skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like driving down an endless highway where you can see a huge crash well down the road but you fail to lift your foot off the accelerator.
I see a new trend emerging in response to the Swift letter / Apple response -- the idea that Apple is exploiting artists and is no better than anyone else in how it treats people.

The funny thing, it's everyone except Apple that gets a free ride from these discussions. First -- Apple is in fact offering a better deal to artists than pretty much anyone else. It's possible Amazon matches Apple in some cases -- as a book author, I know Amazon's "matching" of Apple's 70% is a sham (you only get it if you price your books low, lower than makes sense in many cases, otherwise your royalty is halved -- and even then they subtract "download fees" based on the size of your book from your 70% (or 35%)). When Apple entered the market, 70% was far and away the best deal in town. Since then it's only been exceeded by players trying to make a beach-head.

(Incidentally, Apple is going to pay the same percentage of its revenues to artists as everyone else -- but Apple Music has no free tier. In practice, Spotify and Pandora have minuscule revenues. 70% of almost nothing is nothing.)

A guy from Pandora chastising Apple for not being altruistic is simply disingenuous. Quoting that guy as an example of the industry being loath to criticize Apple for fear of ... something ... is even more dishonest. (Let's face it, at least part of the reason both Swift and the guy from Pandora couched their criticism in praise is that they aren't disinterested parties -- they're trying to make money too. Being nasty might just draw attention to the fact Taylor Swift is arguing for Apple to give her more money when they aren't collecting any. If a musician's agent or the record company has tickets to give away, do they pay for them? I doubt it.)

The bottom line argument is that Apple is offering a free trial loss leader and took the view that it would pay artists X% of what it collected, and X% of nothing is nothing. (A record label or hollywood studio would subtract accrued costs from future royalties, but hey who's counting?) Taylor Swift argues that Apple is taking more value away from the free trial than musicians -- she may be right, or it may be Ping all over again -- but she has a bazillion followers and she's Taylor Swift, so Apple immediately caves. (Hey, they named a programming language after her, what more could she want? j/k)

If you sell a CD through a record label, or a movie through a studio, or a game through a games company, you don't see royalties until production and marketing costs have been paid, and Hollywood and the Labels have become masters of padding their costs. For this reason, most artists use their albums as promotional tools for their live performances, and have done so since long before Apple.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/wrongful-conviction-internatio...

That should have something in it that allows comparisons to be made.
Excuse me, but your dichotomy of two possibilities is facepalm-worthy. A few broad points:

A) Consciousness, as in subjective experience, has very little to do with "artificial intelligence", in our current understanding. Only philosophers of mind continue to be obsessed with consciousness qua consciousness, as if a program needs qualia to drive an automated car or solve a math problem.

B) We will damn well understand human consciousness and cognition, in terms of neurally-implemented statistical learning mechanisms. This will just require that one or two more generations of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind who refuse to believe in statistical learning retire. The best current literature in neuroscience and cognitive science is all computational and statistical in nature.

C) We will not build "AI products" based on a One True Theory of Cognition. We will find that human cognition works as a singular, highly effective example of general, broad principles. This is why we already have lots and lots of highly functional statistical learning and inference systems, albeit not ones that can be directed at a keystroke to perform any inference a human being can perform. Of course, this is also what makes them useful: by restricting their hypothesis space, and thus the problems they can solve, we vastly reduce their need for training data compared to a generally-intelligent human, and thus make otherwise difficult inference problems tractable.

D) Those who understand the principles of cognition will notice and understand perfectly well when near-human or human-level "artificial intelligence" (inference engines) is/are built.

>Wouldn't it be so perfectly human of us (as a society on the whole) to overlook the emergence of true AI while we ponder our navel?

You're already doing it.

>We have the capacity for rationality, but we're not 100% rational. That's what makes us human.

I demand a definition of humanity that doesn't define my entire species as crippled, and necessarily exclude all non-crippled life forms from humanity ;-).
I feel like this completely counters the part where manufacturers are trying to make vehicles more visible with better lighting, etc. by pretending the vehicle is see-through. In ideal conditions, it wouldn't be a problem to a driver that has decent vision, but in stormy weather for example I'm not sure I would want this in front of me.
This is a somewhat novel workflow from what I can gather, so no. If you worked backwards from my flow though, you could figure it out no problem. Maybe I'll do a blog post in the future about it. I just don't have the time these days.
What is the best free alternative to meetup.com?
Where I did mine, they required submissions in strict word formatting.
It's even worse on the Internet with younger voters. If you look at /politics on Reddit, it's all propaganda that bashes the opposition. Link titles are changed to invoke anger.

I hate to see when this generation grows up and Twitter and Reddit are the sole sources of political information.

The "hands up don't shoot" is a good example. Forensic evidence came out and it was proven that this never happened, yet it didn't fit the political narrative. CNN and most of the mainstream news continued to push it as if it was fact.
Not so. The technology invested in razors is significant, and their pricing has been studied to hell and back. Gillette is selling a very sophisticated product, and they test it thoroughly. It's a pretty fascinating business, actually. Despite the high prices of the top end blades, their price on a cost/shave basis is only slightly higher than cheaper blades - they last literally several times what the cheap ones do, and cut better the whole time.
it's the most democratic presidential election system in the entire country
I agree with some of your points, but in some ways I think you are overly optimistic. I bet that the majority of the people not in Charleston couldn't name the Charleston shooter either (not that his name is particularly important). Your point about them not knowing tax rates is absolutely accurate, though.
Not exactly. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
> was the foundation for the ultimate mathematical elaboration of a structuralist theory that bears no relationship to anything in nature

So, like most theories?

Or do you really think of electrons as 'tiny things'?

You do the math and you get the results.

But yeah, Chomsky structures seems to be more useful when applying it to computer languages than to real ones.
> It's simple, clear cut, and quite high especially when compared with how things are in brick and mortar stores.

Care to explain further?
Let's be fair, the product is designed to specifically not do that:

"Echo uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When Echo detects the wake word, it lights up and streams audio to the cloud, where we leverage the Alexa Voice Service to recognize and respond to your request."
Many institutions, including mine, require a very specific style. Many even provide templates. Irritatingly, mine only provided a Word template, so I had to spend a day or two creating a LaTeX style. (Procrastination bonus: I was "working on my thesis" without actually working on my thesis). The mere fact that the provided style uses color would disqualify it as a thesis in many institutions. Also, it's somewhat distasteful that the linked site uses significantly more words on how I can donate for this derivative work than it spends on convincing me to use it.
That's one heck of a shop you have.
Yeah, creating all this multi-billion dollar app market and all, what a shafting...
I propose a new "standard" role="bullshit" to the W3C. Developers around the world could use it to mark those bullshit fragments of their pages. Users could filter them with a browser plugin "Bullshit Block".
>Strangely in Europe they claim 33dB.

The standards of measurement are likely different. Measuring "volume" (sound pressure level) is a very tricky business.
I buy more music today than I ever have done in the past and having a decent portable media player (iPhone) has a lot to do with this. I actually buy 99% of my music from bandcamp which is a really great service that pays musicians quite well and has lossless downloads.
How about normal people.
How New Hampshire's lack of Internet connectivity is crippling the state
Regardless of how much value it provides, we have no choice if we want to sell on the platform. In a hypothetical world where we could either sell ourselves or go through Apple, if it really provided that much value, everyone would still go through Apple. I kind of doubt that would be the case.
Mobile App Design That Scales
Code Is a Job – Garann Means
Energy is fungible at an efficiency loss. If solar gets cheap enough we'll use it, water, and atmospheric CO2 to synthesize hydrocarbons. At that point your boats and planes are net carbon neutral. It's getting carbon-free energy that cheap that's the challenge.

EDIT: I hope the OP wasn't getting downvotes. It was a reasonable thing to worry about.
I think they realized that they can easily influence our political landscape by pushing desired candidates and ideas to the top of the search engine results.

But what he said does have truth to it. Most people are employees (they need to be told what do do). It's just an easier way to live.

*Edit: I forgot. So many people on HN work for Google and I can't criticize the king.
Internet of Things (IoT) – What Is It and Why Do We Care
Retro: Neat use of ports as high-level API from inside a VM (stack language)
1. 3/4 of energy usage is outside the transportation sector.

2. If we switch 3/4 of energy production away from fossil fuels, that will make a huge dent and make renewables even cheaper.

3. Once renewables get cheap enough, it may be cheaper to use a few kWh of solar to produce one kWh of ethanol than it will be to dig 1 kWh of oil out of the ground.
>It is not necessary to put dbo. in front of table names in SQL server.

Depending on default schema, it definitely can have performance considerations on compilation.

Maybe some of those team conventions are actually based on real world things.

From: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd283095%28v=sql.10...

SELECT * FROM Table1

Will assess the following statement first: SELECT * FROM <defaultschema>.Table1

If it cannot find the object, the server will assess the following statement: SELECT * FROM dbo.Table1.

The assessment process can be improved by using either the fully qualified name or the DEFAULT_SCHEMA option described earlier. By setting a value for DEFAULT_SCHEMA for the user, the server will check the DEFAULT_SCHEMA first, removing an unnecessary ownership checking process. This can improve performance considerably on heavily utilized systems.
Loved this the last(?) time a discussion on Fourier visualizations was on the front page. These visualizations really help with breakthrough moments.

I'm surprised nobody has yet linked to the video of Fourier series for drawing Homer Simpson.
First of all, some kind of periodic status meeting is a necessary evil. Everyone hates giving status reports and justifying time. It's humiliating and time-consuming. It probably has to happen. If you don't have a scheduled, formal status reporting, you end up with impromptu status pings that are astronomically more annoying and lead people to give up on getting anything done (because there's nothing more anxiety-inducing and flow-breaking than an unreliable environment in which you can be expected to give status at any time).

The upper limit for senior people before they start to get pissed off is probably: the lowest of 10 minutes per week person, or 60 minutes for a weekly meeting, or 20 minutes for a daily meeting. So with a team of 8, you can either have a 60-minute meeting or daily 16-minute meetings. With a team of 4, you're limited to 40 minutes for a weekly meeting or 8 minutes of status reporting for a daily meeting.

Standups are good insofar as they allay toxic suspicion that <Person X> isn't contributing. They're like prisons: not innately good, but the aspect of human nature that they exist to control or mitigate is worse.

Of course, most seasoned people realize that the game of status reporting is like playing Scrabble. It's not about dropping the 100-point words. It's about not opening up the board (and getting nagged with follow-on questions).

Now, I believe you that most of these Agile methodologies were designed with better intentions. I absolutely agree. But they devolve. We've seen that, over and over and over. They don't fix things. They make tolerably broken things more intolerably broken. If you're in an environment where business runs the show and engineers just implement (i.e. business-driven engineering) then the right thing to do, often, is to become politically inert, silently learn new skills, and save your energy (slack) while opportunities are few so you can step up when the business-driven engineering regime goes away (or when you change companies). Scrotum gets in the way of that, and by putting such an emphasis on micro-estimates (numbers that will always turn into political tools) it generates politics.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone like blizzard said something similar about the App Store.
Using Scopes with Laravel 5
You're forgetting all the money that we had to spend on marketing.
Doesn't seem to support iOS, so I wouldn't recommend it for any development where you are hoping to earn money, but could be a fun thing to play around with and learn, maybe, I guess.
no, but let's say that either Jeb or Hillary wins a couple of terms. If that occurs, then at the end of their term, we'll be able to say there have been THREE different last names in the white house in the last 35 years.

Political dynasties are real.
"No action" you mean like them adding in-app-purchases, better monitoring, easier provisioning, faster submission and check process, unified iOS+Mac subscriptions, bundles, and tons of other things?
An overview of the language:

http://retroforth.org/docs/An_Introduction_to_Retro.html
The part that shocked me (and prefaced section 6) is the chart in section 2: these are all _additions_ to the current energy grid. We're still adding so much coal when we should stop building these plants right now.

Not to mention the continued development of Canadian tar sands, which falls outside the electricity generation equation but is still part of the global emissions picture.
They are making artists pay for their user acquisition. I still call that profiting off of someone else's work without compensating them.
The next few decades are gonna be a great time to say "I told you so." :-/
Music takes about 0.1% of my iPhone nominal usage... even when I'm doing other stuff.

I use my iPhone for business and personal connectivity - taking calls, sharing webex, emails, SMS/imessages, etc.

Once in a while I listen to music. It's great. However, I see no reason why artists of that music should get a piece of Apple's pie here.
I think you're comparing Rust to a language with ad-hoc polymorphism like C++ (where you pay for the somewhat simpler signatures with confusing template instantiation errors), and I'm very glad we didn't follow the C++ route. Rust's generics are very similar to those of Haskell.

The only major generics-related issue that is getting some significant thought is the ability to have the automatically derive the return type on top-level functions, which is not something that is common in other statically typed languages (only C++ and those with whole program type inference, which has its own set of drawbacks).
No reason to be sorry, it just may have benefited your post a bit. One of the mods may still make the change.
I'm an adjunct professor who teaches five classes. I earn less than a pet-sitter
It will be amazing if Bush doesn't end up with the nomination. In past elections, his money advantage would be a lock. Even allowing for disruptive technological/cultural changes, his stance as the moderate nominee is a huge advantage in blue/purple states that tend to look for the candidate most likely to swing their state.
Show HN: GlobeWhere – Revolutionize the way you plan your trips
It#s better in that it meets needs other products don't. That's why people buy it.
I'm observing my own personally biased sample set. :-)

- I played in a jazz band in college: across all of the department jazz bands, probably 95% male participants.

- Attending the local symphony: approximately half and half, and I do seem to find the male/female ratio in classical music performances tends to be more balanced.

- Perusing musical instrument stores across the country: predominantly male shoppers.

- Listening to recorded music: I don't consciously (or, I think, even unconsciously) select music based on the sex of the artist. Most music I've listened to has been produced either mostly or entirely by male participants. More specifically, I listen to a lot of jazz and jazz-related genres of music; it's rare that I even encounter a female performer in those genres. (Rare, as in, maybe 5-10% of the time.)

- Playing music in local bands: most other participants have been male.

I personally suspect that high school band participation is, at least in some cases, driven by external motivators besides intrinsic musical interest. In my (again anecdotal) observations, many people who were actively involved in high school bands put their instruments away more or less permanently after high school.

Anyway, again, I have no concrete statistical data, and I certainly agree that high school participation is more balanced.
I'd be interested in a variant that uses travel time for the length of edges, and time to reach street level for the diameter of vertices. Bonus points if these were to reflect current conditions such as delays caused by "passenger action".
The marketing picture hasn't changed for 99.999% of developers. Unless you're fortunate to get featured by Apple, you still have to do all the work yourself.
Show HN: Robin – OpenTable for your office
> (Yes, that includes Option<>.)

Why? Seems to me that it's precisely equivalent to Golang's error handling story (assuming you mean something like Result). In fact, it's a lot easier to handle errors individually that way, both because it tends to make it harder to use a return value without checking for errors and because its generic nature means that you can handle different errors differently without having to deal with interfaces.

If you mean that it's more typing to write "return err" and it forces you to think about it more, I don't really buy that. "return err" is 10 characters; "map" (e.g. in Haskell) is 3 and "try!()" is 6. I really doubt that the difference between 3 and 10 characters has any practical outcome. For Golang programmers, "return err" is muscle memory.
The supercomputer in your pocket statement is meaningless. A calculator in my pocket in 1991 was a supercomputer compared to an abacus or the Apollo 11 computer. A gsm or star-tac motorola cell phone in my pocket in 1997 was a supercomputer compared to that calculator. So what?
New discovery at Stonehenge: ground radar reveals “Super Henge” and buildings
You can get a copy here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131103628
I agree there are some costs, but I think that the amount Apple feels entitled to take is still distasteful. As there is no competition, the pricing is quite high.
"The lifetime cost of a photovoltaic solar-power plant will drop by almost half over the next 25 years".

Can someone explain how big of an impact this is?
The slavery-like dynamics of the immigration system is a surprising mismatch, versus the typical American business culture.

For comparison, I've spent time in a few countries where a slavery-like relationship with employers is completely expected and even supported by the employees. (Culture shock!) They imagine that it's the only way that businesses can function.

This isn't the type of business culture you want to live in, no matter the perceived benefits.
3. Ethanol or hydrogen?
As someone who made the switch to safety razors, I have to say that with practice the shaving time gets within a few minutes of cartridge shaving. Cartridge shaving was taking me about 5 minutes, and I've gotten safety razor shaving down to about 7 minutes.

Part of the time savings is going with a tubes of shaving cream. The cream (Proraso in my case) lathers quickly and consistently, and is vastly superior to the canned stuff.

In the end, after becoming fully adjusted, I find that safety razors are just as convenient, give a better shave, and are far cheaper than cartridge razors. It takes just a minute or two longer.
Definitely subscribe to Numberphile if you thought that was interesting. One of my favorite YouTube channels.
Ok, but what evidence suggests this to you other than optimism? What I see is dynamic languages having more underpinnings of fast native code or things like web assembly, which make them effectively faster.

I don't see any evidence that dynamic languages in general will somehow get much faster though.
WiFi iZ banned in the area by law, and the FCC can fine violators, it's just there's nobody nearby with the authority to enforce the ban https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio...
What makes me think it hinders democracy are the studies (as highlighted in, for instance, Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy) showing that democratic sustained with fewer viable parties and less proportional representation in the national legislature, which the US system is a notable example of in both cases, produce governments with which citizens are less satisfied than other democratic systems.
Can't believe I hadn't heard of that before. That's an amazing story!
If I had told George Orwell that people would pay for the right to have an always on microphone in their house, he would have said, "That's to far fetched even for me. I'll stick with the government forced TV in the living room."
Disclaimer: I work for AWS (not Amazon but part of Amazon).

I like the idea that this is backed by a service that has an API that can call out to other APIs. It has an "app store".

I think you can sign up for the SDK already: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/devices/echo

It's one of the only devices in my home I use as often as my cell phone.

I look forward to the day when I can push information back to the echo using apps like tripit:

"ranman your flight is leaving in 2 hours, should I call an uber or give you the train schedule?"

"It's lunch time, want to see what's in the neighborhood you haven't tried recently?"

"You have an incoming skype call from X"

"Welcome home, want me to turn on the news?"

The only downside is that it depends on always on and fast connectivity.

I'm not particularly concerned about the privacy of it all (I do recognize the concerns other people have) but I would be interested in learning more about how the privacy is handled.

The other interesting device in this category is the Jibo: https://www.jibo.com/ but I haven't seen any of the details on the developer side of that yet.