skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The speaker said that SciPy uses Boost Python. My comment here was that it does not. I said nothing about SciPy's performance.

I didn't say that my co-worker was the first to compute the derivatives. I said that it wasn't that complex of a task. Mark Nelson worked out by hand the second derivatives for the force fields and implemented them in NAMD (note: NAMD is not VMD). He also checked it against a couple of other implementations, including the one in XPLOR. I think he also checked against PMD and YAMD, and I believe he noticed that the PMD implementation was copied from XPLOR.

My point is that it's not hard to find these manually. In any case there's little need to figure it out from scratch since nowadays the force-fields are available in code with a permissive license, and the math available in publications like https://books.google.com/books?id=GYTuCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA168&lpg=... .

It can make sense to develop new tooling to generate code automatically. The result might be faster than manual code, but as we heard, the auto-generated code is currently 10% slower than manual code. Or it might make sense when developing many different types of force fields, like what Konrad Hinsen does in ScientificPython (see http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.97.... ). However, I heard nothing about developing new force fields, and in any case, parameterization is the limiting factor, not computing the second derivatives.

My 'quibbles' are two-fold. The major one is that I heard or read 30+ years of history on how molecular modeling can be used to design solutions to real-world problems. The 1980s thought that it would be a CAD problem (which it wasn't). The late 1990s thought it was a simple matter of nanotech, with all sorts of designs for nifty diamond-based structures with no real-world hope. We've had special purpose programming languages for molecular modeling, custom computers with specialized networks, custom designed chips, GPU-based implementations, and more.

There's no evidence that the limitation is in the tooling, which is a major part of the speaker's thesis.

The minor one is that if someone makes minor mistakes that end up placing the speaker in a brighter light, and says them with confidence, then I believe it's reasonable to discount more the major points said with confidence which have less evidence, and which also place the speaker in a brighter light. What you see as quibbles for minor points I see as a way to judge how strongly the speaker is willing to trust personal beliefs over evidence and proof. (Yes, those personal beliefs might be right, but that's my previous point.)
Google launches free music streaming ahead of Apple Music
Calls with links, instead of phone numbers
Speaking as someone who isn't much of a Ruby user, what do you expect to see? I mean, when you have Smalltalk-style messaging and metaprogramming, that's a relatively timeless and composable base.
There's a passenger seat in a Car2Go.

They could just make the previous owner responsible for cleanliness (a fine or fee if dirty) and I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem.
"I can only guess they're using the Mail because they think it's funny."

Ironically, given your self-professed superior tastes in reading material, Deepmind seems to have a better ability to read, comprehend, and answer questions about articles than you do.
The article explains it very well and in detail. None of his employers wanted to sponsor a green card, because it was too expensive, too much hassle, and too risky.
When they make enough money, do you un-sterilize them?
wasted space = more pages!
Meh. Google has what, 20,000 engineers? So even a normal turnover rate is thousands every year. This is a "dog bites man" story.
What exactly would you like to see?
> a slavery-like relationship with employers is completely expected and even supported by the employees

Actually, that sounds like America's start-up culture
Erm... no. They mostly love what they do and would do it as a hobby even if they didn't get paid for it. However musicians absolutely despise most kinds of live shows.
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, that the US is losing out on that valuable tax money.

However, I'd argue you're still a net gain for the US, because your work - the value derived from it - is very likely quite a lot more valuable than what you're charging for it. In tech, often worker input is worth several times what they're paid for it. You're making a valuable net contribution to the US economy.

Not as much of a net gain as it would be if you were here also paying taxes.
Why would you think there's a possible break in environmental equilibrium due to solar energy. They amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere won't change. The only thing that changes is instead of the energy being wasted, it will be used to generate electricity. Conservation of energy guarantees this.

You asked for research, so here's a link from UCS. While they don't address that particular point, they do point out various potential problems. http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewa...
(S)he doesn't, it's an example of something ranman is looking forward to.
Announcing Lotus for Ruby v0.4.0
google for pandoc...
Zapier is hiring a remote platform engineer
What's awesome is that there are so many valid ways to interpret the math. My favorite way to understand fourier transforms is the linear algebra approach. You start with the fact that the best approximation for a vector in some subspace is the projection of that vector onto the subspace. This makes total sense visually. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Pr... So if you want to approximate something, it's really nice if you can make it look like a vector and just do a projection.

After that you just do what mathematicians do, you generalize. It turns out that if you define addition of functions in a logical way, and if you define dot product (or inner norm) of 2 functions in a somewhat clever way, you get a vector space that you can do projections with.

The next thing you do once you have a vector space is figure out a natural set of basis vectors. For normal 2d space, we pick <1,0> and <0,1>. It turns out that you get really nice properties if the vectors have a length of one and if they are at right angles to each other. The concept of right angles can be generalized by saying their inner product is zero. At that point there's no more 90 degree angle, but the vectors are still independent in some useful sense.

It turns out that if you define "multiplication" as multiplying 2 functions together and looking at the area under them, then basically all the sin and cos waves are orthogonal. If you multiply by the right factor, you can some up with a sin wave where the area under the curve is one. So now you have a whole bunch of "vectors" that are orthogonal and have a "length" of one. So now all you have to do is measure the component of your target function along each "axis" of your set of basis vectors and you have an approximation. That projection is pretty easy. In 2d world if you wanted to "project" <5,6> onto <1,0> you'd just drop the 6 and get <5,0>. "projecting" x*x along sin(x) is conceptually pretty similar. It's just defined in terms of the inner norm from before.

One thing I've left out because they aren't intuitively obvious to me. Sin and Cos waves form a basis for continuous functions on an interval. That means that if you can use "all" the sin and cos waves in your approximation, you'll get the original function back. If they weren't a basis, then your approximation could only get so good.

So that's my POV. Every time I think of fourier transforms, I think of a little flashlight shining above a 3d vector that's casting a shadow onto a 2d plane.
I have never encountered any opposition to high-skill immigration among lawyers. There would be no point--entry into the profession is already gated by the JD/LLM/bar exam requirements. The problem is that getting a greencard requires your employer to prove that they can't find a qualified domestic candidate, which is difficult when large law firms take only 10-15% of the domestic JD graduating class each year and a third to half are unemployed.
What If IT People Were Game of Thrones Characters?
Do you have a source for that? My quick look at wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_track_(trade)

The procedure section shows Congress to have the ability to pass it to committees for at most 45 days and then they have at most 15 days after that to vote on it.

That seems to imply that it would be public for a maximum of 2 months, but I don't know much about this area.
Yeah, it does seem like more a problem of philosophy or perspective than a lack of advanced technology. We have all of the ingredients for a variety of dishes, but it seems we're settling into one basic recipe: centralized lockdown.
A lot of Moto devices actually are "always listening" -- they have a co-processor that just listens for the "OK, Google" hotword.
Well, that's not true. Ruby's changed massively since the 1.8 series. What are you expecting to see that you're not?
"Xbox Select" on the Xbox One as well.
No, I haven't. How do they work if you can't look at the screen? Siri tends to be bad about that. Like "how's the weather" gets a response of "Here's the forecast:" and shows it on the screen.

One of the things with Echo is that it doesn't have a screen, so everything has voice responses.
I was going to cosign this but then I saw Arch Enemy. Substitute Bolt Thrower and we have a deal.
Any chance you'd be willing to write a bit more about your support for open borders? In particular, I'm interested in knowing whether you think this is a situation where it would be both moral and beneficial, or if you feel that it is simply wrong to limit where people can live and work based on where they were born (or even where their grandparents were born) even if the overall effect on current citizens of some regions would be negative.

Interesting that the author of this piece comes from New Zealand, because NZ is the country that often springs to mind when I think of a nation that might could change dramatically with open borders.

I haven't been there, but I understand New Zealand is a country about the geographical size of California and Oregon put together (a bit larger), with spectacular natural landscapes, and a very small population (much smaller than the island would be capable of supporting). What would happen to New Zealand if they unilaterally opened up their borders? To keep it simple, let's not worry about malicious people, I just mean honest, hard working immigrants who seek a better life. Should New Zealand open up borders to unlimited migration? Is there a moral imperative for them to do so?
It is an indisputable fact that I paid for my Echo, and that my information as a result of that purchase is used by Amazon, where they may profit from me when I purchase more products. I do not believe that Amazon grossly misuses my data; what reason do I have not to trust them? My value to them is derived from my purchasing decisions.

It is an indisputable fact that I didn't pay for Chrome, and Google doesn't care at all about what I buy because they're not selling me anything. My value to them is derived from the data I provide, in many cases, unwillingly.

So, respectfully, I'm not "Wrong", and it's presumptuous to say so.
A simple explanation of Bitcoin “sidechains”
So on which climate sensitivity estimate are you basing your comment, and why are you choosing it in preference to others?

A compilation of at least 30 published studies based upon satellite and ocean observations demonstrate climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 levels after all feedbacks is only about 0.5 C, which is ~7 times less than the 3.2C claimed by the IPCC AR5 modelled mean estimate.
Very cool & Interesting Stuff Kevin

-Shankar
...a topologist is someone who can't figure out whether to dip their doughnut into their coffee mug or vice versa.
A Simple Trick to Improve Your Decision-Making Process
Facebook now worth more than Wal-Mart on stock market
Reads like FUD, also it is from January 2015.
That's generally a true statement about anything that could foreseeably be good for the US economy. What's good for the economy is good for investors, and, apart from (vast numbers of) state employees with defined benefit pension plans managed by huge investment firms, investors aren't workers.
That's a reasonable way to look at it, I think. Except imagine an ARP where there were thousands of very highly paid network engineers constantly monitoring the tables.
Everyone except the very rich are about to get slapped in the face by a whole slew of bad policy decisions :\
Part of the problem with improving the system is that there's simply no incentive. Immigration reform almost entirely centers on managing undocumented/illegal immigrants. Law Makers don't have to listen to petitions from people outside of the country let alone their own jurisdictions.

The other part is that people who've suffered through the process don't turn around and try to fix it, I remember when my wife was going through the process almost 2 decades ago (and it took us something like 2-3 years to get through it), not one of the employees in immigration we dealt with were obvious former immigrants. If people who finally made it in turned around and went into government service and tried to fix the hellscape they went through, it would probably be better. But most people seem to be glad to get through the process and then get as far away from it as possible.

All that being said, people who I know who've gone through the process recently report a vastly simpler and streamlined process from the one we went through. So there is improvement being made.

For better or worse, the difficulties around immigration come purely from limiting the number of immigrants. If immigration entry was virtually unlimited, these stories wouldn't happen. I'll leave it up to you to decide if unlimited immigration is a good or bad thing.
You can't --- it has no inside.

You could probably put a carbonated drink on it, though...
You're conflating can and do, so neither.
It's about the trend and the environment not the numbers.
As long as a solar panel is lower albedo than the object it's installed on, the effects you're mentioning will be an improvement over the baseline effects of human development. If you start replacing fields with solar farms you may have to worry, but for a rooftop installation a solar panel will absorb more energy than the average tar or asphalt shingle roof surface.
Oh, whoops! Neat.
hahaha, I prefer pc to smartphone
PC still the winner and more enjoyable!!! \0/
Oh, of course - I'm just playing the game too. Technically correct: the best kind of correct.
What are the penalties for trying to leave it? I think that that's the defining factor, for what we're talking about here.
I don't think there are many mass-market products out there left to be created that don't involve insane amounts of hard science R&D. By that I mean products that are so flexible as to be universally useful (i.e. the smartphone). Any revolutionary consumer product at this point is going to require a civilization-level scientific breakthrough.

I think what we have now in tech in general is a long tail of products catering to different use cases. The Apple Watch is one of those -- and it's not for everyone. Apple realizes that, which is why their sales targets for the watch were pretty low by Apple standards. Will Apple sell 100 million watches? Probably not. You see this in a bunch of other areas as well; IoT, virtual reality, etc. None of the use cases is universal enough to rise to the level of a smartphone; but there's a big enough market to support innovation.
And I personally found "Hey Siri" to be triggering enough false positives that I couldn't leave that feature on.
I don't think that works both ways.
The Echo is awesome; my girlfriend and I have had it for the last few months and LOVE being able to just play music by telling it to play. It's also an AMAZING bluetooth speaker; seriously, it's so fucking loud and on point. It's worth every penny.
The intent is to keep false accepts down for the trigger phrase.
It's not just the error rates. Criminal trials are enormously expensive. Every time an accused person goes to trial on incontestable facts, they are taking resources away from people have been accused without facts or law backing the prosecutors up. The results are an even more kafka-esque nightmare for the innocent accused, who must wait in holding cells for court dockets to open up to make time for their exoneration.
Thing is, Chomsky is (at least partly) responsible for the so-called Cognitive Revolution. Look up B.F Skinner and notice what happened to his career after Chomsky reviewed one of his papers. Skinner's brand of behaviorism was surely something we didn't need around anymore. He also changed the way everyone thinks about language. Before Chomsky, there really was no real theory of syntax that was even close to being scientific and formal.

Although probabilistic machine learning methods replaced the Chomskyan brand of formal theoretic methods in NLP, a lot is owed to is work. Obviously there is the Chomsky Hierarchy but even things like the Penn Treebank POS tags are taken straight out of work in the Generative tradition from circa 1970 (not sure why no one has tried the updated and more accurate tags currently being used in theoretical linguistics). Anyways I could go on and on but Im wondering what your Dad has to say about this ?

P.S There is an ongoing joke in the field of Linguistics about people who either think they understand Chomsky or just straight up don't understand him. Its difficult stuff.
Even if the objective is to limit immigration, the rules are arbitrary. Like bureaucracy in general, it is also counterproductive to the economy. Skilled immigrants, after all aren't like industrial pollution or worker safety or pharmaceutical drugs to be deliberately doomed to bureaucratic labyrinths.
Is This Game-Changing Web Tech a JavaScript Killer?
Energy storage solutions are getting better, but energy storage research didn't really pickup till the 1990s.

Pumped Hydro (~80% efficiency) is still the best large-scale energy storage mechanism in the USA. Maybe in a few years Redox-Flow Batteries (Or flywheels, or Lithium, or Compressed Air, or...) will catch up to technologies from the 1960s and we can have advanced energy storage.

But for now, the vast vast majority of energy storage is basically pumping water up a hill and letting it back down at a later time. Something like 95% of the entire USA's energy storage is pumped hydro.
you take money from other areas that need it like healthcare, parental leave, education, etc.

That's a truism. Investing money in one sector necessarily means it doesn't go to another. All that money spent on education is one that isn't going to space research, but most people would find that sort of statement abhorrent.
Rare earth mineral mining also gets that subsidy as does the manufacture of PV panels.
I'm Hiring Full Stack Java Developrs in Burlington, MA
The mandatory 24/7 on-call support for your group, (week or two at a time, every month?) is a huge negative. My friends groups product was for mainly normal working hours professionals on the west coast so he didnt get the crazy all night shenanigans that other groups had.
I've been waiting for that point to emerge, eventually used to denounce "clean renewables" by the same people now promoting them.

When scaled up to the hoped-for levels, we face the prospect of "solar strip-mining" whereby vast areas of land where sunlight used to reach ground is now blocked. How bad would it be?

Just to bracket the subject with a SWAG (corrections welcome): total USA electricity consumption is 534,938,184,000 watts. Practical maximum for solar is about 1,000 watts per square meter (a very optimistic collection & conversion rate). That works out to a minimum of 200 square miles (534 km^2) devoted entirely to solar collection, or 2,000 mi^2 for a more realistic solar efficiency. The upside is the latter is just 0.05% of total USA land area, hopefully with most of that being used on already-erected roofs.

What the climactic effect of 534,938,184,000 solar watts being converted into electricity instead of heat or photosynthesis is, I'll hope someone else figures out whilst I do lunch.
1 - Storage. Ignoring developments in storage as part of the build out for renewable power will always make it seem as though you need loads of baseload. And storage is far better developed than fusion. It exists for one thing.

2 - Is ignoring the research done by the grids themselves that indicate they can save money on link upgrades by building out lithium storage systems.

3 - solar panels are nearly all silicon, the storage is mostly lithium and nickel and copper. Some polluting compounds get used, but come on, we are comparing to oil, gas, coal and nuclear. To crap as much in the capital production of devices that last decades as is produced by a chemical fuel economy requiring constant replenishment over the same timescale, would be pretty impressive.
Tell HN: Kevin and I are doing HN office hours Friday from 11 am to 1 pm PDT
Kevin and I are going to try doing online office hours on HN this Friday.

We'll create a thread at 9 am PDT, and interested companies (or people) can submit a top-level comment with a brief overview of what they're working on and a first question. Then we'll let HN vote on the projects, and do office hours via back-and-forth comments with the top 5 companies as of 11 am.

You can ask about anything you want related to your startup, but the way office hours work at YC is we try to identify the biggest problem you're currently facing and then brainstorm things you can try.
Could you link some of those 'baby studies' you are referring to ?
I love programming, if only for its vocabulary. Where else can you use bangs, splats, sloshes, whacks and thunks on a daily basis? Apart from the comic book industry that is.
Credit Karma Has Raised $175M on a Valuation of $3.5B
I got one of these for work with my office decorating budget because I thought it would be cool to hack on it. Maybe even set it up to do silly dev-related tasks like "Alexa, how many users are active right now?" and "Alexa, comment 'looks good' on Janet's pull request."

What I found, though, was that it was a divisive product. 50% of the office thought it was neat, 40% didn't care, and 10% hated it with a surprising passion. Privacy concerns were brought up, but the biggest complaint was just that it was "creepy."

We ended up unplugging it and leaving it in a corner because it wasn't worth making people uncomfortable for a largely useless toy.
Moral imperatives do not always correlate with survival imperatives. I'm not going to say whether or not I believe in immigration, but there are two things I will say:

1. Arguments against immigration stem not from moral imperatives, but from survival instinct.

2. If we open up immigration, America as we know it will change dramatically, in either a good or bad way. I think what we have now is already pretty good, so why change the status quo?
Wow, someone doesn't like movies very much.
"But the dismaying fact remains that the majority of art-house cinema treats science fiction as a means to acquire a veneer of philosophical gravitas, while freeing the auteur from the burden of writing a story that makes the slightest bit of sense."

Science Fiction aside, you could say much the same thing about "Groundhog Day," "It's a Wonderful Life," and "Pan's Labyrinth." Any movie with a bit of "magical thinking" and "what if..." That's the whole point of huge swaths of movies from every category of cinema! Even romance and drama -- with seemingly solid footing in reality draws on the implausible to make things interesting. You really think a successful Richard Gere would fall head over heels in love with a prostitute (even one who looks like Julia Roberts)?

If you want "science" why are you looking in "science fiction"?