skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The popular answer was that projects change too fast and he doesn not have time to maintain docs.

I sort of agree with this, but rather from the perspective that often the effort required to maintain documentation isn't in proportion to the payoff.

Naturally details differ among projects, but I find that the 20-80 rule applies to documentation, i.e. that 20% of the documentation provides 80% of the value. I find that focusing on stable architecture/properties of the system is a good approximation to the 'important' 20%.

If the system also has any especially tricky parts (e.g. a transaction coordinator) warrants documentation, but that also probably falls under the 'not subject to rapid change' 20%.

I'm assuming project internal documentation here. If you're documenting things for customers, then you'll want to document everything very thoroughly, but one would hope that people figure that out eventually when support tickets keep coming in...

EDIT: Clearer phrasing
People get meth mouth even if they don't take it orally (or smoking) i.e. your thesis is wrong AFAIK.
This has to be the least charitable reading of Crazyontap's comment. Couldn't you have just inserted the implied:

> I was just talking to a friend the other day on how badly Apple and Google are trying their best to kill curiosity and creativity [with regard to the computer they're using].

Also:

> So please, enough with this narrative, it’s really outdated and based on such a limited world view.

You'll have to explain how it's a "limited world view" to suggest that we can have our cake and eat it too: that we can have open, hackable platforms that are also popular and easy to use.
Test-Driven Algorithms – Sorting
I think the point is that there are smells that we do remember for a lifetime, which must be explained. Either these stable memories aren't mediated by the cells in piriform that Schoonover and Fink recorded, or there is a mechanism that supports drifting yet stable distributed representations.
In this article, I’d like to explore a couple of implementations of sorting algorithms. However, I’d like to do so driven by unit tests. The examples are written in Go but don't worry if you never worked with Go before. The emphasis here is on the journey and the joy of building solutions guided by tests!
Algorithm correctly identifies Covid-19 only by the sound of coughs
Someone have found a long post title that can't spoil anything from the article content, so HN users have to click to understand what it is about :/
That's not a remotely easy solution. It's just easy to state.

If someone can afford solar panels and an electric car (or don't need a car to get to work), more power to them, but that doesn't describe the vast majority of society.
Thanks for the hint, now I'm not sure what went wrong when I tried something like this. I should read up on this more.
Nature has a massive incentive to make good use of energy from light through photosynthesis. Billions of plants compete, and whoever can get most out of the sun will win out.

Yet manmade solar cells are more efficient by nearly all measures.
Linked Paper https://www.embs.org/ojemb/articles/covid-19-artificial-inte...
Both can coexist, they are not for the same usage. When I want to do something creative (i.e. create music), I don't want to tinker with a computer, I just want an appliance that works. I spent decades toying with computers, but there are others creative endeavors in life for me now. Apple (at least Jobs) was always about the idea that the general purpose computer was a mean not an end. An iPhone is not locked down if you see it for the appliance that it is. I'm glad that Linux exists and use it everyday at work though, it's just not the same thing.
> I like this article overall but I get irritated when I read stuff about drug users that is clearly written by somebody who hasn’t done a lot of drugs.

To be fair, though, medical doctors with personal experience using meth are probably a very small group, and it's unlikely they're in a big hurry to write an article talking about their experience. But who knows...
Assuming that you will be ever allowed to refactor properly rather than be put under immense pressure to fix other things right now.
Pretty OT here but they're (the Biden WH) buying 500M doses to send elsewhere as of the headlines today (6/9).
I'm of the first type. I love Factorio, I bought it when it was still pretty much unknown (I'm a hipster like that), but I can't bring myself to play it while I'm in my current state of extreme burnout. I have a hard time writing code, I really can't muster the strength to play "programming and refactoring, the game."
Just the number of councils with similar sounding names makes the whole EU project sound like satire.
I don't think those numbers would change a lot if you asked people from the working demography.

I know very little people my age that speak enough French to be able to work, however, everyone I know my age speaks English.
most banks don't support international numbers if that what you meant
Do you think Apple engineers don't have access under the hood? Simply provide that access to those who request it, everyone else can keep it locked. Problem solved.
Something that a lot of the comments do not address and neither does the article to me is that QC relies of concepts that we don't really "understand" as experts either. The article says that in a way superposition has been indeed not well explained as well as parallelism, however to me it is insufficient to get "it". What about entanglement ? What do we mean by measurement of the outcome ? I also think the complexity in explaining it in layman terms are also in coding theory, what is an algorithm ? Why can we encode things in quantum bits and why is it different from usual binary ?

The problem with explaining QC to me lies in the quantum mechanics : it is a theory that is stochastic by nature but governed by deterministic principles. In a way we can't really explain QM properly or satisfactory to ourselves, hence how can we explain any of the quantum techs naturally ?

Quantum bullshit hype doesn't help either.
Why do you make the assumption that a device with freedom would be a device to worry about?
This is exactlty what the op is saying.
The Apple narrative of "we have full control over your device and your software for your own good" is horrible and worrying. I'm not gonna make a parallel about Apple source of inspiration but it doesn't scream creativity, freedom and certainly not democracy.
Thanks for letting me know. Let's see if I can figure out how to fix that.
I live in a big city, and currently know maybe 1% of the neighbors if lucky. Unknown folks are not a concern.
> This is 100% a way to extract more money from consumers, especially non financially stable consumers, while lying to all of our faces

Isn't this hyperbolic? I split time between at least two cities. Being able to pay as I go represents a real saving in cost, time and attention.

Sometimes buying is better than renting. But sometimes there are economies of centralization. AWS isn't a scam on companies too poor to buy servers.
TL;DR; over time the same physical objects/processes fire up different neurons when we experience them. Nothing unexplainable to see here.
Sometimes one in that 0.01% end up creating a world changing operating system like Linux.

I shudder to think what the world would have be if Andrew Tanenbaum/Linus/Wall/etc had to wait for a week long review after creating their software and got rejected every time because Apple support told them.. "Are you out of your freaking mind!? You possibly can't think we will let you do anything remotely like that on our hardware. P.S. Also your account is now permanently banned."
> stop using oil

If you want to go back to a pre-industrial society, sure.
Unexpected surprise is the reason I still stuck to Win10 1803 lol.
Being “enough” isn't practical though and whether it's sufficiently efficient is still an open question.

We already know that evolutionary trial and error is “enough” to create flying animals, yet with a little bit of domain knowledge we've been able to build planes way faster than nature has built flying insects.
AgileGAN
We just want AI to be able to think. We do not need an AI with an autonomic nervous system, or many of the functions in the central nervous system. We do not need AI to be very power efficient. If it takes several megawatts of electricity to get our first strong AI working, so be it.

So, we do not have as many constrains as life did.
From the tone, I believe they are intentionally trolling for reactions. It is probably best not to feed them.
It seems you already know how hard ops can be, so you might already know that a little development effort can often go a long way into alleviating the ops tasks, which is a win for everyone. I'm not sure every developer knows, or understands.

Yes, you could follow a rule book, or a deployment framework, but you'll be better at what you do if know why you do it.
There is another set of people. There are people with solid track records in AI and ML that disagree with DeepMind.
The DGC doesn't have any such type of certificate, so there's that (which, obviously, doesn't mean countries cannot accept antibody tests). As for the traveling, that's weird, as I thought most countries exempt you from needing a test if you're just transiting.
I think part of the mystery is that computers can copy binary information losslessly, ad infinitum. So they can move information as often as needed with (almost) no error. We don't think neurons are as reliable, and excessive copying is expected to degrade a memory/representation. It seems like this might work for discrete categorical representations, whose activation is essentially binary, but would gradually fail for anything analog/continuous.
this can also be an algorithm for an AI news writer.
I disagree, i think it’s the basis of a lot of addiction.
Except that manmade solar cells are pretty bad at repairing or replicating themselves.
> but the sum total of what we know about intelligence says it probably isn't

Source? I am not aware of any other known process in the universe that could not be simulated by a Turing machine.
Always be thinking about what you can get out of your employer. They’re always thinking about what else they can get out of you.
You literally have both, and more.

Right now, I have a nearly uncrackable walled-garden iphone on my desk. And a mac laptop running XCode (learning about Metal programming), and at the same time running an Amiga emulator (tinkering with 68k assembly), and a windows gaming laptop next to it, and a breadboard on the floor with a pile of resistors and capacitors and transistors.

So what's the problem again?
Is Deep Mind a “booming business”? They are achieving great things academically, but their business successes are either kept secret or mostly absent. All I know about is the Google data centre cooling scheduling, probably a big saving for Google but hardly an achievement that in its own professes their business success.
No, that's not what I meant.
While I am agnostic as to the advantages of RL over simpler ML, some basic structural concerns seem to apply here.
The potential concern is that if RL works, the very best factors for learning are likely to be potentially dangerous.

The best environment for learning is the richest -- ie. unrestricted access to be the entire Internet/ or the world via the Internet.

The best reward function is quite likely to be reproduction. If the researcher allows moderate action but attempts to limit reward functions, at a certain level they may find the AI has found a better reward.

If the claimed advantages to learning of richer environments & richer action capability are even somewhat true, researchers are likely to be strongly incentivized to pursue such risky structures.
It will not happen overnight but it does fuel nationalistic ideologies which is counterproductive for EU as a whole. Just because a politician got butt hurt and wants to save his face, doesn't mean it's acceptable.

I was really looking forward to see the EU flourish for years now and all I see is them concerning with offense, accusations and procrastinating issues or matters that don't serve the union but rather a part of it. EU, just get over it, Brexit happened, whatever.
This is excellent and reminds me of the style of The Richest Man in Babylon. Is it available in print format?
Not sure I understand what problem plasticity poses to NeuraLink. If anything, that is the mechanism that is supposed to power it up. How otherwise brain would learn the meaning of the signals received from it?
> Yet manmade solar cells are more efficient by nearly all measures.

Only because we cheated, though: Houses can't sponantously grow more cells in place when more energy is needed.
Stop Giving Af and Start Writing More (2019)
By far not an expert in this area, but if (when?) we successfully generate true intelligence, I suspect it will be through some sort of "ensemble" model, where multiple agents are trained in parallel and interact with each other. Intelligence as we know it hasn't just resulted from an evolution of one agent in response to a cost function, but rather through the complex interactions of agents (humans and organisms in general) over time. I feel like the underlying journal article (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000437022...) is missing discussion of this.
Constant Literals in Objective-C
energy supply and other constraints (material, robustness ...) are a good explanation though - an organism can't grow out of aluminum or steel
It is amazing and frightening at the same time. The other day I was reading somewhere that micro organisms on the surface of spacecraft survived on the cleaning liquid that is designed to kill them.
"Scientists are meant to know what’s going on, but in this particular case, we are deeply confused."

What? I'm a scientist, I often don’t know what’s going on! I see it more as my duty to help others understand that that is ok, and often even a good thing because that is when the fun starts. Science is a method, not a “state”. States are for religions, they “know” what’s going on because "it has been written!". Us scientists are always writing.
Let's consider this in the context of another currency, say, the Euro.

"At any point in time - past, present, or future - the people who have ever bought Euros [with real currency, aka every other fiat], considered as a whole, have put into the game more money than they have got back."

Now the Euro is heavily traded in forex markets, and surely the price fluctuates. Is this statement true? I'd suspect yes, though there are many other factors at play. Has the value of Euro increased relative to the other currencies it trades against? If so, this is probably due to large amounts of money pouring into it as a more lucrative asset than the quote currency.

I think this question really only makes sense using another currency as a reference. So let's consider the Zimbabwe dollar during its period of hyperinflation (2007-2009). In this case, citizens of Zimbabwe who bought Euros very likely got back more of whatever currency they eventually converted it to than they would have if they had kept their money in Zimbabwe dollars.

But what does this even mean. There is no 'stable' currency to use as a true reference, the value of each in the global market is constantly fluctuating. 'Getting less or more money back' becomes hard to evaluate.

So let's talk about purchasing power instead. I suspect the people who have ever bought into bitcoins as a whole, have increased their purchasing power (the number of coca-cola's they can theoretically buy on any given day).
It used to be always check the link before clicking to know it isn't a phishing email, now everyone is hiding the actual link
A few years back, I had the opportunity to lead the Product Team of a 200+ people company. It took me over a month to understood who does what, and I tend to try to know things around me and at least have the idea of “what to do in an emergency.”

I stumble on one DevOps guy who wrote every bloody thing happening in the system. He likes doing it, but from the way people were asking questions in the common chatrooms, group emails, I knew nobody read them. He loves plain text, nicely formatted with the old-school Unix-styles et al. I had talks with him outside of work and found him fascinating; I asked him help with my hobby, home-lab tinkerings, etc.

By that time, I had already started internal blog groups and was encouraging people to write. And indeed, a lot of people came out to write about engineering, marketing, product, and it became a routine for people to show off what they can do, what they love, and what they are good at.

In one of my regular company-wide emailers, I dedicated a big piece to the DevOps guy, pointing to his work and the beauty of his documentations. People loved it, and they began reading it. He remained a friend. That mailer was the only way I could highlight people I encounter doing good work, to the whole team up to the CxOs.

By the time I left the company, I was responsible for many vital things in the company, but I could transition everything smoothly with the documents and credential details (thanks to 1Password).

In the last year or so, I have been thinking more about -- always be dying. I think the similar vein of Always be Quitting; I try to document, write out details, just in case I die and my family has to figure out the intricacies.
This directly contradicts what you previously said, which is the point I was trying to make; thank you for also having made it for me:

>When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple.
Because they don’t justify the massive subsidies.

Sleepers have had a little resurgence over the last year or two, but motorail demand is low and costs are high. Demand at market price is even lower. With a good motorway network and reliable cars people just aren’t willing to spend 5 times the price to go on a train.

Even they were, it’s not sustainable. Far better to fly or train to a remote city and hire a car on arrival.
Deutsch explained quantum theory in his Fabric of reality book. Not every aspect but basic concepts are presented really well.
I'm not overly familiar with the low-level details of iPhones and Android phones, but it's not clear to me why it would be such a big effort to allow one to install whatever OS they like on an iPhone.

Maybe display a big, scary "unofficial OS, you're on your own, don't bother us if your iPhone becomes unusable". Maybe have one jump through some hoops, like getting an "approval" code by signing some mile-long EULA on the iCloud account stating you forego any software-related warranty / support.

This should be enough to deter "regular users" from messing with their phones, and Apple wouldn't have to go to any length to guarantee that a "restored" device isn't compromised. Kind of like the KNOX thing on Samsung phones used to work.

And this actually seems to be possible, since people are having success with running Linux, a non-apple sanctioned OS, on the M1 Macs, which have the secure enclave, etc. My understanding is that whatever issues they are experiencing are related to hardware support.
I feel like that’s unfair. Wisdom and intuition can get you much further in philosophy than it can in physics, which relies on an extraordinarily vast foundation of mathematical principles to even get started on the right path. Philosophy has had the majority of its foundation a lot longer than modern physics has. It seems less tangible things don’t typically share the same fundamental restraints.
>I mean when I first got my 286 the machine was just full of possibilities.

When I got my first 286 very little was available to me because it all had a cost. Want to learn C then get your wallet out to buy a C compiler. Want to learn Pascal then get your wallet out for Turbo Pascal . Want to learn UNIX, well hard lines, that stuff is only available in ivory towers.
yes, it's a recurring thread, "do we really need to mimic the birds in order to build airplanes", etc.

I think someone serious about AI should treat it not as engineering problem but as a science, like physics, which starts with model of nature, and experiment to prove or disprove the theory. Nature provides the constraints by which theory is developed, which radically limits the "search space" of theories. Otherwise it's a bit like throwing things on the wall and see what sticks, which is the primary method of current AI research.
It's not. Space shuttle was pretty well engineered to do the things it was meant to. (If anything, launcher and ops were underengineered hence the failures.)

The problem was that it was meant to do too many things at the same time. Some of them were: being able to return to US territory from anywhere. (Hence semi-aerodynamic.) Carrying people and a lot of cargo. (Hence big.) Deploying any kind of cargo rather than defined operations. (Hence Canadaarm.) Being reusable. (but not the launcher...) Etc.

The chief problem of it is that it was first in a class research vehicle. And you cannot refactor rockets. (At least not cheaply. Prove me wrong Starship.)
Obligatory reference to the mother of all demos [1] by Douglas Engelbart

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&ab_channel=Marce...
I just write documentation because I know future me would like to have it. That is just good engineering.

If you are an electrician you also label your terminals and add plans to avoid troubles for other electricians and your future self. People who don't do that are handymen, but not electricians.

Many developers are handymen, not engineers.
As a sysadmin who became a developer, I don't think I agree that it needs to be hard to operate software these days. We have tools that simplify, standardize, and aggregate a lot of the things that used to make systems administration much more complicated, such that operating the software you wrote very rarely actually requires a full set of systems administration knowledge. With good platforms, it's absolutely feasible to operate your software without needing the full knowledge of a sysadmin.
Another indirect reason is creating support for your product in another open source project.

Qualcomm, for example, adds Linux drivers for their chipsets so they can be used in Android devices.
It would probably be a lot more expensive to replace more than 20 years of domain experience immediately because you quit to go work at rand($FAANG).
The engineering effort is entirely surmountable; we already have a pretty decent solution in Chrome OS's Developer Mode.

"Security" has become the excuse big companies use for everything they foist on users. Better update to that new OS version that ruins the user interface -- it comes with security patches! Better make sure you can't play any games that aren't approved by Apple -- it's the only way to make iPhones secure! Better centralize the entire Internet so it all depends on four or five giant corporations to run -- they're the only ones who can be trusted to implement security!
Or sometimes you get drift, and then you don't remember a smell, and this happens all the time - which is why if we re-smell something, we don't necessarily hit the same neurons, but we also remember old smells, because those didn't drift. Or is that excluded by the experiment?
Here in NL, everybody is "entitled" to a bank account. However, banks can, and do, freely reject people. They will block and ban your account if they want to. For businesses it's even worse.

So even if everybody has the right to have a bank account, it just doesn't work like that.
But letting aside the unicode reason, wouldn't be the answer the following?

&str is a slice of something that is const (it can be in flash, for example). Like:

const char* str = "cat";
str[0] = 'C'; // <--- wrong

So, because of this, an extra allocation and copy is required.

(read the above answer like it's coming from an embedded C developer learning Rust as I am).