concrete Mathematics. Discrete maths plus jokes in the margins.

Stillwell's Mathematics and its History - meet the main strands of mathematics, their origins, and the great mathematicians.

Needham's Visual Complex Analysis - complex functions, differentiation & integration, Möbius transformations, hyperbolic geometry, vector fields etc - explained with a lot of pictures.
It's more about trying to prevent flying from increasing by 5x as huge new populations become affluent enough to start using planes regularly. Pushing back against the culture of flying while supporting alternative technologies that are easier to make zero carbon in the near term is the goal.
Slightly tangential, but I've always wondered something similar: why did we wait so long for the printing press? The technology is essentially the same as coin pressing, which has existed for much longer.
we used existing recipies for training (tuda german), slightly adapted and with additional training data. i am sure with more knowledge we would have made some extra percent ... performance is not really good, but good enough for our purposes, and with a satisfying cost vs quality trade off
Kazoo of shame

-1 redundant
The average US citizen has a large load of PFAS in their blood[1] from clothing, carpet, water and other sources. The levels have dropped a great deal in the last 20 years but it's unlikely you've increased your levels much beyond what you already had from other sources.

[1] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/pfas-blood-testing.html

The blood serum levels reported by CDC are staggering. As an example, I have a well and it's in a contamination plume of PFOS and PFOA. The EPA certified laboratory measured level two years ago was 11 ppt (parts per trillion.) The CDC measured 2.1 ug/L of PFOA (only) in the blood of over 2000 people in 2014. That's 2,100,000 ppt; 5 orders of magnitude higher than my 'contaminated' water.
...yes? Hearing about something doesn't make it true.
The article says the book only suggests it could have been fiction, in that no records exist that allow people's participation to be verified.

It's still entirely possible that it happened as reported, but that the (properly) confidential records were destroyed/lost.

According to Wikipedia, "'[s]he writes that she cannot be completely certain that Rosenhan cheated', despite entitling her book as she did." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
Given that Vancouver has good air quality, the difference between living 150 meters from a highway vs. further might be more pronounced than if living in LA where the baseline pollution level is high enough that living next to a highway doesn't give meaningfully higher exposure.
For example, some students use their personal laptops in the sixth form. To access the student intranet, they need to enter the URL (and you ain't finding it on Google) and that's a huge struggle for many of them.

Not understanding URLs also affects their ability to see through any bad emails that make it through the spam filters. If you understand URLs, you can hover over a link, see that it's pointing to bankcom.fzzaa.net and see that it's obviously not something you should click on.

Quite a few students have asked me how to access the online resources that come with the revision guides they have purchased. Somewhere in the book will be a URL to whatever they need and they just don't recognise what a URL is. They see something beginngin with https:// and it's meaningless to them. Visit this link? How? What is it?

This isn't an exhaustive list of reasons, it's not even close. I don't think it makes sense to argue that being completely oblivious to the very basics of something so fundamental to all our lives is something to be dismissed as irrelevant. I also thinking it's bad that Google is the only way so many people know how to access a website. Remember when some blog was ranked #1 for 'facebook login' for a day or so? People were filling the comments section with stuff like "ugh this new facebook is so bad". I think that highlights a serious problem that we're lucky enough to have mostly avoided... so far.
Apologies for a tangential comment, but I laughed at the fact that all of the ads I am shown when viewing this article are for tires.
> Is cluster-per-app a thing people really do?

Gravity enables a somewhat unique scenario of companies taking their complex micro-services stack and delivering it as an installer for software application. From the end users' perspective they don't even know that it's a k8s cluster, they consume an application that consists of multiple components.

However Gravity supports the scenario when multiple applications are installed in the cluster as well.
> deepspeech is python

I was under the impression DeepSpeech was native (C++), with bindings for Python and others. Personally I've used it with Node.js so far, and I couldn't see any dependencies on Python.

edit: I was talking client, you're talking training I guess.
we used a context-free data set, augmented with additional domain-specific sound samples and it worked out fine, although the additiinal samples made nearly no difference
Yes. Despite the name, it seems like the majority of posters are ex-Mormon, but not angry about it.
>Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled by principles and such.

Beautiful strawman here. Let's let Turkey go on denying genocide, murdering Kurds, destabilizing the region, and arresting political opponents and holding them without charges, because gosh darn it, they let wikipedia in.
Sometimes if you build it, they will come.
I launched a music app in 2012 (student project), and over its lifetime (6 years), I had 95k downloads and 7 million sessions on the app.
The economics on that look terribly bad. Keyboard is too high or screen is too low. Keyboard is too close to the screen.

I suppose you'd adjust those but for a single piece of glass product, your sort of stuck with placement.

Honestly, what's wrong with a wireless keyboard? Or a wired one?
We are staying on the safe side here on our recommendations. We have seen many scenarios when high latency on volumes on AWS creates a lot of problems even for small 3 node clusters.
> just a small server, hope that it wont crash when posting

> the link here

In all honesty I was just looking for some pre-processed examples.

The API itself seems intuitive enough, good job.

What really stands out to me is that open-source text-to-speech is really awful compared to commercial solutions - which surprises me. Does anybody know why this is the case? (And not just "money", I'm talking technology)
Maybe I'm just a very lucky person, but my wife and I combined have driven probably close to a million miles and I can't recall having ever changed a tire road side. I can only recall maybe a few punctures ever, fortunately only causing a slow enough leak that it was discovered at home or the destination.

Still, with full-size spares having gone the way of the dodo and space-savers better than nothing but not that great, this is a welcome change as long as tire prices don't become exorbitant.

I put a solid rubber tire on my wheelbarrow years ago. It'll outlast the wheelbarrow. Greatest home garden purchase ever.
While we’re talking history: I’ve heard that the system of laws codified under Justinian in the Byzantine empire ended up forming the basis for most Western law systems to this day. My math is probably off here, but is the current Turkish court system a continuous descendant from that system?
I’m looking forward to the post mentioned towards the end, detailing the cutting of features. I’ve been following the work on this for ages and was looking forward to types data as a way to guard against accidental mistakes, so I’m keen to read the author’s reasoning for switching to strings and arrays of strings. I’m sure there’s a non-trivial reason, his work has always felt careful, measured and well though out to me.
Word2Vec Tutorial Part 2 – Negative Sampling · Chris McCormick
If you think of an application as composed of hundreds of micro services, than it makes perfect sense. It's a multi-tenant system, it's just each tenant is a part of the same app.
From the comments of the author:

"You can puzzle your group by asking whether entropy increases as clouds of gas and dust in the early Universe collapse and form stars and planets. If it doesn’t increase, this process violates the Second Law. So it must increase. But why is it increasing? It seems that order is increasing… so doesn’t that mean entropy is decreasing?

If someone can’t answer this puzzle correctly, they don’t understand how thermodynamics works in our Universe."

So, who knows the right answer to the puzzle: where and how the increase of the entropy happens? (I also suggest that those who really know should wait for some hours... I'd first actually like to see some wrong answers which try to be right but don't manage to be -- just to get some better picture of the readers here -- I don't know if this will work).
Cool! Thanks! I've tried both wav2letter and DeepSpeech, and now this, but I get very poor results even with short sentences (compared to Google's proprietary services). Would it be possible to also make an API for passing in training data and automatically update the model? I'm thinking that the results might get better if they are trained with the specific audio/hardware/settings and dialect of the end user.
Pushers of the paradigm of imaginary property like to misuse the word "theft" to make the plebs identify with their position.
WordPress.com will do the job. Free for a subdomsin only site, then for a small fee you can connect a domain. I’ve setup a bunch.. feel free to contact me if you have questions!
tubeless sealants in a tire make sense.

non-pneumatic tires are one of those Things that keep coming up and keep being a very stupid idea.
The same thing stuck out to me, and definitely seemed presumptuous. However, I'm not a physicist, so what do I know?

Maybe one way of looking at it is that despite the fact that gravitons are hypothetical, we can still do the math and calculate the amount of entropy or information that they would/could contain.
How would my consent to have my image recorded and stored affect other people?
If the data is active, it's not enough to just throw more storage on the server. More storage means more of other things: Memory. I/O bandwidth. Processing power. Could keep adding those as well, but eventually it's faster and much cheaper to add additional servers.
Buffets are terrible places to eat for a vegan or even vegetarian. Options are typically limited to simple salads, various types of potato (fried, baked) and occasionally pizza or pasta: i.e. cheap tasteless carbs.

Besides limited variety, the other problem is you need to choose very conservatively. Lots of options have animal-derived ingredients and the staff are either clueless or there exists commonly a significant language barrier.