skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one can see X-rays (or infrared, or ultraviolet, or microwaves). It doesn't matter how much a person believes he can. Retinas simply don't have the sensory hardware.

The author seems to have stumbled into a poor example, as a recent study shows that humans can indeed see infrared light using an unexpected process. Should we read anything into the audio case from this? Probably not, but it's a sign that even those who are sure they are right because they have science on their side should retain some degree of openmindedness.

Human infrared vision is triggered by two-photon chromophore isomerization

This study resolves a long-standing question about the
ability of humans to perceive near infrared radiation (IR)
and identifies a mechanism driving human IR vision. A few
previous reports and our expanded psychophysical studies
here reveal that humans can detect IR at wavelengths longer
than 1,000 nm and perceive it as visible light, a finding
that has not received a satisfactory physical explanation.
We show that IR light activates photoreceptors through a
nonlinear optical process. IR light also caused
photoisomerization of purified pigments and a model
chromophore compound. These observations are consistent
with our quantum mechanical model for the energetics of
two-photon activation of rhodopsin. Thus, humans can
perceive IR light via two-photon isomerization of visual
pigment chromophores.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/11/25/1410162111
What's Coming in Apache Kafka 0.8.2
Absolutely correct, the OP is delusional. Replying because the HN up/downvote buttons are too damn close together.
I'm not arguing that the private sector is no good, but that you're making a rather circular argument in its favor. What about examples of private sector failure like the financial crisis? Equally, what about the fact that government services are typically mandated to serve everyone who comes, whereas private enterprise is free to set its own prices?

Don't get me wrong, there are numerous flaws in the public sector that I would like to see changed, but its also saddled with constraints that are at least as burdensome as regulatory overhead the private sector deals with, if not more so.
dude, it's just a job. You're not making the world a better place. You're building slightly better corporate file sharing. That's it. It's a dropbox or box or btsync competitor tuned for corporate clients.

And it's just a job. Not a mission.

People jump out of bed to go skiing, or cure cancer, or research fundamental physics, or to practice medicine, or to help the needy, or to help animals, or to put a human on mars, or for 1000 other reasons.

Not to steal a point of marketshare from office 365.

But I do think I see why aerofs has trouble hiring.
Most, but not all of Amazon.com runs on AWS.
I wouldn't just blame developers; I feel like the OOP languages most of us have been stuck with deserve some scorn as well.

The major functional languages all come from academic backgrounds, and it shows. They're very principled, and a lot of thought is put into designing languages that are clean and actively encourage you to write clean code.

The major object-oriented languages, by contrast, tend to come out of non-academic environments. Their design was often compromised by pragmatic concerns (C++, Java), or by their being hobby languages being designed by folks for whom Barbara Liskov maybe isn't a household name. I don't want to hate on these languages too much - C++ and Java and Python and Ruby make the world turn, after all, and I suspect that's partially because they let you get away with so much. But they are what they are.
The weird thing is, many if not all of the arguments apply to C with structures, unions, and function pointers... and I don't know that consider that properly object oriented.
One could hold will_be_no_ai's position if one believed that (human) intelligence cannot be reduced to an algorithm. Then halting problem arguments don't apply to humans. But that assumption kind of amounts to begging the question...

(On the other hand, assuming that human intelligence can be reduced to an algorithm is also begging the question, just from the other side.)
And there are jobs created for engineers who design that equipment - simultaneously recycling more money in the economy and contributing to the statistics of STEM job prospects! Everybody wins!
Mein Friedtod
We could solve all that stuff easily right now without cutting NASA's budget.
I think you make the strongest case for government investment (which is) in expensive, capital-intensive, high-risk projects; this is probably the most defensible area of government spending. There are two strong counter-arguments I have heard against yours. The first is that the reason private organizations do not invest in these projects is that the government's tax structure makes such ventures unprofitable, and the government crowds-out private investment in these projects. The second argument is that the government is the only investor in these projects because they are investing large sums of money when it is unwise to do so, because the project is not yet worth doing, or it is too risky, and a private organization would have invested less initially, and followed-on as the project became more affordable.
Then you take that premium, and put it in a scholarship fund for STEM students....
Ages ago there was a tool which would split a large file, let's say the usual 700MB movie, into chunks of 5MB, then create accounts on Yahoo, upload each chunk and return to you a list of usernames, passwords and URLs to download. Another person was able to use the software to download the full file. I can't remember if the product was Yahoo Mail, Briefcase or Photos but the chunks were small. With the introduction of captchas this was no longer possible.

Speaking of captchas, there are click workers (humans) who solve captchas for a living, even APIs so you the customer can get access to sites in almost real-time. A clever variation was re-displaying the captchas on porn websites and return the results.

There is a website right now re-selling Google Maps geocoding results for money. The coordinates are slightly altered but if you do 100 requests and take the average it will be what Google's service returns. I'm sure it's similar with Google translate.

Redirects like some-service.google.com/?do_something=1&.done=<spammer website> can be used to fool systems to think they're dealing with a safe Google.com URL.

We learned that for every mistake we introduce in software there will be somebody very bored or determined spending hours and days trying to abuse it.
A TA is a graduate student who is also pursuing a doctoral degree. I don't think it's fair to compare this to a job in a private industry.
Filed it: https://github.com/OscarGodson/HTML6/issues/39
Does GitHub need to do anything beyond hosting git repos, though?
Ah yes, dependent types. They tried to teach this at my university because some researchers there were working on it. Too bad they didn't bother to teach something more useful, like what malloc and free do.

But let's see. Perhaps the field has become less wonkish and more relevant to real programmers in the last ten years.

Most language tutorials start with the typical “Hello, World” example, but this is not really appropriate for a first example in Agda. Unlike other languages, which rely on a whole lot of primitive operations and special cases for basic constructs, Agda is very minimal - most of the “language constructs” are actually defined in libraries.

That sounds reasonable ...

Agda doesn’t even have numbers built in, so the first thing we’re going to do is define them

That's much less reasonable ...

This is a very elegant way to define infinitely large sets. This way of defining natural numbers was developed by a mathematician named Giuseppe Peano, and so they’re called the Peano numbers .... Now we can express the number one as suc zero, and the number two as suc (suc zero), and the number three as suc (suc (suc zero)), and so on.

Oh dear. This is a new use of the word elegant I have not encountered before.

I was expecting the next stage of the tutorial to describe how to make numbers in Agda resemble number systems actually used by humans, or even machines, but no such luck. They stick with a Lisp-style Peano representation throughout the entire thing. Having defined an entirely unworkable method of representing integers because their standard library apparently doesn't do so (?!) they then go on to prove things like 1 + 1 == 2.

Yeah, I think I'll skip. Perhaps in another few decades someone will have bothered to make a dependently typed language that doesn't use untypeable characters as part of its syntax, and has an integer type built in, and we'll all get awesome statically checkable code for free. Until then I'm gonna stick with FindBugs.
Money handling software and beta don't mesh well with me.
and at the ripe age of 103 no less...
The article covers this here http://williamdemeo.github.io/2014/02/27/learn-you-an-agda/#...

Some excerpts:

> Agda is a programming language that uses dependent types ... you can actually include values inside a type. For example, the List type constructor can be parameterized by both the type of its contents and the length of the list in question ... . This allows the compiler to check for you to make sure there are no cases where you attempt to call head on a potentially empty list, for example.

> If I can come up with a function of type Foo -> Bar (and Agda says that it’s type correct) that means that I’ve written not only a program, but also a proof by construction that, assuming some premise Foo, the judgment Bar holds.

> Proofs work in concurrent scenarios. You can’t reliably unit test against race conditions, starvation or deadlock. All of these things can be eliminated via formal methods.

> Thanks to Curry-Howard, Agda can also be used as a proof language, as opposed to a programming language. You can construct a proof not just about your program, but anything you like.
So astronomy isn't your thing, that's cool. Perhaps you'd be more moved by considering just how much energy and money are wasted to create that light pollution? That's another important part of the issue.
Your first paragraph confuses me. Most APIs that I know for promises/futures are effectful. For example, there is a procedure for checking whether a promise has been fulfilled yet or not. The return value of this function obviously depends implicitly on the state of the promise object.

Making this abstraction purely functional requires making the interfaces of these API functions more complicated. And the monadic style helps reduce that complexity.

My point is that promises seem very much connected with effects to me, and I'm curious why you draw a line between them?

(I understand that there are implementations of the monad abstraction that are not connected with "state" in the conventional sense.)
I started working with Lita a few weeks ago and really liked it. I wrote up my experience at http://engineering.lonelyplanet.com/2014/11/19/lonely-planet...
> But more to the point, it's short-sighted and selfish to judge policy decisions solely based on their effects on your salary. Especially since those of us in tech are, by and large, ridiculously well-compensated.

Maybe it's selfish for you, but what about the ~50% of STEM grads who can't find a job in their industry? And wages are stagnant for STEM workers, and lowering for CS workers. Hundreds of thousands have been laid off in the last 5 years, particularly faced with globalisation and outsourcing.

It sounds like you're being selfish in your own way here by saying people shouldn't judge policy decisions based on the effects on their salary, because a lot of people in your country aren't as comfortable as you are in terms of pay.
Best description of functional programming I've ever heard, thank you
On top of the pictures, the examples are a lot more fun than foo and bar. Here's (part of) how Learn You a Haskell introduces map:

ghci> map (++ "!") ["BIFF", "BANG", "POW"]
["BIFF!","BANG!","POW!"]
Their scope is to colonize Mars. NASA's scope is to land a man on Mars.

In some way, SpaceX's scope is much more ambitious than NASA.
Talk about recent... that article was published yesterday.
There are only a handful of Yann LeCuns in the world. You can't just duplicate certain technical expertise.

This isn't about developer X using framework Y; this is about research level PhDs (and equivalent) that cannot continue work for a US-based company because of visa issues.
You don't think there are alternate ways to build roads or put out fires? I can tell you one thing, I definitely would like to upgrade to a better fire department so that my parents' house doesn't burn to the ground again when our shitty municipal fire department runs out of water.

edit: since I'm getting downvoted anyway https://www.reddit.com/r/whowillbuildtheroads
The correct way to attack this isn't by attacking the theory. It's to gather a lot of people and ask them to press a button indicating whether the audio they hear is 16-bit or 24-bit.

If the results are no better than chance, then 24-bit doesn't matter, regardless of how sound the underlying argument is.

EDIT: The experiment would also be extremely difficult to design. For example, you'd need to run this test with music, not simple sounds. So the question is, which music? I think whatever is most popular at the time would be a good candidate, because if people are listening to music they hate, they won't care about the fine details of the audio. But that introduces an element of uncertainty and noise into the results which is hard to control for.

Some people might deliver accurate results with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zNSgSzhBfM but not with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tr0otuiQuU whereas for others it's the opposite.

Or, it could be the exact opposite: Maybe you can only detect whether a sound is 24-bit when it's a simple tone, and not music.

Age is also a factor. My hearing is worse than a decade ago.

The headphones used by the test are another factor. If you feed 24-bit input to headphones, there's no guarantee that the speakers are performing with 24-bit resolution. In fact, this may be the source of most of the confusion in the debate. I'm not sure how you'd even check whether speakers are physically moving back and forth "at 24-bit resolution" rather than a 16-bit resolution.
Even indie games can benefit a lot from components, and a basic component-entity system is very easy to implement. Make component and entity classes, give the entities a list of components, put the update method in the component, and put most of your code there.

This is fairly different from the most popular/performant ways of implementing ECS's (there are no "Systems"), but keeps a lot of the benefits (much more flexible than traditional class hierarchies, easier to develop and design content for without writing new code, etc), while avoiding a lot of the complexity which makes component systems overkill for smaller games.

You lose a bit of performance (compared to other methods of implementing component systems), but in higher level languages this will likely be faster than trying to imitate C++ patterns (I could say more about this, as I've seen some travesties, but I won't).
I'm not sure why immutability is being lumped into OOP alternatives, seems orthogonal (to me). You can have immutable AND mutable versions of OOP after all. Similarly, you can have immutable and mutable composability. To me the main issue with OOP not matching reality is having people put things into hierarchies instead of thinking of common elements found in them. For example, to me thinking about composing objects in Go and its nice-auto-applying interfaces is similar to Haskell's data with typeclasses, despite one being totally mutable and the other immutable (obviously these feature sets are quite different, my point is in how you think about "the world", i.e. a circle in both Go and Haskell doesn't inherit from anything but may abide by a contract thanks to either interfaces or typeclasses, getting you to talk about things in terms of its features and not its inheritance).
> If you read the link ...

You're right that I didn't; sorry. I have a hard time putting faith in the value or accuracy of Wikipedia, especially for sophisticated analysis.
The moon mission was 9 years to launch.
Not in C/C++ apps :-(
That's rather a wide-ranging bit of character assisination. Some of us just enjoy listing to music on decent equipment (If you can buy it at your local big box store, it's probably not sufficiently "decent") properly setup (which doesn't mean expensively - just basic proper speaker placement and the like).
The resolution of both sinusoids in the example you suggest is exactly 16bits

Edit:
While it would be possible to represent each of those individual sinusoids in 6 and 10 bits individually, the signal you describe has the high frequency signal "riding on " the low frequency signal. you need 16 bits to represent the amplitude of that signal at e.g. t = pi/4.
Hello, everyone! Joshua Berk here. Visiting SF in the 2nd and 3rd weeks of December. Let's grab coffee. Even if it doesn't lead to a job, I'm always game to meet awesome people. :)

Locations: SF, Boulder, Seattle, Austin
Roles: associate PM, junior design, ops

I'm flexible on the role & location -- what matters is a group of awesome people and an ambitious vision.

Resume: http://bit.ly/jjbresume
Portfolio: http://joshua.berk.is

Say hello! joshua@berk.is

Self-taught coder/designer with a biz-degree, previously in Ads @ Google. Design-oriented, user-focused mindset that understands distribution/monetization very well. Curiosity + enthusiastic, friendly. Recently spent 5-months backpacking Southeast Asia. Cyclist.
Amenities and perks aside, I have met and know of people who have or still work at Amazon and I can tell you that it doesn't sound like that great of a place to work. Sure, the work might be interesting and diverse, but the environment is notoriously harsh and strict. Did it ever occur to Bezos that the perks that Google offer its employees actually means people are more inclined to stay back at work later than other jobs? I mean Google have restaurants, massage therapists, on-site doctors, post office and more. It is all superficial stuff, but also means people are less likely to leave as everything is there for them already.

I don't condone long working hours in tech, but at least Google actually make an effort to make it less stressful for those who choose to stay back and work later hours. And calling being able to walk in Seattle a perk is a joke. I am currently in Seattle and the constant rain for about 9 months of the year is not a perk, especially at present the roads are littered with ice and light snow.
This is really a contract that some Americans would like to impose on other Americans.

The U.S. is a free country; that's the social contract. People are free to live where they want, associate with whom they want, and speak whatever language they want. Other people are free to accomodate them to the degree they wish, or not.

But the idea that you're not "really" American unless you fit some predefined set of characteristics is just a nasty attempt to impose one set of values on everyone.
I don't know the salaries of any of the H1-B visa holders at my company. Do you?

Maybe we can make it a policy that companies make such information public when they employ more than N number of H1-B holders. With mean, median, standard deviation and error bars, you should be able to get an idea of whether or not this is happening.

Besides these numbers for salary, it would also be interesting to see the same statistics for years of experience programming of domestic labor versus imported labor. I would expect to see a significantly greater mean and median years of experience among H1-B holders versus domestically sourced talent.
There is a delay from sending any data to/from the GPU.

Generally you aim to give the GPU a 'large' task (or many small tasks), then ask for the answer(s) in 1 batch and wait while it is transferred across.

If you have many small tasks where each answer is sent back separately, and you need that answer before requesting the next task, then you will be very slow, even if the data sent/received is small. A naive implementation of the chess algorithm here (with alpha-beta pruning (which has many if-then branches)) would be like this :/
Greater than 44.1khz sampling rate and/or 16bit depth.
Openmindedness isn't the same thing as being open to accepting a mistaken belief. If no one can tell the difference between 24-bit and 16-bit, then 24-bit simply doesn't matter. The only way to know is with a controlled experiment that checks whether the people can detect no better than chance whether music is 24-bit.
The margin isn't exactly healthy at 44.1khz. The video guys went with 48khz for a reason.
If you just change your definition of basis functions from infinite sinusoids to truncated sinusoids and your definition of bandwidth to the maxiumum frequency of a nonzero truncated sinusoid coefficient you can recover an analog of Nyquist Rate just with a different idea of bandwidth. When you're talking about the typical 10^6 cycles over a song they're the same for all intents and purposes.

EDIT: Your truncated sinusoids have to be harmonics of the total signal length for this to work trivially.
You can. It is called migration.
Everything else. Lift to orbit is only one of hundreds of factors.
I like your comments and I am all about holding Tech Review to a high standard, but I think I am going to side with them on this. The key part is "from scratch". I'd venture that there are lots of AI projects that similarly relevant precursors to DeepMind, all of which (including your Backgammon examples) do not actually accomplish the same from-scratch abilities described.
I came here to say the same thing. I was really interested in Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in college, and around 22 I had the same idea as Penrose: that if the mind could be simulated on a computer, it would be a formal system in Gödel's terminology, yet the mystery of the Incompleteness Theorem is that we can work out when things are true or false despite limitations of formal systems. Penrose takes that nugget and tries to develop a rigorous argument against general AI or a mind that is explainable by purely Newtonian mechanics. At least that's my understanding. I only made it about half way through the book, because it is not really aimed at a general reader. Agree or not, it's a pretty fascinating argument, one which makes my head spin.

Some other nice resources on Godel are:

- Gödel's Proof by Nagel and Newman
- Forever Undecided by Smullyan
FreshDBCache – Eventually consistent database cache for Java
Mobile Game Cash Tournament Back End System
Dure, but there's no reason to expect you lose anything, either, barring implementation errors. Lots of the TV you watch looks fine, despite being a 720p signal displayed on a 1080p display. Same concept.
How Paid Search Saved a Life Yesterday
If the results are no better than chance, it means the study methodology is flawed OR there's no effect.
> He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3

If we're to take Tidal and Spotify(at highest quality) as representative of those two (please correct me if I'm wrong, no expert) then the difference is night and day. Perhaps Spotify could use a higher quality mp3 encoding?
Docker's killer feature
Crash course in world history
This right here. I posted it upthread, but, unless you get really lucky and hit the green card lottery jackpot, your only viable option is an H1-B.
24/192 flac as opposed to 16 bit flac. flac/mp3 is about compression, bits and khz are about sampling/representation.
5 Amazing Female Engineers That Time Forgot