skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> would only have a vague idea of how to do a integer => string conversion with base N without googling it. So am I shit?

I would probably not hire you unless you could actually back up your dubious claims ("I can fix anyone's code ..."). The funny thing is, while I am judging people by their ability to solve a particular problem (which admittedly may have an age bias), you are judging people who studied CS based on the fact that you didn't but are still full of yourself.
All "modern" browsers render Docs well. Not sure what difference the OS makes, after all, it's just a vessel for the browser's rendering engine.
Thirded. Before Diaspora, I first read "Wang's Carpets"[1] which is a short story of his. Then found out this story had later been incorporated as a chapter into the book. I remember basically immediately ordering said book that night.

fwiw, that "Webly-Supervised Visual Concept Learning" reminds me of the stuff that Hinton et al. do re: unsupervised (concept, etc.) learning (using restricted Boltzmann machines, and so on.) Good talk on the subject (of deep learning, etc.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M

[1]: read online here: http://bookre.org/reader?file=222997
So I think all fans of the talks would really love to have a little Mill CPU of their own to play with for some hacking project.

I imagine high prices due to economies of scale will be a problem in the beginning, but if we think longer term and assume you guys overcome that initial hurdle, any dreams of incorporating the Mill into a platform like Raspberry Pi or Arduino?
To answer you, I'm 24, and an accountant by profession. From what I've seen, most banks still run some core functionality of their systems in IBM Mainframe, which includes JCL, COBOL and maybe other languages.

Because of space constraints then, file names were limited to 8 characters (someone correct me) and lines of code has fixed lengths. That already made commenting a nightmare. I have 'reverse engineered' scripts that were written more than a decade before I was born. Most have outdated documentation, filenames are a mess to figure out, and over time there have been automated conversion tools that were used to update language versions.

As I said, most of these systems still run some core functionality of the bank, and the people who wrote them ain't there no more, so banks have to shell out lots of money to either fix and maintain these, or to figure out what's happening so they can move to newer systems.

A form of anecdote could be that because IBM still make some form of x64 flavour Mainframe OS indicates that large corporates still have code that's potentially double my age.
Yes, that could have happened. Or maybe the Soviets would have found trying to keep all of Western Europe except for the UK under their boot a lot harder than it looked like from the beginning and they would have ended up in an Afghanistan like situation a lot earlier.

The problem with alternate realities is that no matter how intellectually interesting thinking about them might be we'll never know because we only have this one.

So, bratwurst, borscht or nothing, it's all just fantasy.

One thing is for sure, and common to all those scenarios, in that world anything between the UK and mother Russia would have been in for one hell of a ride.
LOL - yes, you are quite right, I wondered even as I commented (or it may have been slightly after posting) about the digital-ness of ones own DNA that has provided a way for one to evolve to the point we can appreciate (and build) a bass guitar and the pre-amplifiers to go with it. Yes, thanks. Still it was nice to see some circuitry with resistors, capacitors and opp amps, and to read a little about the design.
Someone please add [2008] to the title. I was excited when I saw this and thought maybe Eric was updating it.

In general of course this is a great book to read, I have a hard copy (gasp) on my shelf and when it came out I had been working on Unix systems for 20 years. There are lots of good nuggets in there. It is a good read for people who would like to better understand the philosophy of Unix. That said if I recall correctly it was a bit cult like in nature and like most things should be taken with a grain of salt. Remember the historical context of when the book was written, it was very much a war like time when many Unix heads where certain we could "win" the OS wars. Much like the "Drug Wars" now I think a bit of reality has set in and we realize things are not always that black and white.

It would be awesome to see a body of work like this updated with today’s evolution of the Unix philosophy. When I look back I think I’m so lucky to be in technology today, what used to take me months and years I can do today in days and weeks. We have so much foundation now, technology is more about Legos™ versus bags of Concrete. When I started in technology almost everything had to be built from scratch, often starting with little more then a simple computer language, some cpu, ram and maybe a disk if you where lucky. That made things so incredibly hard when you wanted to do anything of real value. Today it would be impossible to design the chips we use without the chips we built last generation and the software that leverages that power to help the people design the next generation of chips. We live in a world that builds on top of many generations of technology and the amplification effect is amazing to see first hand.

Great book, read it, enjoy it and then read Eric’s other book (of many):
The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
These kind of gadgets already exist, see e.g. the

http://8devices.com/carambola-2

They are basically breakout boards for MIPS SoC chips intended for use in home routers.
This is a fantastic effort, the transcription and the archival of this content. If you are fortunate enough to be able to read the originals, definitely check some of them out. Dijkstra's handwriting is gorgeous, it gives the text humanness and a hint of whimsy, making it even more entertaining.

Example: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF
Microsoft has been caught astro-turfing on HN before, you really don't want to be lumped in with that lot so if you can resist the temptation to plug microsoft products in threads about competitors it would be a benefit to everybody (even to Microsoft).
You could use chrome for all of them and specify the profile in the command line arguments
The descriptions are wrong, the letters were moved right not left. Anyways, the new one is more balanced. Quite the zen garden.
What Traits would have an Alien Race?
Before GitHub there was Google Code, and before Sourceforge and before there was planet-source-code.com, etc. (all sites are still up, just not cool anymore)
I found this because after watching the video I was hoping some of the recipients had put scans online of the originals. To my surprise I found a whole archive of transcriptions.
Google will still scan your mails but you will not be shown any ads.

For viruses and spam, yes. But Fastmail does that too.

In addition to these increased security measures, as we recently announced, we’ve now turned off ads in Google Apps services. This means administrators no longer have the option or ability to turn on ads in these services. We’ve also permanently removed all ads scanning in Gmail for Google Apps, which means Google does not collect or use data in Google Apps services for advertising purposes.

Source: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.de/2014/05/protecting-googl...
The transcriptions have a link at the top right corner to the original file, when available.
There is a fair amount of code you should copy/paste unless you are doing pure research, some because it has been so well studied it is almost a certainty that you are not going to drastically improve on it and others, such as encryption implementations, because it is actively dangerous to fuck about with unless you are extremely careful and a domain expert.
Not quite.You mean flagging system doesn't work ?
I think he was always planning on getting them properly made by machine, that's what the kickstarter is for (the upfront cost).

His other advantage is being Chinese, and therefore not having to bother with any of the expensive wireless approval process that's normally required for this sort of thing.
> Anecdotally, the result is that people take public transport for 'something to do'.

If this is an extremely common problem (as you seem to say it is), it points to a deep underlying social problem. Most senior citizens I know are pretty well immersed in their own lives; which include those of their children and grandchildren.
You should read this then.

http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/null?&exclusive=filemgr.downloa...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

The current regime is installed after the 1979 revolution against the US installed Iranian government.

Things would be different if U.S. didn't meddle in Iranian politics back in the 1950's.
It's basically an eval board for a Ralink SoC. I believe this particular chip is for lowish-end WiFi routers.
i know it's not your first language but since you mentioned you like to think and understand things, the correct syntax is '80s and '90s; the apostrophe is used to indicate letter omission. incidentally, my first language was basic. didn't want to omit that :)
I really want a computer that you can run on a potato battery or two. Does such a board exist? What is the lowest-power general-purpose Linux computer in existence that's somewhat convenient to use?
Packaging a python library
Let me guess, a new OCD-suffering designer has joined the team? :)
If you really can hit 10x performance/watt then this could be massive in the world of wearables.

Imagine a smart watch going from 3-5 days standby to 30-50 days standby. Heck, at that level you might even be able to charge kinetically..
Just unrelated addendum to Fortumo - they enable developers from countries where Google Merchant account is not available to charge for in-app purchases on Play Store.

We'll be using it in two of our upcoming games.
Well you'd have to build a probabilistic model for each concepts, whether on pixels or on features, and you could use it to generate images randomly. It might show up some good shapes.
>>Things would be different if U.S. didn't meddle in Iranian politics back in the 1950's.

You claimed that before. I discussed that, despite that it wasn't relevant to my point, in two comments. Including the GP(!).

So I assume you have nothing to say. Except that you want to drown my original point in a sea of text..?
I own those things but that doesn't mean I have unlimited freedom to do whatever I want with them. I own my food but I couldn't sell it (I don't have the right licenses). I own my clothes but I still have to comply with the law when I do things with them. That laws/HOAs/etc. regulate what I can do with my flat does not feel substantially different.

Taxes too are orthogonal to ownership; where I live people treat the local government tax as another utility bill, like water or electricity (so when renting sometimes the landlord pays or sometimes the tenant does). If I owned a car I'd pay tax on it - but if I leased a car I'd also pay tax on it in the same way.

Words have meanings but are necessarily simplifications (just as a map cannot capture every detail of the territory). In legalese I lease my flat - but in English I own it, because how I use it and what I can and can't do with it has much more in common with something that I own than with something that I rent or lease.
> All that NFL says is that if you fix an optimization algorithm and average its performance over all possible measurable functions, no algorithm will be better than the other.

> Therefore, trying to design a fully generic optimization algorithm is a fool's errand.

I don't think we have any factual disagreement. In pure mathematical context, what you say is absolutely true.

I just wish to emphasize, that "all possible measurable functions" and "fully generic optimization algorithm" have very specific mathematical meanings here, and those meaning are probably different than what a casual reader might expect.

In a set of "all possible functions" an overwhelming majority are functions that are indistinguishable from random noise. They are e.g. not continuous, not even remotely like continuous, they have no structure at all whatsoever.

On an intuitive level, everybody understands that it is a fool's errand to try to design an optimization algorithm to find the maximum from an array of random numbers. But when you just say "trying to design a fully generic optimization algorithm", people may not realize that the "fully generic" contains the requirement that it should also work on random noise.

The No Free Lunch Theorem does not say anything about the feasibility of fully generic optimization algorithms, if we restrict the "fully generic" to mean anything that can be expected to appear in any real world application. A lot of people might agree that an algorithm that performs well in any real world problem is "fully generic", even though it may not perform well in all imaginable abstract mathematical settings (which mostly means settings of random noise).

To your last comment: I also agree with you on this front. Also my understanding is that for every or almost every type of problem there are other optimization algorithms that drastically outperform genetic algorithms. I also like your "snake oil" metaphor, and I was happy to see your top comment on this topic.
I just bought a Surface 2 Pro 4 weeks ago. It is an awesome piece of hardware.

The pen is great, I use it to sketch up stuff in OneNote like I would in my regular notebook.

I connect it to an external display and use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse at work, and I confuse people by running a fullscreen mintty.exe with terminal vim in my linux VM.

The stand is why I bought it over a Dell Venue or a Lenovo Helix (even though I think the Helix is the best offering).

It's a brilliant machine. I sold my Macbook Air 11" to buy it too! I sure hope Apple make something like this one day that runs proper OS X :)
You have everything here: http://levan.cs.washington.edu/?state=show_about

I quote the readme:

>
This is an implementation of the "Learning Everything about Anything" system. The system
is implemented in MATLAB, with various helper functions written in Shell, Python, MEX C++
for efficiency reasons. For details about the method, please see [1].

This readme contains instructions on using the code, as well as accessing/using already
trained models for various concepts.

For questions concerning the code please contact Santosh Divvala (http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~santosh)
at santosh@cs.washington.edu.

The software has been tested on Linux using MATLAB versions R2011a. There may be compatibility
issues with older versions of MATLAB. At least 4GB of memory (plus an additional 0.75GB for each
parallel matlab worker) is assumed.
Want a say on pay? Tell them what you make.
> What makes you think correctness was not a priority for the software that put a man on the moon?

I reread what I wrote and I honestly don't know why you'd want to attribute that belief to me. Not acknowledging all the priorities in the correctness tradeoff was something I was writing against. Not counting correctness as a priority would certainly qualify.

I've always found NASA discussions of software quality to be interesting and informed by practical experience.

> Before running your mouth you should read the actual history

I consider your attitude harmful.
Umm.. fourthed? I just couldn't help but jump in and
also recommend Greg Egan's "Permutation City". That book is just wonderful... think simulation, cellular automata as a model for computation, artificial life and all that other good stuff :).

Also, about the LEVAN thing... given the amount of data available online, both in various structured formats and unstructured formats, don't be surprised if deep learning will yield better and better results moving forward. To me though, they mostly seem evolutionary rather than revolutionary. I mean if you look back at the AI field, during the days before the "AI winter" came, huge amounts of data is one thing researchers back then didn't have available. This is not to say that there haven't been advances in learning algorithms at all recently. ..
Further, a single pizza is unlikely to make much difference to one's nutritional status. I see these sorts of things as closer to emotional support than life-saving interventions.
I think this guess from /r/typography/ is worthy to consider:

"My educated guess is that it most likely scales in Webkit better. I can only imagine this change was the result of a dozen round table discussions and half a year of a/b testing.
EDIT: Yup! Here's both logos at 50%, scaling done by Chrome. Notice how the letter l changes [1]

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/x6K1yVe.png "

http://www.reddit.com/r/typography/comments/26fgq6/google_up...
Alan Kay on Dijkstra (1997)
Of course the full talk also has some merit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
A cheap android phone.
There are an enormous number of sub-corporate level businesses out there.

Some of them are great employers. Some of them are terrible. But none of them will feel like working for a large corporation.
Because the person buying it new bought it overpriced. Real quality gemstones do not have a new/used stigma as long as they have the proper paperwork. There is some loss in price if they are set because the market shrinks as people see the new setting, they may have a different setting in mind. But people buy overpriced jewelry for the design or name or because they don't know the industry standards which is simply a GIA or similar certificate.
Humanity: Epic Fail (2009)
For the terse badmatch error and such, you might be interested in Shippai:

https://github.com/nox/shippai
If my maths is right, based on this Wikipedia article[1] a typical lemon or potato battery will deliver about 1mW.

That's not enough to drive even the smallest 32 bit CPU (eg the Cortex M0). Or to be more accurate, you could drive the CPU at ~ 100 Hz from your potato, assuming you had no other hardware.

If you want to play with a tiny, cheap 32 bit board that does not run Linux, but is a lot of fun anyway, I recommend the Freescale Freedom board FRDM-KL26Z (under £13/$20 each -- they're so cheap that one unit didn't reach the minimum order value of the reseller so I had to buy two of them :-).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_battery
Movie Pirates Can Be Converted, Study Finds
Obviously the 1-pixel moves signify the shift in Google’s business strategy. Google is now politicaly one more pixel to the left and moving towards the lower upper class by one pixel.

#OverAnalyzing
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
- Donald Knuth

Formal correctness and implementation correctness are still separate issues in compilers like gcc but that doesn't change the fact that there are correctness specifications for gcc. There are projects that try to bridge the gap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompCert.
Average at Goldman Sachs is $400k iirc.
I don't think the Mill is designed for this use case, exactly. Optimizing peak performance per watt is very different from optimizing for low power. The latter would be dominated by shutting off circuits, different sleep states, lowering leakage and voltage, etc.

Something like a GreenArrays chip might be a better fit for that direction (though very unconventional).
At companies like Google or Facebook, you expect to get 10-15% salary raise every year for the first few years, and around 10-15% annual bonus. Assuming that after 4 years, your equity doubles, the $300k figure seems to be pretty accurate for the fifth-sixth year of working there.
have you seen chomsky and norvig's debate on this? http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
Who cares about taxi drivers' pride, when the journey could be much cheaper and safer? I bet robo-taxi would stop for pedestrians to cross as well. And of course it will be a while before robots could rape or rob someone. Also they don't strike.
The list of Vendor IDs is quite amusing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPUID#EAX.3D0:_Get_vendor_ID
in theory it is: http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal-...
> Move to NYC or SF

Factor in cost of living and you're really not making much more.
Show HN: Yet another Hacker News Reader for Android.
Hopefully doesn't suck.
If you're copy-pasting encryption implementations rather than using an existing library, you're probably doing it wrong.
This change totally sucks and, to me, it represents everything that's happened at Google that I don't like. Which is everything. Because I hate it when stuff changes.
"full stack" == "jack of all trades"
> I can fix anyone's code, even when I've never used the language before [..]

You can jump into any codebase and solve core architectural problems like precise garbage collection, eventual consistency, or miscellaneous dead locks? I'm not making up contrived examples, these are some of the problems my friends and I are currently dealing with at work for different companies.

> I would only have a vague idea of how to do a integer => string conversion with base N without googling it. So am I shit? Am I suddenly a useless programmer because lazyjones only likes people who studied CS?

I've never had to do integer => string conversion until asked in an interview either and I still did it. It's not a difficult problem. Anyone with a basic understanding of division and string manipulation should be able to reason out a solution.

> You have picked an arbitrary, and extremely rare in the programming world, standard. No-one needs to write their own string handling routines any more.

I wrote my own C++ string library before std::string was introduced. I contribute to Rust which has its own string, big number, vector libraries and much more. The web site I work on gets >130M monthly uniques and we have extended Python's string, dictionary, iteration, and datetime modules because the standard library isn't enough.

> [Programming languages are] all pretty much the same after you've used 3 or 4.

Then you haven't used enough languages. Try functional programming via Haskell, or dependent typing via Coq, or concurrency via Erlang, or memory safety via Rust.

The world is a really big place. I know people infinitely smarter than me doing incredible things, and there are many more like them. Stop being limited by your own experiences.
I'd tend to agree with lazyjones. I doubt that his expectation is that you would know all the tricks for making the most efficient integer => string conversion routine ever, but I certainly would expect any competent programmer to be able to write an integer => string conversion routine without really thinking about it, not because anyone needs to write such code much anymore, but simply because a competent programmer should have sufficient mathematical understanding to see the obvious solution to the problem. This isn't about writing string handling code, but about demonstrating understanding of very basic mathematics using a trivial problem that should need a line or two of code in most programming languages to solve.
I actually had someone bitch me out on StackOverflow for having an answer that wasn't useful to him, and it was slowing down his "above-industry average productivity rate". I had a damn good laugh about that one.
Using Vim's tabs like buffers
I don't know what is it, but this new one just feels wrong. I hope they change their mind before it's too late.