skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like the idea to just use a physics engine as a means of randomizing the layout. Smart, succinct, and easy to implement.
Reminds me of this approach:

http://everyonecanprogram.com/

UK schools are teaching programming with marble runs.
Thanks for sharing, will pass to fellow non-native programmers for them and their kids. I'm afraid to say that in a productive environment CS is still way more a technical effort than a cognitive one for "us". But Python helps, aha!
Still the same concept, although I'd guess the NBA players would have less variance in performance. Thanks!
Step 1 - Introduce young people to "Mickey Mouse"

Step 2 - Get people to care about this "newly acquainted with" character

Was that the first golden age of animation? I know Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry was one golden age.
> No matter how alone you seem, the trail is more like walking through a "nature museum" than actually being part of nature.

That's true, but it's largely to help people avoid getting lost and dying in authentic nature. Backpacking trails are much further toward the "what trail?" end of the spectrum, but they're still marked trails. Going off the trail is dangerous.

(That said, another purpose of "stay on the trails" signs is to help prevent shortcut-based erosion, an entirely different goal coming from an entirely different motivation for leaving the trail.)
Really? Where? I've done several multi day backcountry backpacking trips in national parks recent years, and I can't think of a single piece of trash I've seen or person I've seen leaving trash at camp.
I don't understand what "bourgeois moralist crap" means, but there is a great deal of scientific literature supporting the parent's claim. One need only 'Google' unemployment and happiness, to find some. Here are a few of the top hits.[1][2][3]

[1] http://www.jil.go.jp/english/JLR/documents/2012/JLR34_ohtake...

[2] http://wol.iza.org/articles/unemployment-and-happiness.pdf

[3] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jmcb.12154/abstra...
Trash is light, and you already carried it that far, what's a few dozen more miles?

Maybe with toilet paper, but that should be buried anyway, not blowing in the wind across the trail. Or is burying poop out of fashion again? I've been out of the hiking scene for some time now.
Please see the "Other disclosures" section on https://www.opus-codec.org/license/

You may also be interested in https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/defending-opus/ (warning: contains discussion of specific, unexpired patents).
Sometimes demand exceeds supply's ability to cope therewith, and some form of "friction" need be applied to reduce that demand lest the supply be destroyed. It's not about being macho etc, it's about "experiencing nature" unavoidably leaving a trace which, in great enough volume, destroys the beauty of that nature - and preserving that fragile beauty requires SOME barrier to persuade some it's not worth pursuing.
But allowing so many people to enjoy that beauty simultaneously works to destroy that beauty. So to protect you must either you take steps to dissuade people, or resort to some form of enforced quota system. When it comes to public resources I'd rather see dissuasion than quotas.

If machismo works to reduce the footfall on a trail, so be it. That's much better than a gated trailhead manned by a guard taking tickets. And its far better than paved sidewalks and concrete staircases replacing trails.
Corporate exploitation of our natural resources is an entirely different topic. There are some tangential parallels, but overall I find that analogy pretty weak.
Perhaps a problem with substituting the correct HTML entities :)
I highly disagree.
Beyond medical/bio, Ann Arbor is way to small to support any large scale change in the overall state market. While it does have it's own small footing, it has little resource to expand outside of it's own due to it's location. The location has corn fields to the north, west, and south. To the east...between ann arbor and detroit you have...Canton, Plymouth, Van Buren, Romulus, Taylor...all of those are heavy manufacturing communities.

Which goes on to my prior point. You have to change culture in order to do that. The culture of the state is manufacturing with some bio/medical (Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids).

Any innovation can really only come from 1 of 4 places... Detroit (metro), Ann Arbor, Lansing, and Grand Rapids. Ann Arbor has a small scene, but doesn't have the ability to grow without passing of that scene to a larger community. Lansing is primarily government and manufacturing. There is Michigan State University (50k+ students), but it's a school with a primary focus on agriculture and not techonology. This leaves Detroit and Grand Rapids.

In regard's to Detroit, let's think about it for a moment.

It is very much like taking the idea that you can easily change the culture and mindset of silicon valley from tech to manufacturing and industrial. The people in silicon valley and the surrounding area do not have the skillset as a whole to provide that type of industry. As well as through generations, the mindset of the people as a whole is not directed towards a manufacturing environment. This is what is going on with Detroit. You have had a VERY large portion of the economy (65%+) purely based on some type of auto manufacturing. This is why Detroit city is at around 20% unemployment and the surrounding metro is around 8-10% unemployment.

Now..this leaves us with Grand Rapids. Which actually is a viable candidate. It has a younger generation overall, an international airport, a moderately sized city with room for expansion, and a vibrant downtown.

Then..we have to look further at the ability to grow a tech environment. Is there the skill's needed? Are there investors available to fund companies in this area? Are there incentives to stay in the area?

In reality, all of those answers are relatively "No".

You can get better talent in a warmer climate with the same exact (if not better) opportunities (funding, viability, community backing, tax incentives..etc) in other cities with a better climate (yes, climate is really a big deal)...such as Charlotte, Atlanta, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle.

Unless Michigan does something drastic like being a startup tax-haven, having major incubators, or the like; it will never happen. Too many other places offer the same or much better, but in a more comfortable climate.

(In case anyone think's climate isn't a big deal, try moving to Alaska or Montana. They offer break's for startup's, but when was the last time you heard anyone taking those states up on their offers?).
Those people aren't there for your benefit. Why is your rare use of the wilderness better than their common use?
Why do you say that? I think the technological progress will continue to grow exponentially. There are more researchers now than at any point in human history. The economic incentives are still at least as big (relatively speaking).

At the moment there are many industries with great potential for applying machine learning and various other automation techniques.

And considering that many leading AI scientists are expecting smarter-than-human AI within this century (or the start of the next one), I certainly fail to see your point.

Anyway, there is still a lot of room for exponential growth of human knowledge, in a lot of fields.
>a verbal/symbolic model meant to account for the complexity of the world

I think you and I have very different notions of the word "model." Rational spherical cows in a vacuum may not be precise or nuanced, but that doesn't make them inaccurate, and the simplified view is a useful model for learning about big-picture concepts. It's true that it won't catch every corner case, and when you're making decisions about human beings sometimes that's dangerous, but there's value at every level of granularity. Looking at each grain of sand and learning everything about the rock it came from will let you put it in the perfect place, but you'll never build a sandcastle that way, and if you want to reshape the whole beach you'll need yet another level of focus.

Generalization is a good thing. It's powerful. Humans got where we are by spotting patterns - not because everything matches the pattern perfectly all the time, or even ever, but because you can see general commonalities and start to abstract them away into something that can be reasoned about.

If there's one theory that explains more of the detail and variation in the world than another, at a finer granularity, without giving up generality, then yes, it's clearly a superior theory. But throwing out highly general theories just because they aren't perfect is intellectually lazy.
Same here. Years ago I used to be fine with smoking bowls and the occasional bong rip but once I took a break for a few years and lost any tolerance, I just can't handle it. A few times a year I'll do a "one-hit-quit" but any more and I run the risk of just feeling terrible and anxious. It really does suck because I used to quite enjoy it on occasion but nowadays I just respond differently.
It's quite possible to thru-hike the AT and sleep in a real bed in a town almost every single night. Most of the trail is shockingly close to towns, so resupplying is no problem.

When my brother thru-hiked it he said locals would often leave coolers full of iced beer out with a sign that said "help yourself", so it's not hard to get booze if you want it.
IDE's have their own learning curve. We invest time in learning IDE software in order to be more productive. When we lose access to IntelliJ the knowledge we gained is worth significantly less than it was and now we have to go and spend time learning another IDE. We are also now less productive so we spend more time working to make up the difference. Time is money.
Over the long run most people have always made money in the stock market.
And another right-wing perk: if the basic income had a minimum age, it would attenuate the dysgenic incentives of modern welfare systems.
And while feelthebern.org collabs w/ the Coders for Sanders Slack, we actually have our own Slack with even more volunteers. At our end, we're working on a iOS and Android apps (not just ability to access all the content, but also a gamifying canvassing/GOTV functionality; and also some Thunderclap-like native features). We're also preparing 3 more sites that will be tied into our site but be for more TL;DR consumption. Finally, we're developing flyer versions of our content for offline GOTV'ing.
Looks like the avg. monthly payout of social security in 2015 is 1,332.35. Your proposal would come out to around 350.00 a month. I'm not sure that would go over very well.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0780010.html
Fabricating 3D Objects by Laser Cutting and Welding
__type__ I can understand, but .class seems likely to conflict in those cases where you want a method named class. __class__ seems more consistent to me.

In Perl 6, special meta method built-ins are always all caps, specifically because it's not a very reasonable name to choose in most cases, similarly to how python surrounds a name with double underscores. They are special and different, and should appear as such.

> But "object1.WHAT == object2.WHAT" is something that wouldn't occur to me in a million years

Well, that's good,because you aren't really supposed to be doing that. Rather than getting upset at how Perl 6 looks weird when you map operations directly to how you would do them in another language, it might be better to see if that case actually comes up at all. Maybe the language has other features that support different, possibly better, idioms (or at least better for that language)?

Just because Perl 6 and Python are both dynamic languages and have some features doesn't mean you should assume it functions or should be programmed in the same way. I doubt you would make that mistake for something that looked obviously different, like racket, so why jump to those conclusions here just because they look similar in certain aspects.
Healthcare costs are a problem because they can often be unpredictable and catastrophic. A UBI wouldn't fix that; you still need either an insurance or a single-payer system of some sort. The short version is that you're going to end up with risk pooling of some description either way.

Where the appeal comes for the right is that a UBI would let you eliminate our patchwork of other social assistance programs and all the headache, cost, and inefficiency of their associated bureaucracy.

The basic pitch isn't actually all that different from the flat tax ideas that are popular in conservative circles with the distinction that a UBI would disproportionately affect the wealthy rather than the poor.
I'd guess about $10400, paid at $200 per week to the head of a household, plus an additional $75 per full dependent.

That works out as follows:

Household Size | Annual UBI | 2014 Poverty
---------------+------------+-------------
1 | $10,400 | $11,670
2 | $14,300 | $15,730
3 | $18,200 | $19,790
4 | $22,100 | $23,850
5 | $26,000 | $27,910
6 | $29,900 | $31,970
7 | $33,800 | $36,030
8 | $37,700 | $40,090

That's a compromise. The UBI is less than poverty level, so that the conservatives can say that no one is getting a free ride, and people will still need to work to get by. But it's still around 90% of poverty line, so that the liberals can say that the government is still providing a great safety net.

There are 123M households in the US, for a population of 319M, so the total cost would be $200 * 123M + $75 * ( 319M - 123M ) per week, which is $39.3G, or $2.1 trillion per year.

The U.S. had official income of $3 trillion in 2014, so UBI would cost about 68% of the federal budget.
Implementation of a Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines_Flight_7...
Gary Player had an epic rant[1] about public golf courses getting harder and its affect on amateur numbers. I point to that example to explain my worry about making the trails more inaccessible to cut down the traffic. Making the normal person see the trail as a plaything for the elitist will not help future funding.

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha59iKfjTxw
That's true regarding the DEA and foreign aid, but defense is not a rounding error. National Defense and Overseas Contingency Operations are more than $600B. The next largest military spending is China at $145B (before the cuts just announced yesterday).
Hmm, never heard of people on the right wanting a basic income to simplify government welfare.
>We are all adults here, capable of reading a link and determining if the information in it refutes a prior comment or not.

It serves no purpose, because the purpose itself was never mentioned. I asked for one. I don't quite understand why it bothered you.
Over 50% of government expenditure is on social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, and other social services. A large percentage of that is inefficient and wasted. If you implemented UBI, you could get rid of all of that. Sure, the cost may be 80% of the current spend; but you could eliminate over 50% of it. What's left is a 30% increase in federal taxes.

Right now, I pay close to 50% in taxes living in SF in one of the top tax brackets. I imagine state taxes would go down as a result of UBI too. I despise the fact that 90+% of my taxes go to things I don't believe it. That said,I'd be glad to pay the 50-60% taxes if I knew it went to a basic income. And if I knew that it insured that if I ever lost everything, I'd have enough to survive with some dignity.
Importantly, current full-time employees get an accounting trick but also a guaranteed minimum income in the case that they lose their job, go freelance, have a baby, move to a new city looking for work, start their own business etc. All of which happens without any paperwork, as they simply pay less tax when their income falls.

Reading the original questioners other replies, they assume everyone would get the money on top of current wages, tax-free. I'm not sure why they think that though.
Fundamentally, the Earth is finite and people are growing geometrically. If we're not at the 'natural spaces and trails' load limit now, we will get there sometime soon.

Rationing is a frustrating solution. It means, only the special few get to enjoy these spaces. Then it no longer 'belongs to all of us' i.e. isn't a public space any more. So should the Federal Govt even administer it? Why do we all pay for it, when only a special few get to go there?

I'm not anti-conservation. But these questions inevitably will arise as population (& demand) grows and the public spaces stay exactly the same size.
This is FUD. So what if JetBrains is changing their pricing model? The community edition is still free.
That's strong evidence the cartel was a failure.
I've been working on an algorithm to make more playable dungeons with included puzzles (e.g. locked door/key quests etc.). The math is there to ensure everything is solvable and relatively interesting (you're guaranteed to run into a puzzle before you find all the elements you need to solve it, for instance) but I got bored when it came time to make an example game to illustrate how it works. I'll pick that back up at some point...
Molecular Biologist Explains How THC Completely Kills Cancer Cells
I teach a beginning Java course at the university. I told my students to install your app... Apparently it's not free after a point... if you need testers, I have 40 students that are available.
Or this piece of autonomous awesomemess: http://www.stoneaerospace.com/products-pages/products-DEPTHX...
Driven to kill
I didn't really think of the getting lost aspect. I was in the Badlands when I started thinking about this, where IIRC getting lost didn't seem like a major concern. But yes, not being able to easily find civilization is one of those changed assumptions people need to be constantly reminded of.

Erosion and other destruction is what I was focusing on, either concentrated because of a "shortcut" or not. We're not worried about the erosion/destruction caused by animals running all over, so what makes human animals different? That's what I was trying to tease out.
You're right, "luck" is a bad word because some people do have the notion of luck as an attribute.

It's not exactly the same as a stochastic variable though. It's really any forces that you cannot influence, control, or anticipate.
That won't be the hard part about phasing in UBI without wrecking the economy. All those people that are now unemployed are now earning the UBI.
Defense is indeed not a rounding error. I myself think the Pax Americana the world has lived in for the past 50 years or so is worth it. But this is certainly something that others would disagree with me on.
Again, your hyper-alarmist reply only bolsters my point. No perspective, no rationality, just pure paranoia. Anyone with even a slightly divergent view continues to be dissuaded from saying anything. These sorts of responses only validate my views. I'll say a prayer for the phitoplankton, though [eye roll].
"A job guarantee has similar results to heavily unionized labor: inefficiency."

Involuntary unemployment is more efficient is it?
I've been writing a library that is essentially a wrapper over OpenAL and libogg/libvorbis to provide a simple interface for playing encoded sound samples or streams.
However, OpenAL is a pain, and the only decent free implementation seems to be OpenAL-soft, which seems to be doing all the mixing in software.
This library could be a good replacement, thanks author!
Ntirokey is shipping
That 60% statistic is incredible. It takes months of planning and preparation to thruhike the AT. Throwing it all away on the second day is mind boggling to me.
I was thinking along the same lines. Another specific example would be single-shot HDR or true post-shot-adjustable exposure. E.g. if the optimum exposure for a conventional camera is 1/60th of a second, then instead capture 10-20 exposures whose total time adds up to 1/60th of a second, and sum various numbers of the exposures in software.

Right now that's not practical because DSLRs don't have the hardware capacity to pull that much data off of the sensor and store it quickly enough.

Seems like the additional data would also be very useful for removing motion blur, automatically removing moving objects from e.g. architectural/landscape shots, etc.
The government already, in theory, has a means of making payments to nearly every citizen (social security). So drop every welfare system but the Social Security Administration, and expand its payments to everyone, rather than just those currently qualifying (survivors and retirees, primarily). (Easier said than done)
IAB Explores Its Options to Fight Ad Blockers, Including Lawsuits
If the government instituted a job guarantee with a decent living wage, those 3 minimum wage jobs would magically start paying more and treating their workers better.

Because if they didn't, nobody would do that work.
>You do not exempt the basic income from the normal taxation rules

I have a really hard time understanding the logic here... "Let's give everyone 11 dollars, then spend a bunch of money (enforcement does cost) to make sure all those people give 1 dollar back to us before the year is up." What am I missing?
I don't find it surprising that so many distributed databases fail at ensuring consistency; it's a very hard problem. What really gets me is that they deliberately, knowingly sacrifice consistency for performance, and then claim the opposite in their documentation/marketing.

See https://github.com/codership/galera/issues/336#issuecomment-... (linked from the article)
> to protect you must either you take steps to dissuade people, or resort to some form of enforced quota system

This isn't true. You can channel people into the behaviors you want by making them easier; it's not an all-or-nothing "no matter what our environment is like, 3% of visitors will leave litter" situation. There are many things you could do to reduce environmental damage while accommodating more visitors:

- You could put handrails around the trails. People aren't supposed to leave them anyway.

- You could station trash cans along the trails. This makes it much easier to throw your trash in an appropriate place.

- You could establish fire pits in which it was officially OK to have fires.

- You could patrol the trails. This doesn't work well when hikers are rare, but it scales beautifully as they get more common. Or, you could have a stationary security presence in problem areas.

- You could blaze new trails.

Everything I've listed except trail patrols is something I've personally seen in some areas. (Full disclosure, I'm actually just assuming that new trails get blazed from time to time. I have, however, personally experienced trails being radically reworked between visits.)

> [machismo is] far better than paved sidewalks and concrete staircases replacing trails

Why?
It may not be obvious if you surround yourself with engineers and programmers, but there are a whole lot of adults out there who can't do that kind of math in their head.
Hey Everyone,

Last year I wrote Ethanifier (http://gozman.github.io/ethanifier/) and helped hundreds of people build their own single purpose apps like Ask HIV and KPCB Edge.

Today, one of my friends has brought Ethanifier to Android and added in some pretty cool features like Slack presence indicators. I think you'll get a kick out of it - I'm certainly happy to share it with you. Hope you enjoy!

Mike