skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I keep my ears to the ground for this sort of thing, but I don't hear much about it.

I'm actually kind of shocked to hear this question. The person I was responding to originally is probably just going for the childishly rebellious "I'm gonna say something contrarian to seem like a deep thinker!!!!", but you don't seem to be saying anything of the sort.

I would be extremely surprised if you hadn't heard of any of this stuff; I think the problem is rather that your definition of what innovation is may be arbitrarily and inappropriately defined with respect to the topic of conversation.

This has been a good few years for AI and there have been some impressive advances recently in voice recognition, computer vision, language understanding, core machine learning research, etc. The AI labs at Google and Facebook alone are an important part of this ecosystem. Silicon Valley has also been producing advancements in diagnostic nanotechnology, space exploration and travel, feasible and long-range electric cars, self-driving cars, power generation and distribution systems, manufacturing efficiency, etc. There's a thriving biotechnology startup scene. Then you get down to less "sexy" (but still very important) innovation in things like datacenter design, distributed systems, software-defined networking, network protocols (like SPDY), etc. Even softer stuff like the work being done on the economics of distribution, or the efficient delivery of compute cycles is seeing a lot of advancement in the last several years, and a lot of it is centered around here.

I fully expect a response from some commenter who hasn't been able to grasp what this conversation is about to claim that a lot of that isn't "true" innovation at the kind of low level one finds in academia, but that's missing the point. It begs the question of whether companies in SV are innovative by defining innovation in for-profit companies as more or less impossible (which is, of course, nonsense). Government-funded academia is an excellent vehicle for fundamental research, just as corporations are good vehicles for the next step in the chain (and occasionally fundamental research). The funny thing is that even if you move the goalposts by restricting yourself to academic advancements, both Stanford and Berkeley are world-class research universities and parts of the SV ecosystem.
Possible existence of wormholes in the central regions of halos [pdf]
Yep, I keep thinking that RTS game are the one field where AI assistants would be incredibly valuable.

But talking about AIs in RTS tournament, you may be interested in a tournament of AIs playing starcraft:

http://sscaitournament.com/

They have a live channel with often pretty cool fights.
Whatever that reader app they are using is... Wow does it suck on iOS Safari. I can't figure out what the heck is going on.
What a great book. I love it because even though everything in it is currently future-tech, almost everything seems almost within reach. It all seems so plausible.
> To me, this is proof they are still in bed with the ISPs

The established players are quite often in favor of regulation, since it stifles up-and-comers who might out-compete them.
ES6 makes a lemonade out of a pineapple.
Well, think of it this way. Characters are artificial constructs, and even much more artificial (with only thousands of years of history): there are still languages in this world without a writing system, and they're doing fine. (Well, maybe not fine, but that's more to do with the influence of more powerful languages than lack of writing.)

However, no serious NLP researcher would suggest building a text-to-speech system by getting rid of the middle OCR layer and just hooking the raw image directly to the expected sound. (Well, at least I think so, but I'd be glad to know if I'm wrong.)

Phonemes are absolutely imposed on human babies. Sure, they wouldn't know the word "phoneme", but that doesn't make the concept any less real. Imagine how a typical education on reading/writing would start like: "This is G. It is used for words like grass, game, and girl. Actually, it can also be used for gem or genie!"

Can you imagine an English-speaking child listening to this and not immediately understanding that there are two distinct sounds involved, that the first sounds for "grass", "game", and "girl" are somehow the same (even though the waveforms are different), and that this sound is somehow different from that of "gem" or "genie"? If a child doesn't understand it, then the child probably needs a speech therapy.
Unions negotiate for better wages, stable hours, and benefits. Often those benefits include tuition reimbursement, but the other things are just as important for establishing a predictable career path so that factory work can be a step to something else, if you so wish it to be.
According to [this](http://dailyinfographic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/the-b...) France is faster by a large margin.
>The difference between a ball of uranium and a nuclear bomb is... a slightly bigger ball.

And a very precise detonation device strapped around said ball of uranium.

Software is not by itself dangerous. It only exists in the most abstract sense. What is dangerous is creating physical devices that have the ability to cause physical damage if manipulated in a certain way. Allowing those devices to be controlled autonomously through a software-hardware interface is where the danger from "AI" comes in.
No, unions make it so "cocky, educated" engineers can't tinker with "the way things have always been done" without a big fuss.
Why would that be unfortunate? I imagine it protects many people from losing their home due to out of control home valuations.
BotHack – A Nethack Bot Framework
A few people have made genetic algorithm programs to calculate optimal (in terms of speed) build orders given certain conditions. Here's one I have used: https://code.google.com/p/evolutionchamber/

A genetic algorithm, of course, is much different than using AI to solve the problem, but I think it's an interesting project nonetheless.
Andreessen Horowitz Taps into Thriving World of Programmers
What do you think is the best way to learn of these things, i.e. physics fundamentals and all in the modern state of knowledge?

I ask from the perspective of a B.S. Physics cum computer software person... which, I think, might not be too far removed from the perspectives of most HN peeps...
Don't get me wrong, I find it very cool that people try to popularize STRIPS planning among programmers and that automated planning gets more known. However, please don't say that you can "solve" Starcraft this way.

To get a decent starcraft AI you will need more than the ability to make plans to build battlecruisers: you will need the ability to choose the best plan for the recognized situation, to take decisions under uncertainty and to make compromises between objectives.
Well, yes, it's "Autism, autism, autism." That's why people are generally hesitant to vaccinate, and that's what the majority of the articles would be about.

I confess that I had not noticed the "Vaccines Did Not Save Us - 2 Centuries of Statistics" article, and when you mentioned it, it did give me pause. However, I went back, found it, and read it. Did you? It sounded very "sciency", with lots of graphs and data. Is it correct in it's conclusions? Should be, if it's data is correct. Is it correct in it's data? I honestly have no idea. Is my gut instinct to discount it? Yes, absolutely it is. However, I certainly can't refute any of the data it's presenting me with, so why am I so quick to discount? I shouldn't be.

You're either able to independently judge the veracity or lack of veracity of any given scientific claim, or you're not. If you're not, you need to remind yourself of that, and not be a voice in the mob. I need to remind myself of that too.
What he didn't think of was productivity increases. See Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century.
Sure, you could write a kernel in Lisp or Forth. But if you are a developer for a kernel that written in C/C++, you don't really have a choice.
It sounds like you're making the claim that media coverage is a useful proxy (at all) for innovation occurring in a region. In case I'm not misunderstanding you, do you also think that the stories broadcast on CNN are a useful compilation of the most important global issues right now? I don't really know what else to say about that.

As with other people in this thread, I think your issue here is that one hears about things in their speculative research-study phase (when there's often still 95% of the work to be done for the findings to be actually used), and then lose interest and (somewhat subconsciously) stop classifying it as "innovation". You'll notice that when you do this, literally everything falls through the cracks between "vaporware" and "not interesting anymore and therefore not innovation". In a response to another commenter, I gave a more complete response (of off-the-top-of-my-head general examples): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988431

EDIT: Ah haha, I just realized that your newspaper comment was in direct response to my allusion to a newspaper. The second paragraph of my comment is still relevant though. As an example, there was a cellular matrix spray that the military was investigating for immediate application to large open wounds which had FANTASTIC potential for promoting the healing process (by sealing things up a lot more quickly without foreign materials and thus lowering chance for infection by an INCREDIBLE amount, etc). Newspapers won't give you constant updates about (e.g.) every step of the process of bringing this to market, because the only way to add new information is to go into technical detail, which will turn off tons of readers.

That doesn't prevent you from seeing the story in the newspaper during its eye-catching vaporware phase, and then following it on your own after that. (Note that even this latter step is unnecessary if you have at least a decent ballpark of what percent of things like that never end up being feasible for actual usage).

EDIT2: To be absolutely clear, I was using the spray-on skin thing as an example of how using the newspaper the way you just did is an incredibly poor way to understand what's happening in a given regional center of an industry. I wasn't implying that that example was from Silicon Valley.
sbopkg -i "node google-go-lang ghc ..."

Granted, you have to install sbopkg, but it's still not that hard. And most of those tools (GCC, Ruby, etc., even Emacs!) already ship with Slackware anyway, so it's arguably easier than most GNU/Linux distros.
Maybe someone can clear up my misconceptions - but I always thought that most VCs (the ones that aren't started with tech money) come from Finance. For example Jim Swartz, founder Accel (first firm I could think of that I wasn't sure if it was founded by a entrepreneur), in his bio states came from a finance background - I thought this was the story for most partners.

If this is the case, then I'm unsure this is a problem that the tech industry has to face facts with, but a problem that the finance industry has to acknowledge. The stereotype is (not sure if its still completely true) is that finance is still a huge boys club, and I think the tech industry has made far more strides in diversity than the finance industry has. If the problem really is "VCs don't invest in women" or "there aren't enough female partners" it would help to know 1.) the career path to be a VC partner and 2.) the percentage of women that qualify.
oh-my-git: an opinionated Git prompt for bash and zsh
> We did solve chess, after all.

Nitpick: We solved nim. We created an algorithm that, when applied, guarantees the first player a win if some conditions are met, and the second player a win otherwise.

There is no equivalent for chess. Instead, we created programs that can apply more general game-theoretic algorithms with ad hoc modifications for chess (for example, minimax with alpha-beta pruning and lookup tables to recognize book openings, closings, and common scenarios) which can, at current CPU speeds and RAM capacities, reliably beat the top-ranked human players.

It is mathematically possible to beat the best computer chess player; it might not, however, be humanly possible. OTOH, it is mathematically impossible to beat a simple nim program which has been programmed with the perfect play algorithm, assuming the game is such that the program will win if it applies that algorithm.

My point is, if something is solved, an adversary throwing more computing power at the process is meaningless. It would merely hasten the inevitable. However, for a problem like chess, an adversary suddenly getting better computers could be a game changer.
I'm really out on most of the "async" stuff, after having used it. (Mostly in Node and Tornado)

Remember in the early 90s when Windows and Mac OS were "cooperatively" multitasked? Which is to say, you had to explicitly yield to allow other applications to run (or risk locking up the entire system). And then it was replaced with pre-emptive multitasking, which allowed the scheduler to figure out what process deserved CPU time, while allowing the programmer not to have to think about it. You could call a blocking IO function, and the OS would just go do something else while you waited.

All this "async" stuff seems like a return of cooperative multitasking, only worse. Not only do I have to explicitly yield, but now it's to some event loop that can't even properly use multiple cores, or keep a coherent stack trace. It's a nightmare to debug. It's theoretically fast... except if one request forgets to yield, it can clog up the entire thing. I guess you use multiple processes for that and a dispatcher, but at that point you've basically reinvented preemptive multitasking... badly.

Threads aren't perfect, but excluding STM and actor models they definitely suck the least.
I'll demonstrate the lack of an isomorphism via a counterexample.

Consider MaybeT and WriterT (and the basic Identity monad for the bottom of our stack)

newtype MaybeT m a = MaybeT { runMaybeT :: m (Maybe a) }
newtype WriterT w m a = WriterT { runWriterT :: m (a, w) }
newtype Identity a = Identity { runIdentity :: a }

I'm going to claim that MaybeT (WriterT w Identity) is not isomorphic to WriterT w (MaybeT Identity). If we expand the first

MaybeT (WriterT w Identity) a
==
WriterT w Identity (Maybe a)
==
Identity (Maybe a, w)
==
(Maybe a, w)

And if we expand the second

WriterT w (MaybeT Identity) a
==
MaybeT Identity (a, w)
==
Identity (Maybe (a, w))
==
Maybe (a, w)

So we can see that the Maybe is wrapped around something different in each stack. So now to the claim that there's no isomorphism should be obvious---any witnesses to the isomorphism f and g would have to have that for all w, f (g (Nothing, w)) = (Nothing, w), but since g :: (Maybe a, w) -> Maybe (a, w) cannot fabricate an `a`, it must be such that g (Nothing, w) = Nothing which means that f :: Maybe (a, w) -> (Maybe a, w) cannot determine the right `w` to return.
I would theorize that second used slavic language is not Ukrainian but Serbo-Croatian, at risk of getting hated by everybody mentioned.

It also has a rare property of coming with two alphabets - cyrillic and latin.
A major irony is that, in principle, a 4G radio could be made very simple, with all the protocol processing up in the application processor, and sharing code with SIP VoIP and UMA capability in the phone OS. But, as far as I know, no 4G radios are designed that way. Maybe when 3G starts to go away.
Uber is already doing/testing this in a better way. They had free Uber week in Perth not long ago, with discounts & freebies offered at a number of restaurants if you made them your final Uber destination.

I don't usually go out on a whim to a restaurant when the taxi is $40 each way, but when the travel cost is dramatically subsidized by the venue or zero...
SPS: The Pulse of Netflix Streaming
Well, there was no GUI involved, but such man machine hybrid wars did often occur in MUDs, particularly ones with player killing and guilds. You would often have a set of alts controlled by scripts doing automated tasks like crafting iron from ingredients and selling it in town whereas meanwhile in combat you would have the mud client automatically drink health potions when low on health, auto attack when an enemy player walked in, etc..

I think World of Warcraft had a similar bot getting popular before it was banned.
Meanwhile, Uber is partnering with Carnegie Mellon University to build self-driving cars: http://blog.uber.com/carnegie-mellon

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987441
How to Impress Employers at Infosessions
The water in the interior is what matters. It's actually the fact that water is recycled into the Earth's deep interior that's thought to keep it "lubricated", so to speak, and allow the mantle to flow more readily. For the Earth, that's a feedback loop: water in the mantle allows plate tectonics to work, so water keeps getting recycled into the interior (via saturated crust and sediments) to keep it going.
>> Every now and then people (on HN and elsewhere) like to rediscover pilot-wave theory and other similar ideas that posit that billiard-ball-like-particles still describe the universe.

Have you seen the experiments of Yves Couder?

Hypothetically, if a model like that produced an exact mathematical equivalent of quantum theory wouldn't that be more satisfying? It would also destroy some of the notions that have been mathematically proven - like EPR and Bells' inequality. A lot of people are unsatisfied with QM and looking for something more tangible - including physicists.

Apparently pilot wave theory was never soundly rejected, the crowd just went in a different direction.
I owned an Apple ][ before VisiCalc was released. The transition was amazing.

The home PCs were really just a curiosity before that. Look at Apple's early magazine ads. A mom filing recipes. A dad balancing his checkbook. Looked amazing in photos, but when you sat back and realized they wanted $1,200 for a tabletop calculator it really deflated the motivation to buy one.

VisiCalc showed people that these machines were programmable in a way they could understand. That was a major breakthrough.
Heh so thats what this uber job offer was about.. i should have replied! ;)
ycombinator.com, I've heard they are pretty good
TL;DR; strenuous jogging doesn't have health benefits. There isn't enough data from the study to support any stronger conclusions.
How four underdogs took on M.I.T. in underwater bot championship (2005)
Well, they could just switch to working for Lyft instead of a company that is actively trying to automate their jobs away, if for no other reason than to put some upward pressure on Uber's driver payout percentage.
Eloy Durán steps down as Cocoapods' lead developer
One Day Rails – Learn Ruby on Rails in 91 Minutes
Bummer but I am guessing this will not be the only brick and mortar store to close now that most things can be bought online.
Neo900 has been announced at the moment when all interested parties agreed on "it seems feasible, let's do it". There was no prior investment, the development could start only after raising funds. It simply takes time - especially when organizational burden turned out to be a bit more challenging than initially assumed.

All of Goldelico customers who paid for GTA04 already received one long time ago. I don't count latest fundraiser for its new revision[1], since it will be fully refunded if not enough people will preorder to actually produce a new batch.

Also, Goldelico is "just" a contractor doing work for Neo900 UG, which is the actual entity running the Neo900 project.

But I think we're getting a bit off-topic here. #neo900 on freenode might be a better place for that ;)

[1] http://shop.goldelico.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04A5
The Sales Learning Curve (2006) [pdf]
> but everything I learned back then were things like Basic, COBOL, Fortran and Pascal.

Think about what you had back then, though. At best, you had Mac OS (which was as abstracted away from actual computer internals as Windows is today). All the other options - whether it was Commodores or Ataris or DOS-based IBM-compatibles - involved working very close to the hardware. You were manually dealing with interrupts and memory access and other very-low-level components.

Basically, the reason why you didn't have to delve very far into the underlying system was because there wasn't an underlying system in the first place for you to delve into. COBOL and Pascal were pretty high-level, but BASIC and Fortran are along the same lines as C (especially back then): very low-level, very directly-wired-to-hardware, very thin abstractions over raw assembly. You were already delving into way more than students today would ever be able to delve into on a Windows-NT-based operating system (where you don't even have DOS internals to muck around with, unlike on Windows 3.x and 9x - which is what I personally grew up on).

Yeah, students might be able to get by on a bit of HTML and Javascript and maybe Ruby or Python, but I would be lying if I claimed that such an education would be as in-depth and worthwhile as what your or I experienced pre-2000.
Your Linux browser is too old
Lately I have nag messages everywhere I go: "Your browser is too old." If you're wondering, I have Debian Wheezy. (Going to check if I have all the backports.)

In general, do you think Linux has trouble keeping browsers up to date? Do Ubuntu & Fedora folks have this problem too?
You're assuming the value in Highland's program is the money (which I agree is small.) I assume the value is the access and mentorship.
The HN title is wrong and misleading. The NYT headline is "In Net Neutrality Push, F.C.C. Is Expected to Propose Regulating Internet Service as a Utility".

That's a little different than "FCC regulating the Internet." ISPs provide internet endpoints to consumers. They should be utilities.
The biggest thing is to let the memory allocator do its job. Don't cache buffers, etc between uses to speed things up; once it's used, throw it in the dumpster and get a new chunk of memory. Your nifty performance hack will succeed in leaking vital information much faster than the stock memory allocator. Other things are if your allocator doesn't do it for you, zero out your memory before you use it, and if you really want to get fancy, zero it out when you're done using it. Also, test on more than one OS/Architecture. Your code may work beautifully on your Linux x86 box, but does it still work under OpenBSD? How about running on an ARM board? Good, portable code that doesn't rely on trickery is one of the best ways to ensure that your assumptions won't cause the next security disaster.
Many times. Usually I become disheartened at how difficult the project really is to complete. Then I ask myself if the project is really important to me. If I answer yes I try to break it down to the next 3 steps, and just commit to doing those three. Sometimes you need to learn something to make progress. After a few question - recommit - work cycles more will have been done on the project. Then you wind up refactoring!
Lol, 84% in what countries?

Looking at our web stats across our clients, android isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to iOS.

Having a large market share in third world countries who won't buy your app isn't much of a win.
Cloudflare is opt-in.

In my scenario, the ISP purposely degrades the service unless you pay more. This isn't hypothetical as it has been proven they did/do to Netflix traffic.

Cloudflare isn't going to DDoS every site that doesn't sign up for their service.

The value of doing surgery successfully via the internet is high. Are you really that naive that you don't think ISPs will attempt to capture as much of that value as they possibly can?

Do you want to live in a world where an ISP determines the worth of your internet traffic and attempts to bill you based on the content, not the actual bandwidth used?
How does one request "forget to yield"?