skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's some kind of underlying, overwhelming point in there...

That tail call elimination, agressive inlining, escape analysis, continuation passing style, are saying a lot about the boundary between blocks in Algol-style languages, on one hand, and functions in LISP and ML derivatives, on the other hand.

I've seen someone in a Quora thread state that monads are just like semicolon - newline, which, beyond the witticism, says that (most) monads do sequential code, which is the point of blocks (defined by statements separated by semicolons, and semantically executed sequentially, and to make that block an atomic... Thing)

Now yeah. Where am I getting to?

I'm not sure.

The point for functional programming is composability, which is obtained in many philosophically and technically different ways, but since those distinctions, naively implemented, make call stacks explode and garbage collectors cry in agony.

TCO aims to find functions that can be seen as a block of statements that set n different variables, block which is then iterated a set number of times with different values of those variables

Escape analysis aims to find functions that take an argument A and return a value R where R can be substituted for A in the caller's, uh, memory. Such a function is equivalent to a block that simply sets a variable that is in scope.

(state-ish) monads aim to allow the sequential and atomic execution of functions that are related in a way that's hard to fit into the "pipes" model, typically by passing around a data structure representing the state those functions "live in". That data structure is roughly equivalent to the scope in block-structure languages.

CPS means, more or less, that the stack is a great way to deal with tree-like expression evaluations, but that some control flow is hard to fit in a tree, or that it's a waste of tree space to do so.

It seems like a lot of those techniques' goal is to offer, at the same time, the composability of functions, and the performance of blocks.
"Forget self-driving cars. People really want anti-gravity."

I mean, of course they want better batteries, but it's not like there is a lack of investment in better energy storage.
Most viruses are identified by their signature only, because most of them are dumb. Heuristics for unknown threats are often there purely for marketing.

AVs have all more or less the same signature database due to the same reason as above, most viruses are dumb and well known (most can't even be called viruses, think adware & co). IMO this the best reason for not having multiple AVs. I personally do not trust an AV for anything more than dumb signature checking (which are easily circumvented with polymorphism or sometime encryption alone) and targeted heuristics.

I also don't even want to start thinking at the mess that could be created by several AVs's injection/hooking mechanisms on the same machine.
To be clear, this is research priorities for "given that we have proto-AI technologies, how do we manage the impact on society and make sure the full-AI tech doesn't do something vastly unintended."

Which is somewhat worthwhile, but presupposes the existence of general AI techniques, which is an incredibly low-investment area. Seriously, the amount of research being pointed at anything that's plausibly "full AI" in nature is miniscule. If anything it's lower than in the 80s (and maybe appropriately, given the lack of payoff for the more general work).

(I could go on in detail about how there is approximately zero research being devoted to, eg, automated refactoring of large codebases and other stuff that you'd expect to be absolutely essential to general AI. But I'll just stop with the naked contention.)

And it's rather silly to conjecture effects when you don't even know the order of magnitude of the timelines, the resources required, or the bootstrapability of the technology. There is a huge difference between "a Top100 cluster can emulate a human brain on a 1/100 timeframe" and "a cell phone possesses general-purpose optimization algorithms that are better at learning arbitrary tasks than your average human".
A few things:

1) Why limit yourself to 4x7? The 1988 NES version of Tetris is 10 units wide.

2) There isn't any malicious design, you simply get 1 of each shape (one of the L pieces in the author's photo is reflected, should be turned the other way).

3) In Tetris, a full row is removed immediately so having a complete rectangular shape that occupies the full available width is unrealistic.

Pedantry aside, you'd have to ask Alexey Pajitnov if there was any devilry involved in choosing the shapes since the makers of the lamp have faithfully included a full set. Also, I personally prefer the aesthetic of a lamp arranged in such a way as to leave a hole in each row rather than a plain wall of coloured squares.
You can get to order of magnitude with a combination of getting the software right and using the best battery available. After all, it's not like the company on this path is going to use crappy batteries, they'll use the best available like everyone else.
What's more annoying is that it has two identical L pieces, instead of having one that is a mirror-image of the other, as they appear in Tetris.
It makes no sense to you. But the world is a lot larger. If there is an interruption in data services most people wouldn't even notice. But when you can't make or receive calls that's major and in extreme cases will lead to loss of life. Apps are nice-to-have, phone calls are a must.
I can't believe no one thinks this is a terrible idea. Of course I, selfishly, would love to live longer but doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster.

While we're at it why don't we just solve aging, provide infinite food supply, and eliminate predation for deer. That would be a great idea right? No way that would have any negative side effects, right?
No joke, I have seen a car which would occasionally refuse to start (with no indication of an error: the dash was basically blank) until you disconnected the battery, waited a few minutes, and then reconnected it.
How many people that have mini tablets also have a phone? How many people that have a phone also have mini tablets?
Thanks a lot, I translated the app with Google Translate because there are several german visitors.

I'll fix that!
> Go does little to no dead code elimination

Yet. With the rewrite of the compiler it is safe to assume that there will be many optimizations to come.
A note on pre and post conditions
Google News has always given off this vibe like it's being administered by someone as their side project. Very curious for one of the most popular news websites in the world.
Disclaimer: maybe I'm not the target audience of this letter.

What a terrible letter.
Hemingway grade is "20, bad".

451 words, but the only hint what the authors wants is "We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do ... In summary, we believe that research on how to make AI systems robust and beneficial is both important and timely, and that there are concrete research directions that can be pursued today."
But, reading this, I just think, "Sure, that sounds good."

There's an attachment (which I won't read), but it would have been nice if the original document contained some information what the point of this is so I'm motivated to read it.
I also made this a blog post: http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/593924.html Some hopefully useful comments there, and on G+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/111502940353406919728/posts/gHwp...
This may be wrong for complex reasons. Similar minds making the same decision for the same reasons do not _causally_ influence each other, but that doesn't change the outcome, nor does it make it any less bad. For a fairly deep view into how one might formally describe this particular aspect of decision making, I strongly recommend: https://intelligence.org/files/TDT.pdf
Any idea what it will cost?
Please read the article. It's about laws specifically created to stop farmers from saving seeds so they'll have to buy them from 'approved' sources.
> The point is this: humans often allow tribalist feelings to influence consumption choices (housing, movies, etc). Is this a bad thing that should be prevented and/or condemned?

No, see what you did there? While humans often allow tribalist feelings to influence their choices, there is a difference between those who can choose more and those who can choose less, and the discussion is about those who can can choose more restricting the mobility of those who can choose less. Those are facts -- they are not a matter of opinion or ideology, but the objective reality. It is you who decided that "tribalist feelings" are the cause of segregation, which is a nice hypothesis but a factually wrong one. What you have here isn't tribe A and tribe B, but a dominant tribe A and a weak tribe B, and power dynamics has a far stronger effect than in-group dynamics, as proven by history in this particular case and others like it. That there are several dynamics here concurrently does not mean that they're all equal in influence.
Passen Sie die Anzahl den Schieberegler unten, sollte nur der schwarze Rand außerhalb der Karte sichtbar sein

--> Passen Sie den Schiebregler so an, dass nur mehr der schwarze Rand der Karte sichtbar ist.

Sie haben noch nichts auf dem Bildschirm ein Standard-Karte oder Kreditkarte

--> Halten Sie hier eine Visitenkarte oder Kreditkarte an den Bildschirm

(Replaced Standardkarte with Visitenkarte=Businesscard)

Scannen Sie den QRcode, um den Sehtest durchzuführen und entfernen Sie sich 4 Meter vom Bildschirm. Sie können dafür den App Barcode Scanner (Android) oder Qrafter (iOS) verwenden.

Als Alternative kann eine andere Person mit Hilfe dieses Links, die Fragen für Sie beantworten.

-----
It's not perfect, but better than what you have atm ;)
I had the chance to dive into this issue a few years ago for a school project, and I was shocked by two things: one, the restraint that Monsanto showed when seeking and litigating protections for their products, and two, the aggressive exaggerations and deceptive wording that environmental groups employed to attack Monsanto.

Case #1: "Monsanto seeds/pollen from the neighboring farm blew into my farm and Monsanto sued me!" is the line that gets brandied about with regularity by environmental groups. Percy Schmeiser, the farmer in question, used it to launch a political career. It's also a highly selective retelling of the story that completely omits the __only__ part of the story that the courts objected to: upon learning that certain plants on his property contained the Monsanto roundup resistance gene, Schmeiser purposefully cultivated large quantities of these plants and deliberately took advantage of Monsanto's specific addition for commercial gain.

The courts were very clear: cultivating the Monsanto Canola without a license was OK, but deliberately taking advantage of roundup resistance without a license was not. How do we know it was deliberate? Because non-Monsanto canola dies when you spray roundup on it. If Percy Schmeiser wasn't aware that he was "pirating" Monsanto crops, spraying his field with roundup would have killed his crop.

Analogy: My neighbor downloaded Adobe Illustrator over unsecured wifi and I captured their serial number with a sniffer. Now Adobe is suing me because I used that serial number to register 100 new copies of Illustrator at the graphic design business I own. I claim (and the media reports) that I'm being sued because a serial-number laden wifi signal intruded on my property. After all, it could happen to you too!

Case #2: Terminator genes. The way the media / environmental groups reported it: "Monsanto has patented genes which will prevent farmers from re-planting seeds if they can't pay Monsanto's fees! Monsanto's greed will cause poor people to starve!" The way Monsanto reported it: "Monsanto commits to never using terminator genes; we patented them so that we are never forced to use them in order to compete against someone who does." Monsanto has kept to their word. Come on, guys -- it seems a bit thankless to reward Monsanto for good behavior by lying and making it look like bad behavior.

Case #3: Seralini's "GMOs cause cancer in rats" study. When we discussed it (the school project was a team project), we agreed that it had some seriously shoddy methodology (if you're teaching about PCA abuse, this paper is a good example). It was retracted shortly thereafter, naturally to cries of "conspiracy!" from environmental groups (and sighs of relief from us). Incidentally, a study reaching the opposite conclusion was recently released using a somewhat larger sample size (N=90,000,000,000 vs N=20).

EDIT: clarified the Percy Schmeiser narrative to make it clearer that he knew exactly what he was doing (as was established in court).
everything depends on the laws in your country, where do you live ? what day job do you have ? how do you spend your free time ? do you have access to a legal advisor ?
Looks like the pieces are reversible, so the two L's and two S's are actually L, J, S, and Z.
Well it looks like you can rotate them (I mean in the 3rd dimension not present in actual Tetris)
Check out The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for an argument for this in the science world:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_R...

In a nutshell: people don't change fundamental beliefs, even when confronted with evidence. Instead, they die off and the newer generation adopts the new theory.
Yes, but then it won't be supported by many sites that support Yubikey OTP and rely on Yubico's servers for authentication.
My favourite part is having slideshare tabs crash before they are done loading the page if I have the chrome's "experimental platform features" flag set.
Exactly. I was disappointed that there was absolutely no attempt to look under the hood of this thing. That would actually be an interesting blog post to read: like a look at the system, pre-installed programs, the difference between it and PearOS, whether you can install whatever software you want on it, whether there is a package manager and, and then of course some wireshark captures.
I hope they are filming this somehow so we can soon enjoy the incredible documentary that would come of it.
Web developer for less than a year here, so just offering my perspective on what "new web devs" know these days. I know there are status codes beyond 200 and 404, and work with maybe a dozen in regular rotation. I know there are probably hundreds more, but until they are in more regular use I think it would just inhibit clarity to use them (just like how using less precise language paradoxically makes your prose clearer sometimes). This is sort of a chicken and the egg problem, but the paradigm could definitely shift if the marginal usefulness is high enough.

URN's I had not heard of, but the article didn't make it clear to me what problem they would solve.

Of course I know about HTTP verbs PUT and DELETE and HEAD-- is there really any web dev who doesn't? And I am pretty rigorous about using the appropriate one (unlike with status codes).

I don't have an opinion on how apps are isolated from the web and don't have interlinks between them. Don't really use mobile apps myself except utility ones like Spotify and Netflix.
This has proven to not be a problem in Europe in general and in Asia in Japan.

In other continents, yes this would become a huge problem. Well, it actually is already today.
maybe it's better to use "business card" in this context. I thought I have to pay for it, when I first read the instructions.
I'm still a student with three semesters ahead of me, and I'm in Portugal.
Considering you have to use git to use github, isn't it always an extra step to use github for a private project?
That argument of yours is so confusing and non-sensical, mostly in that you don’t link it back to the original point you made.

Basically, there is just no connection between what you just said and the original point you made. It’s utterly irrelevant, unconnected.
This calls for a reform to the penitentiary system, someone condemned to life in prisson that can live 120 years will cost more to the state than someone that can live 80.

As always, goverment is to late to react.
> Pedantry aside, you'd have to ask Alexey Pajitnov if there was any devilry involved in choosing the shapes since the makers of the lamp have faithfully included a full set.

No devilry, there's just only so many ways you can connect four squares together to make a shape.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetromino
If people lived forever, why would they ever retire? I imagine you'd take a 5 year sabbatical every 20 years or so and you'd probably even head to school a bunch of times to change careers if you got bored of centuries of the same vocation.
I don't know much about Portugal, but every country I seen so far have something called sole proprietor type of business: it is usually single guy doing some work and filling taxes by himself.
Wow. It's amazing to see how far WebGL has come.
Focus on doing whatever you are doing, deal with this stuff later.

Corporations are all about liability and ownership. As a student, you likely don't have any assets to protect. Once you take investment or add a partner, you'll need to do somethingn!
"doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster"

Over the past centuries, human life expectancy has increased greatly and yet we have a much higher quality of life. It's an extraordinary claim to suggest that the continuance of this already-existing trend is 'almost guaranteed to be a disaster'.
Data cleanliness is never a solved problem, it's just a fact. Depending on how severe the problem is, a simple way to combat this is by adding a custom key/value pair to all client-side GA requests (custom dimensions are great for this) and then adding a filter to your profile within the Google Analytics admin to exclude all requests without the appropriate key value. Change the value on a recurring basis, how often is your preference. Though always be sure you have at least 2 profiles for any GA property, one filtered (Production) and one unfiltered as the C.Y.A. profile so that should anything go wrong, you can still get to all data.
IMNAL - but if you will be generating revenue and will have paid customers, at the very least you should incorporate as an LLC or equivalent in your country to protect yourself from personal liability.
I used to work on a news site and the process to get listed on Google News was very manual, at least compared to how you think the rest of Google operates. You had to have a physical address and phone number (though I don't think the two attributes are actually tested, i.e. sending a postcard via snailmail). You also had to configure your pages for the spider so that if your site delivers wire content (e.g. Reuters, AP) or does aggregation, the spider would ignore those pages, and only pick up your original news. The first time we submitted, the response we got seemed to indicate that someone had looked over our sitemap and saw aggregated news/wire reports, and so we had to resubmit. The process took a few weeks, IIRC.

That said, bigger news sites were probably whitelisted...it seems like the whitelist could be done algorithmically...but the number of new authoritative news sites, in theory, changes so slowly, that there's probably not really a need to do that.
It's Time to Change the Way We Talk about Mental Illness
Japan's looming demographic crunch is thought to be a massive challenge for the country in coming decades. To say they've proven not to have this problem is like saying that falling off a building isn't a problem, because this guy is halfway down and still doing fine.
So you claim Apple hasn't earned enough money on a 10 year old phone with yearly iterations?

You do know that they are the richest company in The world and their 128gb iPhone costs 1000$?! According to you, that is justified because the "premium" price is used for paying employees? Lol :-p

Also, it wasn't about money saving ( he already had an iPhone), he wanted tot see how a phone with 1/4th of the cost would be and he liked it
International Marketing – Exploring New Products and New Markets
Can you dig up any cases where this has actually happened, where the farmer hadn't previously signed a contract with Monsanto WRT to those very seeds?

Last time I saw a discussion about this on HN, perhaps a year or more ago, no one could. Per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#As_plaintiff):

While many lawsuits involve breach of Monsanto's Technology Agreement, farmers who have not signed this type of contract, but do use the patented seed, can also be found liable for violating Monsanto's patent. That said, Monsanto has stated it will not "exercise its patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seed or traits are present in farmer's fields as a result of inadvertent means." The Federal Circuit found that this assurance is binding on Monsanto, so that farmers who do not harvest more than a trace amount of Monsanto's patented crops "lack an essential element of standing" to challenge Monsanto's patents.

The closest you can come to that is Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser in Canada of course; in this case he selected for Roundup Ready plants, like we discussed in the recent antibiotic resistance discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8852487) which is not an innocent accident. The end of the Wikipedia Monsanto article notes:

"The court record shows, however, that it was not just a few seeds from a passing truck, but that Mr Schmeiser was growing a crop of 95–98% pure Roundup Ready plants, a commercial level of purity far higher than one would expect from inadvertent or accidental presence. The judge could not account for how a few wayward seeds or pollen grains could come to dominate hundreds of acres without Mr Schmeiser’s active participation, saying ‘...none of the suggested sources could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality evident from the results of tests on Schmeiser’s crop’" – in other words, the original presence of Monsanto seed on his land in 1997 was indeed inadvertent, but the crop in 1998 was entirely purposeful.
There's also two S pieces instead of an S and a Z. Irritating indeed. There must be order!
Thanks a lot for the translation review :)

I've updated the german translation, where the strings aren't hardcoded
When you sell something, legally you have to invoice it. If you find a solution for invoice, of course, you can do it.
It could reveal potentially exploitable server-side bugs.
The PDF mentions some short-term topics relating to automation of jobs, self-driving cars, and autonomous weapons.
So if you ignore piece number 7, can you form a rectangle with the remaining pieces?
If you read the linked research priorities document you can see that this isn't really about "general AI techniques"...it's about steady progression along the lines of things that exist but aren't necessarily to market yet (e.g. self-driving cars).
You may find it easier to redesign your dream phone than the entire web.
> URN's I had not heard of, but the article didn't make it clear to me what problem they would solve.

The idea of a globally unique, permanent identifier that would resolve to a URL to indicate the current location of a resource is fairly commonplace, isn't it? We've tried to bolt all sorts of equivalents onto the existing URL infrastructure without them.
Extending human life span to 200 years would be the single biggest thing you could do to combat global warming..
Wireless charger in your pocket would be close to "from your body" request. Of course this leads to heavy pocket syndrome.
And from what I hear, this happens a LOT.
Do you know where to find the canonical list of HTTP status codes? If the answer's "yes", you're probably OK.