skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pretty sure that what made this happen was the White House memo. Everyone actually involved with the plan architecture seems to have put all of their hard work into assuring that the access given is as minimal as possible while still complying with the letter of the memo and its least generous legal interpretations.
In the Author's Notes of Book 4 in 2006, he writes that he completed the book, and it was so large (2000 pages) that he was forced to cut it in half, and that first half was Book 4, and that Book 5 would be out the following year. Then he took another 6 years to publish Book 5, which was ostensibly done back in 2006. Granted, he said he changed his mind about a lot of things and had to rewrite stuff, but the fact remains that he said it was "done" in 2006. In the meantime, his blog posts were about his football predictions and painting his house.

I have sympathy for authors who don't put deadlines out there, but there's no excuse for being 6 years late after saying it was already done. Considering that the release of the 5th book coincided with a TV series, it strikes me as nothing more than a cash grab.

One of the (many) reasons why I don't support GRRM or his work anymore. Which is a shame. The aSoIaF series was fantastically written.
Are you ready to be an entrepreneur?
Show HN: Easy to use free embeddable timeline tool
Twenty Questions Interview with Emiland De Cubber
A line of parked cars between traffic and sidewalk is a substantial barrier on its own.

If you look at a high-traffic street where parking is prohibited, the Magnificent Mile in Chicago, you'll notice that there are gigantic concrete planters between the cars and the regular pedestrian traffic. Retail stores protect their entrances with concrete bollards. Construction zones protect workers from traffic with segmented Jersey barriers and water-filled crash barrels. Those are actual solutions.

But then you have suburban pearl-clutchers who lobby for a 15 mph speed limit and speed bumps in their cookie-cutter subdivisions, rather than actually making their streets safer for pedestrians. Or by replacing yield signs with stop signs. Those people don't realize that "change the law" is not always equivalent to "fix the problem".
I think it is interesting that GabeN build a company that caters to a demographic similar to himself, with a product that minimizes face to face human interaction. It leans away from all the negative biases he would face in business.

Also, Gabe is a founder. Most CEO types are MBA raiders who float from job to job pillaging companies.
Who is your target customer? You mention churches and non-profits, but why do they build/setup a website. How is your product helping them address this?
Clearly there is no such convention that books are complete stories, because then series wouldn't exist. And clearly there is no such convention that a series will be finished, because then there wouldn't be permanently unfinished series out there, and there are a lot of them.

You paid him for the book, which you received. Transaction complete. Debt paid. He no longer owes you more.
You can go both ways on this. If something were purchased by almost nobody, why ban it? OTOH, if something is purchased by almost everybody, and hurts hundreds of people just in the US every year, shouldn't something be done? If you talk about risk to the average person, it all sums up.
Crashes when trying to load page in firefox.
- Thanks, that makes sense.

- Introspection, not introversion.
For comparison, Nvidia's highest level gaming GPU, the Titan Z[1] has 5760 cores... but it costs about $3000

[1]: http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/announcing-the-gef...
It seems the problem is that the best way to make money as a science fiction author is to have a long running series that might get picked up as a movie/tv series. There's no incentive to ever finish the things until they've been milked dry.
This reminds me, since standard speed limits were set, automobiles have drastically increased in their abilities. Rear independent suspension, lighter weight, disc brakes, radial and tubeless tires.

Just like on a bike, the first one was a heavy steel one with thick tires. Now, I'm riding a road bike that weighs a tiny amount and has dual compound tires.
That takes a while, much much longer then how long it takes a mouse to react to a virus injected directly into its bloodstream. Human cells don't really enjoy growing outside the body.

Genetic alteration involves infecting a cell with a virus that cuts DNA and splices in its own (along with the correct antibody). You have the slight possibility that the virus cuts randomly, turning off some cancer-inhibitory pathways. B cells also have this really interesting maturation pathway where they splice their own DNA randomly in the process of becoming an antibody-producing cell.

Edit, to add: The B-cell maturation pathway is called V(D)J recombination. Cool stuff. It's how the immune system can create cells that respond to things it's never seen before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination
The author (in reading this and his other articles) is chock full of unsubstantiated claims and logical fallacies. And this story is way off topic for HN. Flagging.
Frankly, the reason there's hype around neural nets again is because of the newer ways they can be trained to augment backprop. Neural nets have made a lot of progress in representation learning in recent years.
A major problem that I'm hoping to fix is having the industry catch up to what academia and some of the bigger companies are doing with nets now.

Neural nets are from a silver bullet, and shouldn't be used where feature introspection is a huge requirement (this is why decision tree/random forest is popular), but they are far from being what they were in the 90s.

Note that I have a commercial interest in this so there's going to be inherent bias in my opinions.

To be fair, javascript isn't a scientific computing language. To do most neat training with neural nets, you're going to want to either scale them out, add more layers, and/or use GPUs. That being said, a neat toy example in javascript is convnetjs[1].

[1]: https://github.com/karpathy/convnetjs
"So I think I'm exactly your target customer."

From what you've said, I would argue that you're /not/ their target customer. I used to work with medium- to high-complexity Excel spreadsheets on an almost daily basis, and while understanding someone else's spreadsheet can be tricky in the first 3-6 months, after a while you just get used to working out where data is coming from, usually with the help of F2 (which highlights the cells which are contributing to the formula).

Which leads me on to the main point: 'Who exactly is the target customer here?'. If someone uses Excel so much that it makes sense to buy something to explain formulas, they're probably going to be good enough to make sense of formulas using Excel's in-built tools/just reading the formula.
I used to work with the Lesson.ly team. New and existing employee training is a big problem space with lots of room for innovation. Many employers want to do a better job of training their employees, but most don't have a systematic way of doing so.

For example, a support team might need continual training of the product(s) they're supporting. Or a sales team needs to get up-to-speed on how to use sales software. Or a distributed workforce needs to learn about company benefits and policies.

In many cases, employers turn to team meetings, email, powerpoints, pdf's, etc. Some will implement a bulky LMS (learning management software, usually over-loaded with features). But a lot are not happy with their current setup and know there is room for improvement.

So enter Lesson.ly, stage right :-)
I've always thought the goal was to launch from south Texas and to land the 1st stage in Florida. I don't know if that's too far, or not far enough. Maybe second stage? Although the second stage is a lot higher and faster at the end of it's burn.
Why Chegg's Stock is Soaring Today
The tegra could cost[1] $26 with some time and large volume.

At that price, we might see dev boards with a price closer to $100.

[1]the tegra k1 chip is around 135 square milimeter ,at 28nm (which costs $4000 for a 44000 square mm wafer).which comes down to around $13 chip manufacturing costs.

nvidia's gross margin(55%).
I second it, if you enjoyed it, I warmly recommend Illium/Olympos from the same author which is a bit in the same vein. And generally I really like Dan Simmons. What I found fascinating is that he does not write always the same book (as a lot of author), and he can write in different genre and stay very credible. Carrion Comfort, Children of the Night, The Terror in the horror genre are really great. (Try to read the last one in the heart of a very cold winter)
Here are some mostly SF suggestions:

Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks. One of many books he's written in the galaxy-spanning setting of "The Culture", an anarchist techno-utopia. Everyone who likes the Culture has an opinion about the best one to start reading with; this is mine. He's also written many SF books outside that setting, and many non-SF books as 'Iain Banks'. Sadly he died recently so there will never be any more.

The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi. An ultra-dense draught of future shock; a thief pulls off a complicated caper in a Solar System transformed into something alien and strange by Moore's Law.

The Laundry Files, Charlie Stross. A series about a computer programmer who works for a secret arm of England's intelligence agency dedicated to fighting off magical menaces. Each book stands alone but the end of the world is looming on the horizon. Stross has written a LOT more stuff, pretty much all worth reading IMHO.

The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch. A very witty romp about a thief in a fantasy land. There's three books about Locke now; while there's continuity between them, they mostly stand alone - right now I'm reading the latest, where he has to rig an election for a council of wizards, while an old flame does the same for the other side.

Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart. The first of three gorgeous fantasy detective novels set in magical medieval China. Find them, read them, possibly love them.

The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Michael Swanwick. A changeling's journey through a mad steampunk version of UK fairy myth. Utterly gorgeous and beautiful, also profoundly alien and nihilistic. Not my absolute favorite of his works - that honor goes to Stations of the Tide - but this one's a very close runner-up.

Also seconding the recommendation elsewhere in this thread for Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series. Huge and dense and slow and beautiful and absolutely in love with language. I couldn't get into the two subsequent Books of the Long/Short Suns, but the New Sun is amazing.

Oh and of course George R. R. Martin has been writing for years; have you tried any of his other work?
Nice job! I did some similar work for our 3D Dice on Roll20. Looking at your code you did a nicer job than I did :-)
The Social Laboratory: Ubiquitous Surveillance in Singapore
And if you like it, check out the TV adaption, House.
Seconding/thirding Transferwise. No complaints at all. Transfers, which I do monthly from the UK bank account to my Australian bank account, take between 3 and 5 days - usually 3 - and cost me very little - a couple of dollars, if that. You have some control over the currency conversion but I tend to leave it as it is. It's a great service.
I want to add to this, that there's a lot of work that doesn't require pretraining. I recently implemented the more advanced hessian free optimization methods that don't require pretraining in my deep learning framework. The results are amazing. I'm hoping to demonstrate a lot of the tradeoffs of the different methods in a more comprehensive manner here shortly. This was an updated extension by some of hinton's students. The paper I implemented was:

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rkiros/papers/shf13.pdf
Yes, those are the stats I asked you to cite to back your claim.

If you're going to claim your opinion as fact, it's just rude to be a dick when you're called on it. At least admit that it's not 'empirically true' - or, perhaps more to the point, that you don't actually know.
Maybe I'm a wet blanket as well, but I'd rather not have undocumented features if there's even the slightest risk of it introducing bugs or vulnerabilities.

Sadly there isn't much room for Easter Eggs in the modern professional IT industry since software is constantly being attacked (it's hard enough keeping documented features secure!). Which is why these days most Easter Eggs tend to be hidden away online[1][2]

[1] http://konamicodesites.com/ (↑↑↓↓←→←→BA)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_hoaxes_and_east...
No worries, always appreciate feedback! Thanks a lot :)
Dune, sure, I get it (especially when his son took over). Hyperion though? If you count both parts as one series it's 4 books. Even at pretty respectable page contents, they don't compare to a series with 11 (? or more) books, many of which came pretty close to 1000 pages!

It did get a little weird there at the end, but still pretty good books. And nowhere near as bad as WOT, or hell, not even as bad as the Sword of Truth series.
Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have 'Nothing to Hide' (2011)
I don't understand why sometimes the submitted title must slavishly stick to the original title - otherwise it is considered editorializing - and why sometimes it's OK to change it.

In this case, "The most underrated feature in Python 3" was a fine title. It brought across the excitement of the post's author for this particular feature. I agree, it is a bit link-baity, but a much better version would be "Chaining exceptions is the most underrated feature in Python 3".

The current version ("An underrated feature in Python 3") is extremely nondescript, and I wouldn't have clicked it. It's almost like "A feature in Python 3".

If you object to the use of "most"... the author is obviously using hyperbole. There is no objective measure of "underratedness" of course. I wish people would not take everything so literally, and try to interpret a bit what they read instead. What the author wanted to say was probably (and this is an equally good title): "I really like that Python 3 has chained exceptions!"
DTrace War Stories [video]
But the government has done a similar scheme which is much more radical: PubMed Central, which hosts the full-text of NIH-funded articles. It doesn't just link to publisher websites, and the article text is available for download in easily-parsed formats (instead of just PDFs).

DOE could have adopted that model, and probably even much of the code, but they decided against it.
That's great. Congratulations Chad!
OpenGraphiti: The open source data visualization engine for busy hackers
Often, aggregators are more useful than any given hotel's website.

If I am looking to fly somewhere, I probably don't want to be taken to United's or American's homepage. I probably want Orbitz or Hipmunk or some other site that will give me the comparison tools to make my own decisions.

His mistake lies in assuming that a hotel's site offers more value to users than the aggregators.
Let go from your last job? How to talk to about why you were fired
Snapchat Deck To Brands/Agencies Leaked
Two Factor Authentication for Hybrid and Private Cloud
Are you planning on moving out of teaching into development?
Sandman Slim was surprisingly good. His attitude did start to get on my nerves near the end, but not enough to ruin the series.

It's also free on Kindle Unlimited. The whole series IIRC.
The Resume As We Know It Should Die
Future of MIT Education
Or any room that lacks someone currently dying of Ebola or recently dead from Ebola. I'm pretty sure the only victims are caregivers and people who deal with the dead - it's not easy to catch.
I don't think it's quite right to denigrate the actual safety you get in dynamic languages by referring to their type systems as such.

They are indeed safe, you won't get undefined behavior in the vein of C/C++. In fact, if they weren't such, there wouldn't any point to using them over more performant architectures.

The only time as a Ruby developer I've ever encountered a segfault is when a library calls out to a C extension, the problem is fixed by switching to a different gem. I'm safe in that whenever my program fails, the bug is in something I've written. I've never found an actual bug in Ruby.

Sure, I'm giving up a hell of a lot of performance for this safety, but it's more than worth it for my company's use case.

In fact, I can't even imagine a form of safety you could add to Ruby that isn't a Very Hard Problem, e.g. safety from race conditions. TDD in Ruby gives you a kind of certainty about the correctness your code that is hard to get in other languages. If something breaks, just add another test.
Search engines are by their very nature un-equal. There's no way around this without removing the value in having a search engine.
History of China
Hyperion is mostly OK, and should maybe not be in the list, but the third book, Endymion, is basically a giant chase, and I found it weaker than the first two.

For my defense, I have not read WoT or Sword of Truth because of their terrible reputation. But I have read the Belgariad, I can't really say it is getting worse, because it was not really good in the first place.
Introducing the Pivotal App Suite
Trying a new type of content
Hey guys, as of today we are trying a new type of content on the blog. Comics!
As a lifelong fan I have always wanted to fit it in to my marketing AND have a CEO who would say yes :)
So the experiment starts today. I will let you know how it goes.
Artist is @jamiesmart .

http://workcompass.com/office-introverts-extroverts-performance-management/
>Could that be explained because of not used to type safe languages?

Is not about type safe, Dart can be used as both, a type safe lenguage and as a dynamic lenguage, demanding to cover a certain part of of what a type safe language has it is reasonable, now, if the package was to big for Dart designers they should have made Dart a dynamic language only.

> This assertion is simply false.

Is not that false, anyone can do a JSON to bject parser, the problem I see is that they would need to include mirrors as default to give such functonality, but when exported to JavaScript mirrors would make the exported file to be huge, so I see this as a way to mitigate the desing problems Dart it self has.

As I said, they need to put first in the user shoes and see what is convenient to them and then work in the desing, but I get the impression that they desingned Dart to be fast, it doesn't matter if some desitions affect the developers, the priority is make it fast and not handy for developers.
Optimization in the context of machine learning is a search function that searches a param space by repeated calculations of gradients (derivatives: eg, calculate the derivative and test the objective function) to arrive at some optimal function.

Learning in this case generally means the creation of models. Optimization is the process by which this happens.

A few examples:

Unsupervised learning - typically clustering and grouping things

Supervised Learning - Example based learning where you're trying to label something. This could be sentiment, spam classification, object recognition over pixels, even extending to sequence labeling.

Prediction/Regression - Predicting values based on a learned function.

Learning is more about the goal trying to be achieved. Optimization is more of numerically solving relative to an objective function (also called an error function)
What he utterly ignores is that to the consumer, these intermediaries are often far more valuable than any individual business in the industry is.

This is why I use Orbitz or Hipmunk to find flights, rather than going directly to United or Southwest.
The inbox feature is great! Makes a good addition to Buffer[1] and Polarbear[2] to reach and manage all networks.

[1] http://www.bufferapp.com
[2] http://www.polarbearapp.com
Spilled Milk
Why is the current title ("An underrated feature in Python 3") neither the original source title ("The most underrated feature in Python 3") or a title more descriptive of the content (e.g., "Exception chaining in Python 3").

If we're going to get title changes, can we at least get useful title changes?
To those that know more than I: my understanding before this article was that the only "type-safe" languages were or like Haskell, OCaml, Idris, Agda, etc...

If that's not the case is "type-safe, pure, and functional" a good epithet to extend, say, Haskell's "type-safe" tag with many of its other features that weave with the type system well?
JavaScript Framework Showdown
Related, albeit of a different nature, a pretty classic LinkedIn tactic now are connection requests seemingly from relatively attractive young women (at least when targeting men. A similar ruse is using age-correlated female from names when sending mass mailings -- instead of being from "Widget Co Promotions", it's from Brittney @ Widget Co).

Moments ago I followed one connection request I was sent, trying to find how I knew this person, to what was clearly a fake company with dozens of these "employees" -- all 20-ish, attractive women[1] with cloned profiles and fake backstories, to be shocked to find that many of them shared connections with me -- people I knew accepted the connection request because...attractive person. And this likely bot keeps crawling through the social graph building its master corpus of relationships.

To make it even more humorous, many of these fake profiles had various skills endorsed by seemingly real people. So not only did people connect with fake people on a picture, they felt the need to endorse them as well, earning their imaginary trust. Who knows...maybe it'll be the start of a crazy internet romance? Man and virtual bot.

[1] An interesting correlation would be determining someone's "type" from their online profiles, optimizing the success rate of the connection. Do they like the big haired blond? Maybe the petite Asian? How about the short-cropped strong-faced woman? A penchant for red heads?
“Granny Tea Time” GOING HAM (Sketch Comedy Video)
Shaking off your TDD fatigue
This guy is ranking pretty good for most of the circle jerk linking scheme on the bottom of his page (which violates Google's policy - LOL if they slap him).
How to Find Unique Growth Channels Beyond Content with Sean Ellis
The $500 display makes your Junker Car feel like a Fighter Jet
Curious what was the catalyst to switch from Redis to Kafka? Reliability that a given message was received and processed and replaying that to a different consumer in the event of failure?
Yes, I've long wanted to be able to attach arbitrary predicates to types. This is great for functional state machines; say the state machine type is sm, you can specify functions like

fun initialize(sm) -> sm'
where sm.state == uninitialized, sm'.state != uninitialized

or

fun ping_clients(sm) -> sm' where has_clients(sm)

in concert with

fun has_clients(sm) -> bool

The compiler can then track these, and ensure e.g. that "has_clients" is called and returns "true" before "ping_clients" is called on a given value.

An even smarter compiler can, if it knows the definitions of these functions, determine statically whether a given predicate is guaranteed to produce the same result on a modified object. (e.g. simply by inspecting which fields are inspected and modified)
It is also interesting to consider the PL definition of type safety: the progress and preservation theorems.

Progress: if an expression is well typed then either it is a value, or it can be further evaluated (in the sense that "an appropriate evaluation rule exists").

Preservation: if an expression e has type t, and is evaluated to e', then e' has type t.

That's it, really (well, you can do a few extensions to allow errors such as division by zero, or take memory into account).

If your language has both of these properties, they tell you that typed expressions will behave nicely at run time.
The One Tool Startups Need to Brainstorm, Test and Win