skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your broader point - that we're a lot more likely to find useful things using some guidance as to where useful things are likely to be than in proceeding randomly - is important.

A crucial difference between digging for oil and doing math, however, is the nature of the externalities. In either case, you're burning some work that could be spent somewhere better, but with oil you're left with a hole that you probably want not to be there and there's no good way to put it back. In both drilling and math, "drilling" helps us refine our methods. In the case of math exploring more of the ramifications of our axioms also helps raise our confidence that they're not subtly inconsistent.

And of course, math is generally less expensive than an oil well.

I don't know where the cost-benefit analysis puts work on math when we don't yet see practical application. And I think that's often over-romanticized. However, I do think there are a lot of reasons we should expect the analysis to come out more favorably than for drilling random holes.
>> This ignores that genetic code is meaningless without the translation machinery

Not really. The translation machinery is also defined in the DNA. Granted, there is a bootstrapping issue. The chimp argument seemed silly to me. Why not just estimate so fraction of the human genome as defining the brain? In that case 3G base pairs is a bit under one gigabyte of information defining an entire human. Still small in comparison to the quantity of synapses.
Here's a link to the actual document:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1697...
Hey, I am writing a book on python for non-beginners
To borrow Winston Churchil's phrasing: America is the worst possible global hegemon, except for all the others.
It's a nice notion but I've yet to see an existence proof that a machine can do that. It's not about just passing the Turing test and fooling humans, I'm sure that will happen, but I mean the more nuanced qualities of how the machine fails, how it is able to tweak and be more thoughtful of the situation. When NLP / smart text systems make a tiny mistake, it's quite egregious / silly and we can immediately detect it (but since the machine lacks knowledge of social constructs, physics of the world, idioms, and other idiosyncrasies that we have, it doesn't know what it doesn't know).
We've seen some legitimate posts consistently reported and removed. There are definitely fishy dynamics.
So it can resolve dependencies of different versions? For example if there are three packages that each depend on different versions?

foo v1.0.1
foo v2.0
foo v1.5
People who live in places that actually have drive-by shootings (note: probably does not include Canada) do not shout "hit the deck! drive-by!" when they hear loud popping.

Gunshots don't really sound like fireworks. If you've ever been near angry gunfire (even from a safe distance), you probably don't forget the difference.

My money remains on "they're fucking with you" but with the bruises added to my priors, my backup is "you were hanging out with really dumb people".
I definitely seen them used in that manner... but at only 8 pins (two of which are probably power), its hard for me to imagine good future-proofing in only 6-pins.

I guess 28-pin CPLDs are already made though (Atmel ATF750C). But I really don't see how a 6-pin FPGA can be used for routing / future proofing.
Sounds like you might enjoy freelancing more? Not sure how it works in the RoW - but in the UK you look for contracts, when you find one setup your Ltd Co and engage an accountant - and you're set --- with the added bonus that your will stick with you employer (yourself) for many years.
thanks for your response.

i would imagine spectral controls to be less useful for leafy greens. will the spectral controls be remote controllable? ie; an api over some type of wifi connection?
For context, I assume you're referring to this [0]? I think it's a bit more nuanced than you're letting on here.

[0] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/127
Like I said, this is a really good point, and it supports including algorithmic complexity as part of the Java API in the future, but unless I am mistaken, it currently is not formally included.
Eh, I think it's a matter of perspective. Parents don't care about the millions of sperms that died on the way to fertilize an egg. They only care about the one that made it. You're thinking about it from the perspective of the sperm. I think the authors perspective was from that of the parents.
> humans are the stupidest possible creatures that can build a civilization

Many insects have quite elaborate 'civilizations' or at least colonies, and it's doubtful that each individual bug is very intelligent.
Don't worry. This stuff is ultimately judged by the biases of whoever is reading your CV, and people vary a lot.

If an employer is particularly worried about employee staying for extended periods, your record will work against you and you won't get that job, all else equal. But, that's not as bad as it sounds. Some employers value people with Math Degrees. Some prefer PHDs. Some don't. Some employers don't like autodidacts. etc. A 1.5 year average employment period is in that category of preferences. Different employers will treat it differently. Same applies to your time as a freelancer.

Long term, 1-2 year stints early in your career is not usually seen as indicative of anything later on. It's common. So unless it is not causing you problems now, it probably won't later on.

I don't know how it looks when you get to 10X1.5 year jobs though. It would certainly make you an unusual candidate. I've never hired someone with that much experience so never seen these CVs.

The real "problem" cases are people with multiple < 1 year jobs. If your last 3 jobs were under one year, most employers will see that as "The last 3 people that hired him regretted it." That doesn't sound like your record though so like I said, don't worry.

Also, just building your CV your whole life sounds like a drag. Staying at a job you dislike for years just to change your CV image is like taking a job you don't want or doing a degree you hate for your CV, it's unattractive as a lifestyle. If you like changing jobs, do it.
Joshua Topolsky, Bloomberg Web Chief, Said to Be Leaving Company
I've worked at 4 companies in three years. Any company worth working for doesn't give a shit and they'll recognize your abilities.
OTOH, Java 8u20 added string deduplication in the GC: https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/08/string-deduplication-...
How do you know other humans can truly experience "yellowness"? What if we're all just pretending and you're the only one?

Let's not talk about realistic AI for a moment, let's talk about hypothetically building a human protein by protein (or whatever building block you're comfortable with saying doesn't have qualia on its own). We're going to write the computer program to build this human. Nanobots will carry it out, every part of the process is understood and nothing is left for biology to do for us. We're just putting together lego blocks and at the end is a human indistinguishable from any other human.

Does this person experience qualia? How would you know? Apparently you can't just ask, since this isn't a valid thing to do with a computer (it's not really experiencing qualia! It's just saying that!).

Let's just say you come up with some objective qualia test. Now we can build a slightly more deficient human protein by protein and test it for qualia. In fact, we can do a qualia binary search and...

Once you take apart the argument like this, it's easy to see that arguments that computers can't experience qualia are arguments against materialism or reductionism, or are patent attempts to sneak souls and other woo into the discussion.
The translation machinery is nowhere represented in the DNA. Its the cell soup, that came from mother and her mother before her, back to the primordial soup. Dna is the paper tape; the egg is the computer (or autofac, or self-replicating machine etc). That paper tape has nowhere the instructions for making the egg; only detail for how it operates.
It's not that you have changed jobs, it's how and why you have done it. From your description you seem to be directionless, impatient, and prone to experimenting over informing yourself properly. Yeah I would definitely consider you 'unreliable'.
> more than a dozen different resources

I believe the end-game count is 43 these days.
> to experience the color yellow, as opposed to classifying a visual stimulus as being of a certain wavelength

I've been wondering about this for a few years, can't find anything about that because it's too generic a search term. Is there a name, or references about this ?

ps: ha, these in-thread answers already give pointers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864479

<closed/>
No, it's common. Many developers focus on purely contract or project work, so 4 companies in one year isn't uncommon.

You have an increased validation in your hirability, as four different companies have thought you were good enough to give an offer to.
And are you worried about ethics?
> Physicists (and this guy is one of them) certainly do have a robust set of taboos against considering consciousness as a quantum phenomena

They really don't, but they do have taboos again ignoring the fact that there's no evidence for such a hypothesis, as do all scientists. Science is empirical and scientists don't generally just like to make shit up because it sounds cool.
There are algorithms that make algorithms. (Even if we assume that the brain doesn't run on algorithms.) Genetic programming has made algorithms, for instance.
Except you're looking at 3 seconds to power up your cell radio, before you can actually download the HTML.

You can cache all files in the app bundle with Cordova so the download happens during the install.

Until you need more, at which points you're spending all your time extending your hybrid framework.

Cordova makes it easy to build bridges through plugins. Moreover this promotes proper separation of concerns which lets you use the SAME view layer on different platforms, changing only the "client api bindings". It lets you truly think through a crossplatform system design AND the business logic of whether you'd like your invited users to start on the web experience and download the app for that + expanded functionality. So it informs your business model as well.

They do know "it's slow," in the case of Facebook.

When Zuck said that HTML5 was a mistake, Sencha made fastbook demo three years ago to show that facebook could have been sped up and was slow for a different reason. Since then it's been three years and two generations of phones. Things are even better now.

https://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-...

Until you spend six months rewriting all your apps.
Hybrid apps, on mobile, trade short term gains for long term maintenance nightmares. On the desktop, with a high bandwidth connection, and lots of power, they're less bad.
With a well written model layer on an iOS app, maintaining a desktop UI for most apps is the work of one or two developers. Sadly, desktop usage isn't worth it for most consumer facing startups. I've accepted that business reality.

Business reality you say? Well at least for mobile, it's this:

http://blog.venturepact.com/8-high-performance-apps-you-neve...

Hybrid apps have 20% HIGHER RATINGS in the app store than native.

Many top companies heavily use WebViews.

MacGap is getting better and this will become standard for the desktop, too.

Take our own Calendar app for example. It has over 60,000 active users in any given month (http://qbix.com/calendar) and having WebViews would SIMPLIFY our port to iOS and Android. Here is what we wouldn't have to rewrite and additionally maintain:

1) The view layer incl all reusable components
2) Caching of view models
3) The server side communication, incl websockets and realtime

And we get one more bonus:

4) Invited users can click a link and instantly get an account on the web, after which we can send them transactional notifications until they sign up. As opposed to being taken to an app store with a description, pictures and some ratings. Higher virality for the win!
I had no idea this was a thing. :O
There was a time when telechat (chat over telnet, mid-late 90s early 00s) was a pretty cool niche chat medium. I really miss it.

It allowed more customization and control than IRC for the host, and a bunch of small communities popped up around them.
It's worth noting that there are two sorts of posts that people will try to game the voting process - submissions by people who want the status of higher karma among their peers and submissions by startup founders who want "traction"[1]. That is to say, people believe there is actual, real tangible value in getting upvotes. To that end, while it'd be nice for HN to be more organic, unless there's a penalty for gaming the system it's not going stop just because people ask nicely.

[1] The traction you get on a site like HN is useful for feedback but it probably won't covert to sales unless you building something for other startups. It's not real take-it-to-the-investors traction.
Also a great Uncle Tupelo song (they repeatedly pronounce it for you!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7CGkuLEs5U

Briefly the name of my new company, too.
"This Beta release of Cloud Source Repositories is free and can be used to store up to 500 MB of source files."

No mention of future pricing structure.

https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/docs/prici...
So many of these complaints seem to focus on edge cases, what proportion of car journeys would really trigger 'range anxiety'? Even in the US I imagine such long trips are the exception for the majority of car owners.
Do something like:
NodeList.prototype.__proto__ = Array.prototype;
There's no fundamental difference between a corporate entity and a contract. Just because it has no physical manifestation doesn't mean it's a fiction.
It did happen, several times! But the randomness of weather, volcanoes, disease etc squashed them. Ours is just the lucky combination of critical mass and congenial weather patterns.

On the other hand, Neanderthal had quite a bigger brain than us; but fewer of the social impulses. We're likely dumber but more socialized, which reinforces your theme I guess!
There's quite a few that's been developed in both business and academia with some deployed. NSA didn't do shit except maybe backdoor the closed ones. Genode.org is one of better-structured one's that's FOSS and usable today. Build on it.

You can also negotiate source from one of the separation kernel vendors, compile it on target of your choice, and port L4Linux (user-mode Linux) to it to keep legacy apps. CHERI processor and CheriBSD are open source. EROS source was published and could be extended. JX Operating System has almost everything under JVM's safety protections with relatively small TCB. Cool tools like Softbound and Astree knock out bugs in what's left.

There's many tools to start with to get smaller, strong TCB's. They're just the only one's the open-source community doesn't work on. Tiny, tiny set of exceptions. People not wanting to worry about it can just build on Tinfoil Chat: largely eliminated TCB with clever use of data diodes and physical separation. A Moxie-coded version of that portable to arbitrary embedded systems could be made NSA-proof. So, there's options for anyone wanting to get started.

Meanwhile, I'll keep using GPG on airgapped machines with diverse hardware and interface protection. Only thing that works per Snowden leaks. For now...
You don't know if something has been gamed unless it's blatantly obvious or they're tweeting about it. So flagging doesn't solve that problem.
The Twin Cities is an interesting environment for that. It's so enterprise-heavy here (imho we're as much a tech city as Silicon Valley, just in a different expression), there are lots of people who stick to the same company for 10, 20 years or more.

As someone who has job-hopped a lot in this environment, the worst thing about it is tech environments where the leadership doesn't keep up with trends even on an awareness level. They just stick with the legacy stack they've been supporting for years, which can be incredibly wasteful and limiting. Their software is bad, but it's all they've known for so long that they have no clue how much better things can be. And then the contractors and other floaters they bring through are appalled, frustrated, and often flip quickly to the next job in hopes of less "maturity". Sigh.
Jeebus! We don't even have the books on the web like they do at places where you aren't allowed to select text. Talk about ruining the digital experience when you have it!
Please don't use flags as downvotes, though. Flag things that are inappropriate for HN. Don't flag things to try to rebalance the front page.
Why you failed to clone repository in GitHub?
There were other factors at play during this time which roughly coincided with the Dot Come Boom/Bust. In those days it was ship or die, "money was no object" (unintentional pun) and Sun would be happy to spend people out of their perf well by adding more cpus and ram.
I gotcha. Appreciate the tip.
So what would be the advantage of using Docker for deployment, as opposed to simply fire up a whole server based on a Vagrant image?
I have been trying to setup docker, but the tutorials on the web seem not to be focused on active development (at the moment). Can you link to some documentations from where I can learn about the workflow and transitions from old way of doing things to the docker way?
I had never heard of Cook, Serve, Delicious! and would have never bought it from seeing an ad or promotion, simply because the game's premise is so stupid-on-its-face...at best, it sounds like just another button pushing time management simulator...but I bought it because on Steam, it is one of the few Mac-compatible games that have an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating. I ended up liking it a lot...there's something soothing/cathartic about running a frantic diner even after coming home from real-life work. I think the amount of polish has a lot to do with it, everything from the responsiveness of the controls to the music and sound effects.
Yes.

The original computers were women in warehouses calculating actuary tables. They had a set of criteria to perform evaluations of numbers.

In short, you can reduce a subset of the human experience to algorithmic emulation, which, in effect, reduces a human to a computer. It's sort of what it means to do any job to be frank.
That's still simply luck; unfounded intuition is meaningless as it's wrong more often than not. That's it's occasionally correct is coincidence.
I'm not sure about the cloning, but having the names Whatsapp and Twitter in your app name could get the app banned.
I had not seen that device before, but I am going to buy some now.

The use case is for applications that require complex logic but do not require the overhead of a full-blown microprocessor. I could use this bugger in place of an MSP430 in the automatic pool leveller and barbecue temperature control devices I am (eventually) building.
The stuff they do to detect voting rings is broader than you might expect, so if you're submitting things and having them fail, consider not telling your friends about it.
Show HN: Declara – discover, collect, and share knowledge
How to Securely Generate Random Strings and Integers in PHP
Reproducibility is an issue in all scientific fields, it is not something unique to computer science. Can someone easily reproduce experiments performed in a particle accelerator? What about an extremely complex chemical reaction? The answer to these problems is to have more people doing research in that area to make sure that the problem is well understood, instead of requiring that scientists slow down the research because it needs to first achieve some kind of "engineering reproduction" standard.
Uh, this is like a blatantly reverse-racist article.
experience the color yellow, as opposed to classifying a visual stimulus as being of a certain wavelength

Purple is the weird one as it doesn't correspond to a wavelength, but can only be represented by a set.

Edit - all colours correspond to sets of sets, if you think about it, as you can experience exactly the same colour for essentially an infinite set of different sets of frequencies.
The Two Flavours of Hero Culture
Windows 10 will allow for installable web apps that behave like native (admittedly not much use to an audience that tends heavily toward OS X)
This economist article had a nice summary on this topic, 2014 (not about the same report, however). http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2163671.... The culprit is coal.
As far as I am aware, the only useful application of the food energy hypothesis to practical obesity management are the recommendations that people increase their daily physical activity, do resistance training to build muscle mass (thereby raising resting metabolic rate), and eat specific foods that may increase resting metabolic rate. Notable examples would be caffeinated black coffee and unsweetened tea, which provide nearly zero food energy while the caffeine temporarily boosts metabolism. Compounds found in Capsicum peppers are suspected of temporarily increasing metabolic rate (though the effect diminishes as the body acquires tolerance). The resveratrol in berries and grapes is also suspected of causing white adipose cells to temporarily become "beige", where they mimic brown adipose cells. That third recommendation is, in essence, to take [non-caloric, herbal] drugs to boost metabolism.

As you suggested, the element that makes it useless for practical adiposity management is the fact that human bodies adjust resting metabolic rates, psychological impulses to consume food, and psychological impulses to adjust physical activity levels in response to dietary intake. One person drinks a sweetened beverage and starts bouncing off the walls for the next two hours, burning off that extra energy. Another drinks an identical portion, then becomes lethargic and turns every last sugar molecule into stored lipids. We don't [yet] have a model that can predict a structured diet for a specific person that can reliably produce the desired effect.

The labels on food packages and the calorie counting websites get their numbers from nutritional assays, rather than in vivo measurements in actual humans. The latter would be prohibitively expensive, would produce results that are far less precise, and offer foods suppliers no competitive advantage.

This is why diet plans that don't require calorie counting are relatively popular. People just want to follow a diet where they can consistently lose excess adipose tissue without either literally working their asses off for hours a day, or constantly suppressing the psychological impulse to eat more than is allowed by the plan. Whatever other mechanisms may be in play, some diets work best for some people for just one reason: they can feel satiated and stop eating at a caloric intake level consistent with fat loss, without having to constantly do math during their day.
Practical GTD tips from a father / hacker
I posted MapChat (idoco.github.io/map-chat) three weeks ago at about the same time of the day and also got tons of traffic from HN.

HN crowd was brutal, and I wasn't really ready for that. People were trying to crash it in so many ways. But the overall experience was really fun :) and I also got some very valuable feedback.
What's security like at Tesla Supercharger stations? Some of the pictures make it seem like they're a bit isolated and unpopulated. Needing to wait for half an hour or whatever with your car plugged in (non-operable) would seem to make one a possible crime target. Plus, it'd be a safe assumption that you have money, given what you're driving around in.