skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Been using duckduckgo for a year or two now. If the results are not satisfactory i can always drop a !g into he query to have them send me to the Google results.

That said, DDG is damn good at giving me relevant stuff on clear queries. But i find that Google and DDG alike gets into a bind if i get a bit technical.
I asked a patent lawyer in Switzerland about this, and the law is different to the US. Does that create any openings?
You're completely oblivious to the number of freemium apps that have ads built into them?
While Apple designed the phone well, the key breakthrough was touch based interfaces and Apple got the technology(capacitive touch sensing) for that by acquiring fingerWorks.

Even though Jobs knew that touch based sensing is key , Apple wasn't the one coming up with the solution. Or maybe the did work on that , behind the scenes , but failed ?
Or is it just that most comments don't get downvoted, especially well-written ones?
It's hard to say whether we're bubbled or if Google is really better. I tried duckduckgo for a while. There's a lot to love in ddg, but every time I needed something not obvious, I needed to check Google results too, just to be sure. And quite often, ddg results were, even if I'm not entirely fond of Google trying to understand meaning in my request, a bit too mechanical for my tastes.
Haven't tried ADVI yet, but I think it is (likely) a great idea. In general automatic differentiation is a wildly powerful technique and is underutilized in computational science. Even in pure optimization problems people rarely leverage it to get J or H information as often as they probably should. I'll admit to not being super familiar with all the machinery under the hood in the ADVI paper [1]. It wasn't out when I started working on my current project.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03431
That's mostly my barrier for switching out of Google. Thanks for the tip, I always seem to forget that DDG can quickly push you back to Google when convenient.
Russia’s Bitruble to Be World’s First State-Controlled Cryptocurrency
The TWA terminal at JFK is being preserved as a hotel
> I've been on a high fat, low/no carb diet for 5 months

"No" carb? I'm sceptical. I'm diabetic, and my doctor suggests a minimum amount of carbs for me, as well as a max. You need carbs for energy.

Remember that fruits and vegetables are carbs.

Perhaps you mean "no bread," or "no processed grains?"
I always assumed that was done as a metric, so they could see what percentage of people who saw the page actually read it. But admittedly that is just conjecture.
I don't understand the total allergy to advertising expressed above.

I personally don't like commercial television (I hate interruptions in the middle of a show), or pop-ups that get in the way of me reading a page, or pages that are so plastered with ads that it's hard to find the content.

But when I search on Google for a particular kind of product, and it shows me ads for a new instance of that product (that doesn't yet have the organic PageRank), I'm happy to click on the ad to find out about it.

"A bit of advertising" that's well enough targeted and tastefully presented is absolutely a good thing. Every show in a TV series or movie is an advertisement for the next show or installment. Every book is an advertisement for its sequel. Every blog post is an advertisement for the next blog post. Every blog post, Facebook comment, video, or friend telling you about a product is an advertisement for that product. Many of those aren't paid advertisements, but many secretly are.

Saying that "advertising" is blanket wrong is the same as saying "learning about new things is wrong." Because how could you find out about something new if it weren't advertised somehow? What exactly are you protesting?
Why would someone do that?

If a site owner wants traffic on their site - and most do - they want to make their site as easily discoverable as possible. That means being in all the search engines. Blocking one engine (or all except one) flies in the face of most business models.

The only exception I can think of is Google properties. By blocking out competitors, they can try to worsen the experience on other engines. Like imagine a video search on Bing that didn't include YouTube? But even then, it seems like someone finding a Google property via Bing still furthers their interests.
Statistics for Hackers
Japan's military is disadvantaged by a lack of personnel with combat experience. The change permits japanese soldiers to participate as an equal partner with its allies, and to remedy its experience defecit.
"Libertarians don't have a monopoly on free market thinking."

Right, otherwise they'd underproduce...
OT, but important I think. It's interesting that the article title is

> Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful

but on HN it was changed into a question:

> Is Big Tech Too Powerful?
voice is just an input method. a natural language interface can also support typing or other inputs.
The F-35 JSF has problems, and I'll be the first to be critical, but it is not a "heap of junk." It's a tremendously capable fifth-generation air superiority fighter that can also serve in CAS, bomber, and ELINT roles.

Its tremendous versatility is one of the main reasons it became so expensive and difficult to develop: jack of all trades, master of none.
Causes of the indie Apocalypse (maybe)
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the OSS Movement in general is a response to the problems that this article is enumerating. And yet, there's no mention of open source in the NY Times article.

Perhaps a better-researched version of this article would merely lament that OSS hasn't been more successful than it has.
That's why this was such an interesting story, battling prejudice and ancient folk wisdom is no simple task. Here's a typical Norwegian salmon farm http://i0.wp.com/blogg.seafood.no/wp-content/uploads/2013/02.... This is a sea-water farm and the fish is vaccinated early on and live a healthy antibiotics free life until they end up on your sushi (sour-tasting rice).
I don't think there would be nearly enough money to cover evacuation and rebuilding. Solar is already on track to become cheaper and more reliable than fossil fuel power, so the funds brought in by a carbon tax will diminish rapidly when there's no economic reason to use polluting power sources at a large scale.
The same amount of force F is not available.

If they're putting athletes into this thing, the bigger the athlete, the more force (okay, the more power) is available for propulsion. They have bigger muscles which store more glycogen and have greater total mitochondrial activity, because there are simply more of these cells available to do the work.
Is .com necessary for your app?
Hi guys, I've tried around 50 different catchy names for my app idea (applying to yc) and most of the dot coms are parked which is very frustrating. I'm wondering if registering a .com is necessary at this point? I don't really want to spend $50+ on .ly or .io domains at this point. Suggestions?
Are you saying I have been proven wrong? The assertion is not really backed up by anything, so I guess I could be totally wrong about the amount of remaining alarmist material.

Paraphrasing Popper, it is easy to find confirmations for any theory if you are looking for confirmations. So we will see plenty more global warming anecdotes in the coming years.

But the last proxy study to get big attention was Marcott 2013, no? And I'm sure you didn't read about it on CNN, but the meaning of the abstract had to be "clarified" on that one.
I'd like to note that these are the problem they're talking about and promoting. Who knows what they have behind the scenes that no one is covering for fear of being sued.

Prior to the unveiling of the iPhone - January 2007, iirc - there were some rumors of a phone but mostly conjecture. It blindsided almost everyone. And when it launched, it redefined phone design.

Pay attention to the PR and "leaks" all you want, but remember that their entire job is to talk about and promote the things they want you to know about..
Ad Blocking, Ad Networks, and Your IP Address
One related thing that's caused me some grief is that in Chrome, the cost of a layout is O(n) in the number of hidden elements; so if there's a large number of DOM nodes hidden inside a node with display:none, they still slow down reflows.
I wrote a post about this phenomena myself - How to identify and quash 'offense-bullying'. I include some tips on how to deal with angry people - https://devinhelton.com/2015/03/23/standing-up-to-offense-bu...

Really, this should be obvious to everyone. People get angry because their mind, consciously or subconsciously, detects that anger will be beneficial to them. Period. If you are oppressed, but are very weak, and know you are weak, and you know that anger won't make things better, then you do not get angry. You grovel or you submit. Whereas anger can happen in all sorts of circumstances where there is no true grievance or oppression, ranging from a child throwing a tantrum because he wants candy, to an aristocrat getting angry at a peasant for bumping into him.
We already tax economic externalites. A carbon tax is hardly "reorganizing society". If you want to stop doing that in general, then it's _you_ that wants to reorganize society according to your political beliefs.

Frankly, I'm sure you feel like you're winning a Bravery Contest (http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates...) by posting this here, and I hate pile on, but this was blantant hyperbole.
Do things 'go through' the vacuum of space or is it like newton's cradle where the fundamental building blocks just bump shoulders yet do not move?

So for example when light travels from a million light years away, is it one fundamental particle traveling through space. Or are there trillions of interactions passing energy along?
Norway is hardly comparable to EU energy wise, mainly because they biggest energy production is hydro, which in turn comes from unique geography.

Germany little experiment with solar is already causing massive issues, ecology wise too. Factories are already saying fuck it, building their own local generators, with worse exhaust and lower efficiency.

Keep adding more nonsense costs to industry in EU.
And you know what? China would pick up the slack, and they hardly give a shit about anything. Right now,overdoing this locally actually increases net pollution.
I guess we get to feel good.
How to identify and quash “offense-bullying”
>It is not a compiler virus

Nobody said it was. Modifying a compiler to inject XcodeGhost is simple assembly work. Almost anyone could figure it out in an afternoon.

Multiple independent security organizations are reporting that the modified XCode release was shared via a filesharing site in China. That is how so many Chinese iOS developers came across it.

The version of XcodeGhost on github is a harmless version posted by the original author. The actual compiled code being found in the wild has malicious abilities not found in the code in that GitHub repo.
Raspberry Pi Kits for Every Schoolkid in Kerala
One, decibels are a logarithmic unit. Two, you are comparing factory exhausts on the Harley meant to comply with noise regulations with top of the line aftermarket race exhausts for the Honda (which is probably as loud as you could make the Honda without removing the pipes entirely). They are not anywhere near each other - and the data in [1] really makes that point, I'm not sure how you concluded that most motorcycles are anywhere near each other in sound output.
This. Our society happily tolerates so many entrenched monopolies and cartels that are actively hostile to their customers and blatantly manipulate government to keep competitors out. The tech industry is the least of our worries.
You don't need a real time central planning system for that. Just a few signs and some tow trucks. SF has a few streets that are traffic lanes during rush hour, and parking spots on off peak hours.
The problem is not just that they're all solving the same problems, but that they are mostly solving them in the same way: put everything in the cloud, 'feudalize' the device, make everything free and then monetize the user, solve security and OS-rot problems by closing the ecosystem and enforcing conformity instead of by fixing the underlying problems with the platform that give rise to this entropy and insecurity.

Read Zero to One, on competition and its downsides and the way you begin to 'clone' your competitors and nobody does anything interesting.
This explains what you see when haggling with a merchant in a street market. They're not angry or indignant; they are well practiced in a critical skill.
US Patent Office rejected the Apple Patent on Pinch to Zoom: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2045461/us-patent-office-reje...
If you follow Reich, you'll see he shares your concern about military industrial complex, big pharma, and "too big too fail" banks.
My worst mistake as a developer is the inverse, not learning how to design.
The political pressure and logical interests of self-defense are not surprising: one example being that a Japanese citizen was beheaded by ISIS earlier this year[1]. After such a shocking event, it seems very reasonable for the Japanese government to recognize the absurdity how of they are/were legally limited in their ability to respond.

[1] http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/1.640063
>Yes, I want that. I just want to control which third parties I trust. That's why it's called a "trusted third party", not just a "third party."

I guess I just don't see why I would trust a library developer, but not a CDN. If you don't control the keys, you don't know who has them. (Although, I'd also argue that you don't even really know if you do control the keys)

>I'm not sure how this helps. Wouldn't this leave the index.html in the hands of the CDN, such that they are free to modify it?

I think you are right, as the system currently works index.html would not be safe. Currently you need a more dynamic system where the manifest is protected as well. A sidechannel (WebSockets, WebRTC) could be established to securely deliver updated manifests (which a lightweight client would translate into DOM operations).
> If you want the ads to stop but the labor to continue, you basically desire slave labor from people.

No, I desire the business model to change.

> I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of people in a manner that is essentially slave labor.

My ancestors were literally kidnapped out of their homes and forced to do backbreaking work for little pay in intolerable conditions, often while being raped and beaten daily. You have a shitty business model and you want to compare your business failure due to incompetence to that? No, fuck that. Your comparison is outright offensive. Your failure to monetize your labor is not equivalent to slavery and it's disgusting for you to claim it is.
Here's an interesting paper on learning methods for high-dimensional data: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149...

The abstract:

In this paper we perform an empirical evaluation of supervised learning on high-dimensional data. We evaluate performance on three metrics: accuracy, AUC, and squared loss and study the effect of increasing dimensionality on the performance of the learning algorithms. Our findings are consistent with previous studies for problems of relatively low dimension, but suggest that as dimensionality increases the relative performance of the learning algorithms changes. To our surprise, the method that performs consistently well across all dimensions is random forests, followed by neural nets, boosted trees, and SVMs.
Chrome extension for displaying beautiful nature images in new tabs
Spend 5 minutes googling license types.
Great point. People need to define which ads they are talking about during these sorts of arguments, as "ads" can be thought of as any sort of content that spreads information about a new product or idea as you point out.
i recently was having a discussion about #1 with some folks. I'm not sure its about the competence fall off, i think it's the desire to draw on productivity gains by orienting themselves in a process-centric fashion, versus the original product-centric design. Process centric makes sense for specialization and squeezing productivity gains out (standardized tooling/platforms, bureacracy, layers of middle management to bring it all together). Product-centric makes sense for innovation, but its inefficient in the long-term (small teams, wide range of responsibility).
There's always the possibility that solar energy will become so cheap that it doesn't make economic sense to waste resources extracting fossil fuels from the ground.
You should ask Bill Gates about that.
Oh my goodness you are so correct.
OpenCyc is a really cool implementation of one solution to this problem.

The way it was explained to me, computers don't know that when you turn a full cup of coffee upside down, the liquid will fall out. Cyc attempts to provide a framework for that.

http://sw.opencyc.org
> But rather than take content without paying attention, practice some civil disobedience: embargo publishers who piss you off.

Economically, how does this differ from using an ad blocker? Do you think content publishers care whether they don't get paid because I didn't visit their site or because I used an ad-blocker?
The real fun part is when you set it as default engine for a browser. Then you can do things like !w to search just wikipedia's articles etc right in the url bar.

There is also startpage.com (!s(tartpage) in DDG) to give anonymized Google results. And also ixquick (!ix(quick), natch) for a meta-search (not sure exactly what engines they cover).

https://duckduckgo.com/bang
with the advent of community driven filtering, how long until the self hosted tracking scripts get blocked also? and who would notice?
Does anyone have the experience with speed of convergence for some advanced models? And, defining sequence models in these probabilistic programming languages?

Seems most (if not all) probabilistic programming languages use sampling as a general algorithm for training models.

So, I guess it would be a hard job to express something like HMMs or CRFs that would fit into the framework (I guess one can easily train HMMs/CRFs with a fixed length of a sequence, but not undefined length).
I often do this as well for elements that steal from vertical space - the claustrophobia-inducing ones anyway.
First draft of the “tree of life” for the 2.3M named organisms released [pdf]
Well, I don't have a magic machine that allows me to suss out the intent of someone when they make a recommendation.

However, if the recommendation is not truly heartfelt or organic, if the purveyor of the recommendation is a specialist not in the domain of the product but in the domain of making recommendations, it's an "advertisement" and not just a casual recommendation.

And I would prefer a life of haphazard discovery and missing out on a few good products, than a life of having to battle salesmen trying to butt into every aspect of my experience.

Saying that "advertising" is blanket wrong is saying that becoming an expert on selling things regardless of what the things actually are is wrong. It may be a bit of an old-fashioned idea in our age of professional specialization and whatnot, but I stand by it.
The movie "Fight Club" has an interesting line just after the narrator moves away from his "normal life" and into the derelict house:

By the end of the first month, I didn't miss TV.

I suspect most people don't understand how subtly addictive TV can be, as it takes at lest that month to break the habit. While I'm not sure if it's part of the same effect, there seems to be something similar for advertising: you don't realize the huge cognitive load it puts on you until you've been away from it for a significant amount of time. Running a firewall isn't free, yet the costs associated with recognizing that something is an ad which should be ignored are often assumed to be trivial.
Mostly. Whenever possible I use apps that cost money (get what you pay for, etc.)

"help, doctor, it hurts when I do this"
There are 1000+ features open on feedback.gitlab.com, we can't make them all. If people contribute them that is a strong signal they are wanted. What is the feature you would like to see?
Not this much, because journalists were still stuck on paper, techies weren't attention-seeking altruists, popup windows were more annoying, and extensions were more niche (IE was still big).
the thing about nonlinear dynamics/chaos is that it still allows for some degree of control and prediction -- not in the sense of being able to predict one specific trajectory, but in the sense of being able to make statistical predictions about likely regions for the trajectory to pass through, and even to be able to apply small controls to change a trajectory drastically and potentially keep it out of entire regions.

See, for example, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1461-0248.2001.... (yet another tribolium paper. The favorite insect of nonlinear dynamics and chaos books everywhere.)

I don't think we need to overturn anything mathematically to be able to talk sensibly about climate models, predictions, complex forcing mechanisms, and control. We just have to stop putting the cart before the horse (or the shady politician before the scientist) and look at what can be done to stabilize the ecosystem -- not necessarily worrying about catastrophic predictions, but simply looking at some of the measurable negative effects (like acidifying oceans, brought up in a sibling comment) and determining how to control the system in order to slow or even reverse those effects.
I'm happy to report we just improved the markdown file rendering in GitLab, this started because of the comments here.
Impossible without a jailbreak or e.g. the willingness to set up Privoxy on your home net and configure it to proxy your wifi traffic. There are ways, but this will be a million times easier.
Cool, I'm on their website right now. So far everything is in english.
IANAL, but i suspect it will depend on how much you want to trade with USA...
For anyone else who is looking to do(albeit small) after reading this. Please go to
https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-tpp-s-copyright-trap and sign the petition.
Where's the pretence, though? I don't see anything in that article about anyone pretending anything; just some details about pop music production which the author - presumably because he isn't very interested in pop music - didn't know.
A Conversation with Edward Snowden (Part 1) [video]
Jailbreak made it possible, or you could set up an ad-blocking proxy on your network.
This almost certainly isn't true, it's far more likely you've only noticed it when it worked. Every other time, when it didn't, the comments were buried at the bottom of the article.
Ah yes, fullscreen horribad adverts that takeover your mobile screen. The entire page goes dark and some overlay ad has appeared on the news site you want to look at either trying to get you to log in, buy something or download their app (full of ads) but you can't scroll around to find where the actual ad is to close the popup as the overlay is so far out of resolution it doesn't fit your device, so you just give up on the blacked out content.

The only solution I could come up with for Android/iOS was to run a remote digital ocean firewall to block all ads at the network level, and connect to it with a VPN. Everything else I've tried or implemented on the devices themselves ate up too much resouces or had to be dangerously elevated in privilege (NDK) just to stop the damn ads. A bonus of this method is you can also experiment with filtering known Android bugs before they reach your device if for whatever reason you can't update your system.img
Definitely sad that tools like this need to exist so we can read an article in peace.