skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: As a software developer, how do I get into brain research?
I'm a software developer in my early twenties. I've been programming professionally since I was 16, and I work in a startup now, mostly doing front-end engineering.

I tried going to university but I chose the wrong one and later dropped out (I don't regret it).

I love my job, but sometimes there's a nagging feeling that I'm missing out when I read about neural networks, machine learning or computational biology. I've been taking ML on Coursera and though I don't have deep love for maths, I found the subject both fascinating and approachable.

Still, machine learning isn't what I want to be doing. I'm a thousand times more fascinated by articles about reverse-engineering and hacking the human brain itself. (For example, this one: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~rao/brain2brain/index.html). I'm also very interested in OpenWorm project since it's not your typical movie-recommendation kind of neural network.

I have no idea how to get into that area (fiddling with the brain). Do I absolutely need to get a degree in this area to participate in this kind of research? Do they need software development expertise? Is it difficult to adjust my skillset from being just a software developer? How does division of labor usually work in groups like these? I imagine there are always some biology- and some software-oriented folks in one group. What could be my first step in that direction?

If you have taken this path, please share your experience.
That's pretty nice, but in the US at least, the digitizer alone is almost always never replaced because it is a fairly dangerous maneuver. [1]

Also, if you have the tools (and I would recommend buying a small electronics tool set to everyone, because it's a lot cheaper and funner to fix stuff yourself than to pay someone to fix it), then you can buy a complete LCD + digitizer for $36 on Amazon. [2]

[1]http://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/111483/iPhone+5+cracked+g...

[2]http://www.amazon.com/Generic-Screen-Digitizer-Assembly-Repl...
IMO it should be "You can't reinvent the wheel, but you can study physics to understand how the wheel functions."
"we saw what happened with cars"
What does that mean? I drive a Leaf and its the best car I've ever driven. I've practically forgotten how to pump gas and the only maintenance I have is tire rotations and brake pad changes.
It could be said that he is reinventing the wheel and trying to make it rounder, which is definitely a good thing.
Same here, I think Fastmail should definitely consider hosting their servers in various locations and allow their customers to choose where they want their primary storage to be.
"code is so expensive and rigid"

For a former embedded systems engineer, this is a hilarious sentiment ... if code you can deploy to your web server two minutes after you've written it is "rigid", I'd hate to see what the current generation of software engineers would think about not being able to "reROM" an embedded device once it was shipped. Even remote-FLASH capabilities are a pretty recent invention.

I think the main problem the article describes is that if you prematurely write software for a perceived problem, you will often be wrong. Writing software will always be more expensive than some number of manual operations, but those manual operations, in the absence of a clear specification and solution, will help you understand the problem domain in ways you wouldn't have otherwise.
I guess it takes skills @dannyrohit

I have tried to replace the set on an ipod touch in the past. Didn't succeed. Screwed up taking the face/body assembly apart.
If the people doing this are listening: I don't think the business model is ok. If this keyboard is to get some traction, it will require us users to use it for real before paying. You can't have a keyboard lite, it's a vital utility, not a game. If I type a url or a password and discover that a character is only on premium, I'll switch back to my usual keyboard and not look back.

Another remark: typing number is very important and must be safe and fast, I didn't see a number mode. It should be easily done on five tiles.
There really is a lack of actual usage-videos which is kind of off putting. The posted "trailer" video didn't make me want to use it either, although this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOPalCIbGA8 made me a little bit more curious.

And regarding the 3+2 thing that seems true, I always count to 5 in couples of 3s and 2s.
I know of two cases where Audi dealers acted unethically with people I know in South Africa. Is there a worldwide pattern?
Also a mark of generally severe weakness in front line managers of programmers. Training and mentoring are ideals that only work if those responsible for them are capable, vs. e.g. the standard issue failed programmer who's also generally not very good at management.

For those able to learn on the job pretty much by themselves, well, the above type isn't able to judge much about the real work they do, let alone their not visibly accomplishing much for weeks while they come up to speed.
There is no question that additional data would be potentially useful to an AI. But it's a common fallacy that it's the only way to get "meaning". Data from a digital camera isn't fundamentally different than data from text. The only benefit is that visual data is far less compressed, more redundant. It's easier to find patterns in it. Natural language is a highly compressed description of things in the real world.

That said, it doesn't at all mean you can't learn anything meaningful from it. For example, you build a machine learning system to predict the missing words in a sentence. "A horse is similar to other farm animals like ____." Machines are getting better at this kind of thing, though still far from human level. Google's word2vec for example can take a word like "horse" and list the words that it is most similar to. You can subtract the representation for "man" from "king", add "woman" and it outputs "queen".
lol theyre new desing ppl are idots, Gogle is doomed

etc. etc.
Can we expect Fastmail to run a complete production traffic replica in Iceland in the future? I would gladly pay up to 1.5x the price for having my primary storage there instead of the US.
How is that lazy? Why would a company train you to program?
Hm, good point. My difficulty was this: if a company holds patents that it is not exploiting, all they're doing is adding unneeded pressure on competitors who have to think twice about implementing something similar because you never know when the other guys might sue. On the other hand, it also seems unfair to force patents away from companies that, while having financial difficulties, would also actually like to exploit those patents and simply need some time to find additional income sources.

This would actually be a good idea: such companies should be required to either present a good schedule for how they intend to actively use the patents they hold, with the implementation of that schedule supervised by a third-party (maybe state?) representative. Companies that fail to implement their patents should be subject to limitations that discourage them from using the patents in an anti-competitive fashion, or simply for financial gains that do not result in any implementation.

There could be a ton of variations on this theme. For instance, companies could be required to pay a certain fee for each patent they hold, that decreases if the patent is actually implemented and increases (possibly to impractical amounts) for every year that it is not implemented. This way, companies would be discouraged from hoarding patents, while actively offering an incentive for implementing technology they claim to be patentable.
It's not a bad theory, but then again the `G` doesn't visually change, the `l` looks better horizontally, but worse vertically. Seems like a tie, at least at this resolution.
Let's take a look at Obscure Operating Systems: HaikuOS R1 Alpha v4.1
Simple code-folding in Xcode
I'm finishing building a similar project, but i hope a bit funnier.
I think this is ultimately a bit boring, but i guess it depends on how many people use will it....
How to develop faster with Ionic and Cordova
Looks great. I doubt Halo 5 will ever come out for PC though!
I was leaving the obvious unsaid; the shipping/resource-exploitation aspect isn't as well known. I guess we'll be finding out what happens when an oil spill gets caught up in arctic ice in the next decade or so.
New York City UFO Incident – Pilot and Air Traffic Control Recordings
By definition?

Did you even see what this does?
Can you provide a link to what you're hinting at?
I'm friends with a former state senator, and suggested this to her. She laughed at me and said that's the last thing lawmakers want. They like being able to sneak little bits into bills when no one's looking. She used to start reading bills in the back, because that's where the graft would get thrown in, usually written in some really obscure manner.

So to get this to happen I think we would first need some kind of version control so easy and compelling that the general public starts using it everywhere, and then maybe we can build enough public pressure to make the legislators use it.

(On the other hand I don't see any reason why judges would be against it for court decisions.)
Backed at the $40 level. I'm a big fan of CPU modules like this, they solve the difficult problems and I can solder them onto a simple two-layer PCB that has whatever I need for my application.
Video of the process for anyone curious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbZwypAINYE
So You Want to Write Your Own CSV code
The way they provide responses to their user reviews on the Play store is a bit off-putting -- they have a very "you're doing it wrong" tone, rather than accepting the premises and complaints of their users.

I think the basic concept is intriguing, but the lack of intuitive execution is a huge show-stopper when competing with things like swype.
I don't know, but it does run on an AVR. Sort of.

http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20...
Judging by the amount of "deep learning" submissions to HN bad times for AI are already here although maybe they never left.

In defense of the LEVAN thing, though, I didn't see any claims that this is science at all, more like an exploratory application illustrating an algorithm.
Hang on, you’re sounding flippant about this. Stealing all the kangaroos would be a very serious thing, you know.
The CSV 'format' is hell. I just wrote a blog highlighting some of the issues : http://tburette.github.io/blog/2014/05/25/so-you-want-to-wri...
But that's the thing. We solve a problem and then the solution is just called a "cute trick". The goalpost gets moved further. Natural language processing is getting really advanced. Soon enough you will be able to talk to a computer in a conversation. And then you will just call that a cute trick.
You just prompted me to read the source code :-) gpw.c has this comment at the top:

/* GPW - Generate pronounceable passwords
This program uses statistics on the frequency of three-letter sequences
in your dictionary to generate passwords. The statistics are in trigram.h,
generated there by the program loadtris. Use different dictionaries
and you'll get different statistics.

This program can generate every word in the dictionary, and a lot of
non-words. It won't generate a bunch of other non-words, call them the
unpronounceable ones, containing letter combinations found nowhere in
the dictionary. My rough estimate is that if there are 10^6 words,
then there are about 10^9 pronounceables, out of a total population
of 10^11 8-character strings. I base this on running the program a lot
and looking for real words in its output.. they are very rare, on the
order of one in a thousand.

...

I'm not really in a position to properly figure this out... for a start, it's commonly claimed that there are 1M words used in English however my local /usr/share/dict/words has only 100K entries (and a even lot of those seem redundant).

Assuming my gpw binary was "trained" on a 1M wordlist, and that my algorithm averages three 8-char strings per passphrase... and we take the comments at face-value, i.e. 10^9 possibilities per 8-char string generated.

I'm going to pretend I can competently use Mlog2(N) to estimate that three such strings might make up 3log2(10^9)=89 bits of entropy. Throw in a 0-9999 number, let's pretend that's worth 13-ish bits, let's call it 100 bits?

I haven't factored in the capitalizations yet, and I'm not sure how much the random placement of the numbers and the random lengths of each "word" are worth.

IANACG (I am not a crypto guy) but that seems like a huge number of bits and so this is likely completely wrong (I'd start with going back to trying to properly analyze how many combinations my gpw binary can actually produces in an n-char string - that 10^9 combinations from a 10^6 wordlist needs testing).
I don't get it; VSZ is just the virtual memory, i.e., address space, not actually used space (at least, not in Linux). You shouldn't need any swap for it.

My laptop doesn't have swap and only has 2GB of RAM, but it has no problem "allocating" the 3GB+ of virtual memory that the processes are using.
Then you read some science fiction and futurology forecasts and understand that there is no way future isn't going to be revolving around programming in every way. And you feel even better.
Same deal here in Bolivia, you break something chances are someone somewhere in Los Cachis can fix it for you inexpensively.

For example my Kindle 1st gen charging port was no longer snapping the connector cable correctly - I took it in and for 20Bs ($3) they fixed a soldered part that had come loose with the ins-and-outs of the charging cable.
I wish I had more adventures like this one, but I've found one of the things that holds me back is the language barrier. I don't speak any of Mandarin, Korean, or Japanese (I wouldn't be surprised if bunnie does, given how brilliant he is), and I worry that not being able to communicate effectively rules out serendipitous moments like these.

For others here, did you learn Chinese (or Spanish, or Arabic, or Russian) to assist you in your travels? I've always found learning computer languages easy, but human languages frustratingly difficult for me (different muscles, I know).
I think the increase in deep-learning links in this particular community is partly because Google recently dropped a huge pile of money on a deep-learning startup (Deep Mind), which gave it more visibility in the startup scene. Though in that case, are we talking about a separate AI frenzy, or is it just an appendage of the current startup/acquisitions frenzy?
The fundamental problem humans will have with strong AI is that it won't be able to properly rationalize it's actions. Sure you'll have a statistical model for why it did what it did but that means about as much to anybody as a numerical reification of the quantum states of every particle of a person's mind at the time they made a decision.
It's unfair to highly skilled people, because it would bore the hell out of them. That's how you weed out the top 1% and breed a normalized group of students. I truly understand why some of the super-skilled people I know didn't even consider going to any higher school, but still beat the shit out of the PhD's that I know, when it comes to a) knowledge b) theoretical and practical skill c) solid maths + formal verification. It doesn't mean that universities suck, but they polarize skills towards industrial demand and forget about the diversity of culture that arrived, they are about to eliminate for the greater good of the industrial market, which manifests in the number of graduates. But oh beware, that too many graduate, as if that would mean that the university is cheap and will loose it's prestige. Professors tend to hate it, when too many pass their exams and often times help to let some % of the students fail on purpose, to keep up their "prestige". If every single professor explained thinks like on Reddit's ELI10 and used interactive media to underline the structure behind a problem, then almost everybody would pass. So, does a high number graduations automatically mean that the university only teaches low-skill courses, resulting in low-quality students? I'd say no, if they teached students more efficiently.
And it is

[patent pending]

See http://levan.cs.washington.edu/?state=show_about
No. Why do you want Linux? Linux needs a lot of memory will eat your power budget.
California Joins Other States In Investigation Of eBay Hack
So, what is your policy for when a contributing developer sends you a pull request that adds an enterprise edition feature to your community edition?

Ignore them?
PLX devices have an exciting product and they use kickstarter.com as a marketing tool.
Python: Fastest way to find a string in a big string collection
When I repair phones, I always replace the digitizer and the LCD, firstly because it is too difficult to separate them, but secondly because buying the LCD+Digitizer as one unit isn't that much more expensive than buying the digitizer on its own.
Is is it inspired from Google's Gmail Tap April Fool Prank?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KhZKNZO8mQ
I can't figure out how I'm expected to use more than one digit on this thing at once. I usually type on a touchscreen keyboard with at least two fingers(either both thumbs, or the index and middle finger of one hand).

The sliding action makes using two different hands impossible- I can't type many characters without having to move my thumbs out of each others' way. That won't work.

This leads me to think that I should use one hand, maybe even four fingers. But then my entire hand moves position every time I have to slide, which means I have to move my entire hand back to the start position to use a different finger for the next character.

The only way I can type with this system is using a single finger, and that's just way too slow.
Why I'll Probably Try to Manipulate You
It's possible, but generally generative models have to be trained in a specific way. If not, you could do something like for every layer of the neural net, you train another NN which can "predict" the layer below it, it's input. Then you can work your way down each layer to try to find an input which would produce that output.

Another way is to use some kind of optimization to find an input which produces that pattern (e.g. backprop to the pixels themselves.) This will give you the image that most strongly triggers that output. Not necessarily a typical example.
On the subject of alternative keyboards, I've been using MessagEase (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me...) for about a year and am pretty pleased with it. It's still roughly the size of a regular QWERTY keyboard, but the buttons are enormous, and I can type any letter, number, or symbol I care about without modifier keys. (It accomplishes this by differentiating between taps and short swipes—so each button has nine characters assigned to it, the tapping one and then eight for swiping to each side/corner.)
Which is why saying lots of money if more useful than specifying an amount, because that amount may or may not be a lot of money where the reader is from, but might be a huge amount where the person who posted it is from.
Joshua Gans suggests setting up a way in which people can flaunt the fact that they've paid a very large amount of tax, as a way of taking this impulse for a status symbol and turning it to a positive social end. http://economics.com.au/?p=9958
I wouldn't be surprised if bunnie does, given how brilliant he is

He is brilliant, but having Chinese parents probably helped :)

http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/history.html
For those to lazy to click on the link here is just one sample of awesome you will find:

"That burrito, jesus. But from where? - m4w"

"I woke up with the remains of a burrito next to the sink. It was everything. It had french fries in it, and avocado, and sour cream, and probably sprinkles of unicorn dreams. It was at once crunchy and smooth, and hot and cold, and salty and gooey and chewy. I remember ordering "The Californian" from a menu with 800 other unnecessary alternatives. I watched as it emerged into this world one spoonful of love at a time and then beautifully origamied by a soulful Mexican man who will be the godfather of my future son. It was, quite simply, the finest burrito I've ever had the pleasure of leaving next to my sink at 3:00 in the morning. BUT FROM WHERE? Sweet Mary and Joseph I cannot remember where it came from. Please help. I was walking home from Hi Tops in Castro through the Mission--walking toward SOMA. I was walking down a numbered street but don't know which one. Probably low-to-mid teens. As I walked east, it was on the lefthand (north) side of the street. There was a ton of tables inside, a burrito assembly line (neigh, a wish-granting magic factory), and lots of Mexicans so you know that shit was tight. I've got no receipt. No signage on the bag. No memory. Nothing. Let's track down this nursery of culinary magic. I need this burrito in my life every day. Did I mention it had french fries IN THE GODDAM BURRITO? Where did it come from? Please help me, and then meet me there. I'm getting the Californian."
Public service announcement to all companies that are trying to sell us keyboards or keyboard-like solutions:

I fully expect, when I go into your site, to see a video of someone using your keyboard to type FAST. (Which is probably the most important criteria in a keyboard.)

This is essential because if your own people who developed the keyboard can only get to X wpm, odds are low that your average users are going to exceed X wpm.

If I don't see a video of someone using your keyboard to type fast, I'm going to assume that you were not able to produce such a video, because your keyboard doesn't really allow for someone to type fast, which means that your keyboard is pretty much useless.

Thank you.
Not all phones are so stuck-together as the iPhone, though. I cracked the glass my Lumia 920 and I'm considering just replacing the digitizer. The replacement is $15 on Amazon compared to $45 for the screen.
As a producer of synthetic diamonds (http://d.neadiamonds.com), I can say the production costs for jewelry-quality diamonds are not as low as people seem to think. It is one thing producing brown/yellow diamond powder/grit for cutting tools, but is orders of magnitude more difficult growing a large single-crystal diamond colorless and clean enough to set into jewelry.

The capital equipment for HPHT and CVD are both still quite expensive. It is possible to find some used BARS presses for reasonable prices, but you will be hard-pressed to make a large colorless diamond with one of those machines, even if you know the right "recipe" to use. Gemesis has many of these BARS presses and they have only been able to produce orange yellows and to treat CVD material with them.

CVD does grow more crystals per machine cycle, but also has much higher labor, power and support costs than the latest generation of HPHT machines. CVD diamonds also typically grow as a brownish or grayish color and have to be HPHT-treated (different process than HPHT-growing, but can be done in the same machines) at additional cost to whiten them, healing defects in the crystal lattice.

The cost to grow a rough white diamond is generally comparable with the cost to mine one from the ground. From there, the cutting, grading, logistics and jewelry all cost essentially the same.

Lab-grown diamonds are a raw good, more similar to steel, than they are an assembled good, like a TV or laptop. There will certainly be more improvements along the way, but diamond synthesis only occurs under certain conditions defined by nature. Changing the crystalline structure of carbon is a bit more involved than heating up some filament for a 3D printer.
OK, so you don't think much of ESR. Any alternative recommendations in the same topic area?
If you are a front-end engineering you can contribute to https://github.com/openworm/org.geppetto.frontend