FractalNerve

> The day the computer spontaneously invents a new and usable alphabet without having been specifically designed to do so is the day I will concede we have hard AI. We have a long way to go. Until then it's just a bunch of hotdog/not hotdog classifiers.

Happened already at Google and Facebook. Namely Neural Turing Machines have created an intermediate language, that's a more efficent encoding, without being designed to do so. See: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/googles-ai-translation-too...

But that's really old news and DNCs are more capable, afaik.

We're there already, officially: https://phys.org/news/2015-12-china-clone-factory-scientist-...

What can be done, will be done. Too much to win with military budgets here, that's only what hits the more and more strongly regulated public news.

Edit: My sentiment is to no trust any goverment denying mass experiments. Too much insanity in the politic, bureaucratic power lust.

I just searched for the bacteria mentioned in the article and it seems that you can simply BUY that online and even many other types of bacteria. Here's a link for the curious https://www.swansonvitamins.com/swanson-probiotics-lactobaci... I am in no way affiliated and recommend looking the company and products up.

Anyway I've a severe allergy against figs and hope I can one day eat them again.

I have never heard of these kind of bacteria and thought that probiotics is a scam in that it replaces your gut bacteria with ones that are genetically modified so that you "feel" bad without re-consuming them. I think it sounds crazy, while being in the technically possible realm with no law against that.

> * Give no feedback unless things go wrong

> * Treat your highly educated, intelligent and motivated devs like children by misusing agile in order to micromanage them

These two points made me cry. I suffered my very first burn-out due to that and although having a higher degree in computer science and love towards programming this really made me feel like a piece of shit. I have the feeling that it's really hopeless and it wants me to make the change to IT-Consulting instead of software-engineering.

Mistakes by Management:

* Accept that the Internal IT sabotages External IT (using politics/compliance/HR).

Background:

Interesting projects are often handed to external IT, while the internal IT is perfectly capable to implement most or parts of it, they're held back from the project by the management. However internal IT is very often the only rep the external IT can talk to. Management never allows true of co-operation of internal and external IT to restrict costs and to 'benchmark' the internal IT.

Real Story:

1) I'm the "external IT" and the internal IT together with their project-manager (senior enterprise architect) block all my communication to the client and want to be aware of everything beforehand.

2) They're unhappy with my progress, but blocked my selection of a cloud-computing instance via HR.

3) Just got access to their lowest tier EC2-instance via a ridiculously complicated connection processs.

4) I'm not error free, but my consultant manager is on the customer's side, by principle.

5) The data I received is a very small and useless fraction that can barely be used for machine learning (at least with my limited skills).

6) I'm so frustrated and work remotely, away from both offices I've to report to.

7) I see me failing in this settings and I'm afraid of that. I don't know what to do.

wow I'm intrigued and haven't even heard of tabu search before you mentioned it, thank you very much! You surely are my hero today loserboss =)

Mass Opt Out by Region:

 • In the US: Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) - http://optout.aboutads.info/#!/

 • In Europe: European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance (EDAA) - https://www.youronlinechoices.com

 • In Canada: Ad Choices: Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada (DAAC) - http://youradchoices.ca/

--

Source: https://choice.microsoft.com

Can you define "traditional approach" please? :) What do you mean specifically?

What's the benefit of Gurobi or CPLEX over a CSP-Solver (mini-sat)?

With ASP (answer-set-programming) you can also avoid the specificity of modeling-language DSLs and instead focus on formalization.

I take that it's a 'kind' of decision tree or random forest with gradient boosting, so usually it 'can' run faster on a CPU if optimized than on a GPU (if I'm not mistaken). That's at least what I get from BigML's offering.

edit: Can you provide insight?

Given a time-series history of DRAM/SSD prices, by "what value" do you need to be able to buy 1TB RAM (or anything approaching RAM speeds) in order to make VoltDB and in-Memory Databases competitively advantageous?

So, given this insider knowledge of yours, can we make a prediction by what date predicively DRAM/SSD-NVMe prices may make in-Memory Database Startups lucrative again?

--

Offtopic:

I feel empathy for you, being overrun in decisions as an engineer in a field you're the expert in market and technology by decision makers can be heart-breaking.

EDIT:

removed irrelevant personal experience

@Zeusk is right, I wish costs of SSD-RAMs like Diablo Memory1 [1] were more affordable or transparent.

Summary performance comparison by Storage Class: http://xitore.com/what-is-nvm-x

    NVM-X RAM ≈ DDR4-3200 ↧Availability|↥Cost| ↥4TB@25,6 GB/s
    Diablo Memory1        ↥Availability|↥Cost|↱256GB@10GB/s

EDIT, added source: [1] http://www.diablo-technologies.com/memory1/

Before reading the Blog's summary of the paper, I thought hey they're going to analyze the distributed algorithms[1][2] exclusively and give conclusions on how heterogenous hardware usgage of GPU/CPU works (best) when spread over the network/cloud. My guess was that MXNet would win, because Amazon [3][4] and benchmarks favored it[5]. Unfortunately surveys like this are too complex and out of date, when released, due to the fast progress in our field.

>> @agibsonccc What exactly would YOU, your company and your team like to see reviewed and what would you make different?

A standard benchmark, like the Open-Source, Automated Benchmark provided by the Phoronix-Test-Suite[6] or the benchmarksgame[7] are what we need. Everybody should be able to contribute easily, or even anonymously like with Steam's hardware survey[8].

The main problem with distributing operations with Caffe in example is the need to learn another system for a different programing flavor.

-- References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_algorithm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Distributed_algorithm...

[3] http://www.infoworld.com/article/3144025/cloud-computing/why...

[4] http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2016/11/mxnet-default-fr...

[5] See Page 52 - http://alex.smola.org/talks/NIPS15.pdf

[6] https://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/

[7] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/

[8] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Can't you just use ZFS without RAIDZ and still have your data protected from corruption/drive failures? I think storage is hard and I never understood the advantage of RAID (at least for home usage). It really only looks like an inflexible option, with too much risk to me.

What's the benefit of RAIDZ over say, you choose to have X copies distributed over your disk(s)?

Answer: zfs: copies=n is not a substitute for device redundancy! source: http://jrs-s.net/2016/05/02/zfs-copies-equals-n/

Here's a discussion about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4hbn8v/raidz_v...

Anyone who wants to have real security, relies on off-site backups, isn't that right? And aren't RAID(Z)s slow to recover also? (serious questions, I'm a zfs noob)

RAIDZ: I don't know what stripe-set configuration is good for me and don't want to waste time comparing RAID controllers or if I even need one. Then configuring the beast on the hardware and software side just seems to be too tedious. Why not just (de)/attach another disk and let zfs expand/shrink my total disk space without loosing consistency?

Startup idea: Someone clever should find a flexible storage solution that uses aufs, unionfs etc. to give you the flexibility we need.

I've written a paper for homework on FRP and know a popular FRP author who explained me how it works, but I've not used FRP on a production project yet. So call me a novice :)

What's the advantage of SodiumFRP over React/Vue with bidirectional data-bindings? The marketing for Functional Reactive Programming isn't good and most of my colleagues don't know what's it's useful for, maybe also unpopular due to the technical name. Most often Front-End devs don't know much about category-theory or functional programming and that's ok, but it helps react/vue/angular grow.

I agree skip the documentation, someone can fill that gap with PR.

We'd be really happy if you just provided many little code-examples that can be put together =))

I've not used Cap'nProto yet, but want to build a ML endpoint and wish to have Python support, so I'm also interested in that

Wouldn't some simple search heuristics solve this?

EDIT: there surely is a library with good search algortihms to utilize for the search-box, please share =)

I really like terminology :) Can you test yakuake and kmscon[0] also?

EDIT: [0] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/kmscon/

Care to elaborate?

# Creating immediate value

You could use apiblueprint.org and swagger.io to create SDK bindings in various languages for your distributed search engine service. Which you can build using a Paxos library for the consensus algorithm, (lib)torrent for the data-exchange and the s2n or openssl library for SSL/TLS encryption.

# User facing values

None of your points in the last four paragraphs, even if impressive from a developer angle, are of any relevance to a paying customer (end-user). Except your end-user is thrilled and motivated like you are. But even then, you need to keep the motivation up with excellent and enjoyable docs, tutorial a cool website and good integration into developer tools.

# Growth Hacking

After reading the whole discussion like I've the impression that you're looking for growth hacking, but have no idea how to express it other than with differntiating features. Marketing and growth hacking is really different in that it doesn't exploit clean-ness, but messy-ness. That means your whole taks as a growth hacker/marketer is to convince a (healthily) growing mass of people, decision-makers and early-adopters using manipulative tricks. Be it neuro-marketing, selling-techniques, (programmatic) scaling at and taking an advantage or any other form of gaining mass-recognition and presence. You can find a more concise and useful explanation of this on your digital book-shelf.

Wow, that's a great pearltrees.com replacement!

Can I use it personally/privately already?

Can I selfhost it?

Can you make it available on GitHub?

Can you make the CTA-Button (call-to-action) more visible? I haven't edited links, but would you consider making editing/moderation similar/better than wikipedia?

What about import/export, that would be a killer feature and allow you to keep your site closed-source, but make FOSS clients that asynchronously add/receive benefit.

Try marketing at more visibly at http://alternativeto.net/software/pearltrees/

This list is very interesting!

Which one performs the best in:

• Raw Performance

• Proven Architecture

• Robustness & Congestion Tolerance

• Backward & forward compatibility

• Customizability

Is ASN.1 by Fabrice Bellard the fastest serialization format? http://bellard.org/ffasn1/

Here's a lits of all formats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_data_serializati...

You mean a funding model similar to FreeBSD, right? With the right partnerships this could indeed work very well. At a time where even Microsoft opensources their compilers, Dyalog keeping theirs from the ~70s closed is mind bending to me.

And I agree, I would pay, even if it's not that much. The commercial license comes with a too steep price tag. I'd rather opensource my code or contribute where I can.

Can you and the Lexi guy add Screenshots to your Website so one get's a feel for what your App looks like :)

I also think it's the future, the problem is that I don't believe that Dyalog APL is the future, even though it's really nice. It just should be opensource to succeed imho., why still be so greedy and take money for a language. Also the IDE is really weird. I love APL and J, but I think there is a lot of space for improvement. And I want that improvement to happen in the open. They can still charge for Consulting, Hosting whatnot.

I also enjoyed cookiecaper's post, thank you for your sharing. Is it possible to compete against the facebook/twitter inbound data-stream knowledge and against google's corpo-vision, if you're operating from another country with non-restrictive rights? Geo-fences are the most annoying political invention ever, we know that, but by obeying to unhealthy laws, we encourage it. Not every law makes sense and should be obeyed blindly.

Well, now you need a Distill WYSIWYG, to make it usable (for most of the intended audience).

Hey let's be honest, most academics (that I know) still don't even use LaTeX (or refuse to do so). This is really cool, but requires way too many skills (in js/css3/html5/distill-extensions and node.js).

Personally, my team and I had really great experience with sharelatex.com, whom only I had knowledge about LaTeX. I liked that it's also opensource with a permissive license. I would rather host that on sandstorm.io the next time, or just pay for the comfort offered by overleaf.com (I've never seen such a beautiful colloborative LaTeX Editor).

• What about vendor lock-in?

• Can you export to LaTeX, Word or PDF?

• Can you selfhost it for your team or company?

The most annoying thing is not dedicating the time to cultivate playlist with your favorite tracks, but to LOSE ALL of them, when you move or rename a file. And that is something that happens in 99,99% (I'd say) of all cases with any music library over time.

Example: I just moved all mp3, m4a files to the microSD card on my android phone, keeping names and folders identical, but my playlists are all empty now. Thank you Samsung! grr..

Making a path independent, p-hash independent (but utilizing, if available, or requested) playlist format is what I'd really want. The metadata should always be saved inside the file because metadata get's lost when you change the program. Filling up an sqlite db with all the metadata saved in your audio files would only speed up meta-data management and sync, but remove it's control from you.

Features I think make sense to expect from a perfect music player (without vendor-lock-in), be it run on mobile, web, desktop, cli or as a daemon:

• Path independant, file-name independant (thanks to p-hash) playlist import & export

• Playlist export options for ie. Samsung Music Player, iTunes or whatever crap we're locked-in currently

• Save Metadata incl. rating always inside audio files, because metadata get's lost when you change the program

• Extract Metdata from audio files into a database for speed, management and easier sync into the files

• Audio-Fingerprint may allow detection of: duplicates (hash independant), similars, classify genre and map mood-maps

• Batch-Convert between flac,mp3,ogg,mp4,m4a if user wishes without stupid dialogues. 128Kbit LAME-encoded MP3s don't sound converted to "best quality ogg"..

• Create P-Hashes (or another perceptual hash) initially, when idle, periodically or when requested

Example playlist format:

    estelle.mp3, audio-fingerprint, House-Playlist

    wu-tang.mp3, audio-fingerprint, PartyNight

My Bachelor Thesis on applying Sociocybernetics using Web-Technology. I should've really read this "Getting Started Guide" before :)

It's really a very interesting field and the most modern term I know describing it maybe a conflation of Mathematical Sociology & Psychology.

Solution:

• Mozilla Sponsored Add-On Migrator/Converter that transpiles to equivalent WebExtension code

• Separate lightweight container hosts with DTrace for Core and Extensions (not sure if that makes sense, can you help?)

In fact a friend of mine pursues his Dr. degree on Model-Driven "API-Transpilation" (that's how I call it, albeit limited to CMSs), such that API-breaks caused by CMS upgrades don't result in high integration costs for add-on migrations. Having a complete model for the CMS allows him to support convert add-ons to other CMS too.

Why all the anger? Because API-Breaks cause friction, are avoidable and are commonly known as the biggest "cost-centers & risk-factors" in the software industry. Software-Architects should instead try to find a composable architecture that supports the transition, instead of moving migration costs to the developers. That would allow everyone else to move over more easily.

The anger caused by the limitations of WebExtentions, are they in fact unavoidable? HN, you've a collection of the most clever engineers of the World! Can we find a solution to this?

My question to HN: Do you know an example or show-case of any complex software that reached similar goals in a way that is transferable or at least advisable to Mozilla? I am really interested, if there is a way to migrate from old to new platforms without "API hiccups". Moving (avoidable?) architecture-debts to a huge fellowship of developers doesn't sound like the way to go. I hope you know about guidelines that removes such frictions for us HN devs that we can just follow suit.

PS: I'm a n00b, but incrementally recreating kernel-level APIs on user-land, then writing an abstraction layer ontop, then exposing a limited set of it via Java-Script doesn't sound elegant and counter-productive. Why not reuse an existing kernel and create drivers and bridges or DSLs ontop of that?

Happy Monday and thanks for your time! :)