skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bing's image and video search have been superior to Google's for over a year now, in my opinion.

I use Bing as my default search engine, but it falls short of Google's results for a lot of programming-related queries. I still end up having to use Google a few times per day when I'm working.
"Big Tech" should told Big Media to piss off when content protection was first introduced. Then we'd have smaller attack surfaces and better business models.
Machine Vision with Raspberry Pi
It does not hurt society if they're providing a superior product / value proposition for the consumer, regardless of bundling or self-promotion.
Illegal Fishing Off Somalia Could Spur Piracy Revival
Norway is not comparable to mainland EU, I'm not claiming that. But Norway does have an intensive oil and gas industry which emits copious amount of CO2. Because of the CO2 tax, they have implemented the worlds first (and only) commercial carbon-capture and storage (CCS) project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleipner_gas_field#Carbon_capt...).

As for China stealing European industry, that's happening already, and it's really nothing a little protectionism can't help. Protectionism is bad, but so is losing jobs, and worse is acting like you are powerless when really you aren't.
Enlisted pilots? Even command chiefs disagree (drone article)
the overfishing problem you mention is also addressed in "Cowspiracy" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3302820/) which I highly recommend. Since few days available on Netflix Germany.
> I think the problem with building houses with nowhere to park is that people will just park on the street.

This is exactly what happened in my city. They created a "transit oriented development zone", but never actually provided any new transit.

The developers got to save lots of cash by not building any parking, and the streets are full of cars that everyone is still required to own and park to get anywhere.
Thank You, I've been looking for a barebones reading mode app for years, but they all want you to sign up for an account and add it to your reading list and yadda yadda. This is just what I needed.
Bright Spots on Ceres Are Coming into Focus
In my experience, Stan performance is decent with many models, particularly if all relevant operations are vectorized and the data sets are "reasonable." However it's easy to accidentally walk off a cliff, and write a model that takes days to fit. Additionally the real time output is a little lackluster, so it's hard to know how you're doing until it finishes (I hear they're working on that for ShinyStan).

I haven't done any HMMs or CRFs with Stan, but don't see why you couldn't do them. Passing in the data likely requires some tricks with arrays and indexing, but it's totally doable. Probably unlikely that you'd beat standard, custom algorithms, but if your HMM was part of a larger model, it might make sense.
In my experience, it's less about reading code on paper than it is the other thing you mentioned:

>then they annotate it with a pen while thinking about whatever problems they are solving.

Paper and pen offer a lot of options you don't have in vim (or emacs/notepad.exe/etc ;)). Circling, doodling, arrows, underlining, furiously scribbling...
Isn't that Google bought duck.com? Isnt' that google demanding Android manufacturers to prioritize its apps (that's why Yandex sues the Google)? and so on.
Just to throw an idea out, surely not original...Http has a payment/advertising system added to the headers. Users decide if they will make a micropayment, view advertising or do a subscription to view a page/site if the site requests payment. The user can have a default setting and also settings for specific sites. Along with this there is some management that limits information the site can get about the user.
Assuming the current level of technology of course - I don't think there is anyone who successfully improved their own intelligence with biotechnology. Once there is such therapy, it simply becomes "nurture". But I am not sure that even matters, people are creative and they will find a way to blame unsuccessful people or nations for systemic failures.

Genetic therapy as our future? It's likely you will get choices like "you can have 1 more IQ point, bigger toenails and 10% higher risk of cardiovascular disease after 50".

On the other hand, you can do this today, and pick an intelligent partner to have kids with. And people do and we have empirical evidence of growing IQ (but actually it is explained by nurture) - regardless some still talk about how Idiocracy is our future.
I like to think of light as a something we made up in our minds.

A light bulb that is illuminating a wall is actually more like the light bulb touching the wall, rater than it sending out light that is hitting the wall.
IMHO you should pick "c. Commit to Company A."

1. You have made a committment to Company A, honor it.

2. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Company A has come through for you with an offer. That is big. Company B is "conditional on various background checks" - my spidy sense is making me itch all over.

3. A small company is much less likely to care about your "checkered" past.

4. You aren't working for the hiring manager (I assume), so it doesn't matter how awesome he/she is. Salesmen are always awesome until they close the sale.
It's not just eight bits. It's 8 bits * # of nodes.

The bits per node just determine the 'resolution' of your individual nodes; while the network as a whole determines how many states can be represented.
glad to see the enthusiasm!

ADVI [1] is a variant of BBVI [2] where we fully leverage all of the amazing things that Stan has to offer (like automatic differentiation and automatic transformations of constrained parameters).

you can use ADVI to get an approximation to the Bayesian posterior. the advantage of using ADVI over sampling is that ADVI is typically faster for large models (both in terms of # of parameters and # of data observations). ADVI also a bit better at handling models with multi-modal posteriors, such as mixture models.

ADVI is currently in cmdStan (but not in RStan or PyStan). we're continuing to make the algorithm more robust.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03431
[2] http://www.jmlr.org/proceedings/papers/v33/ranganath14.pdf
3rd world or not, it's still in the EU, and free mobility still applies. Here's how the combination of medicine and IT looks further up north: http://frogleap.se/
I wish ad-hoc/mesh networks would be more popular... it would help if Google would not block ad-hoc WiFi on Android.
I can't fault anything you have said. I do feel there is an industrial level of operation that lives by and therefore needs different rules than the rest of us. The complexity of the situation and the systems, both man made and natural, that dictate the realities we all face with regard to environmental phenomena is very hard to hold in ones mind all at one time. I can imagine it's also a great challenge for scientists working in the field.

From what I can tell there has been no climate conspiracy. One thing that always helps me visualize what we are doing with our atmosphere is astronaut Gerry Carr's observation that if the earth were the size of an apple then the atmosphere would be as thick as the skin of the apple. We have a terribly fragile environment and everything should be done to conserve it. If we go 100% renewable there will still be untold amounts of damage caused to our eco-systems due to mining etc however it will be much easier to contain than the burning of fossil fuels which just spew out and spread around our minuscule atmosphere unchecked. Nuclear mining will also cause damage and while I am not against nuclear as an option it does bother me that we build nuclear stations in earthquake hotspots. This doesn't instill a great deal of confidence in me that we will make good decisions with something as potentially dangerous as nuclear in the future.
You are absolutely right, I oversimplified, but that has the advantage of giving us plenty of other experimental bodies to compare with (i.e. the solar system). For what it's worth, this oversimplification gives a pretty good average temperature of 15 deg celcius on earth.

Albedo is an important factor, but there is actually very much uncertainty about human influence on earths albedo, and at any rate the effect seems to be pretty small. Humans' effect on CO2 on the other hand is extremely well-established and much greater, which is why it's logical to focus on it.
Move Over Slack? Automattic Mulls Commercializing Internal Messaging Product
In the Age of Loneliness, Connections at Work Matter
Because of the NSA'S ability to scoop up the most brilliant cryptographers, they're one of the few powerhouses that have the ability to put together a team effort to accomplish this.

Unfortunately, they've shown in the past a clear desire to sabotage implementations to include weaknesses that only they or perhaps other large state actors can take advantage of.

Any implementation of a quantum-resistant cryptography will face a large uphill battle in terms of trust.
Perhaps you could request a 1 or 2 week deferral of your start date at A, citing last-minute personal reasons. Such a thing would not be unheard of, and that way you neither do anything dishonourable* (as long as you don't lie) nor close any options prematurely.

* Well to be fair, assuming your pending employment is at-will, there's nothing actually wrong with quitting immediately after your start (after all, maybe you simply won't like it there); it's a just a bit inconsiderate toward A to start if you don't really believe you're committed to it yet.
When you can't counter an argument, attack the motives!
It depends if the visitor is both interested and prepared to purchase whatever is being advertised. Someone who doesn't own a vehicle can click on auto insurance ads all day. Now matter how optimized the ads and insurance product is they will never buy. Because of the way ad buys & targeting works you really do not want unrelated users clicking through.

Do the publishers want more clicks to ads? If they look at a short period of revenue, yes, they will see a boost in their CPMs. Over the long term, as more and more advertisers block the publishers domain due to receiving worthless clicks the publisher's advertising auction prices will begin to collapse. If all of their outgoing clicks are bad eventually they will be left with advertisers who measure nothing (or measure the wrong thing, like if a video ad plays to completion) and advertisers pushing junk like adware/spyware.

Like I said before, we are talking about publishers who are not even testing out their own site on a real mobile device. Why not? May be they are still drunk on the typhoon of free traffic they've been getting from Facebook for the past couple of years.
Here, though, most of the raw data comes from the FBI/DOJ, so pretty much everyone accepts it (even if some number of homicides are scored as "accidents", as happened in my home town) and can easily go back to it; the same is not true for many many other domains like the climate.

But the statistics are indeed critical, or must be viewed critically. E.g. the Kellerman study that said "N times more likely to be killed with a gun in the house!!! than use it to kill an intruder" is utterly bogus from the start, because gun owners don't score kills as the only type of successful self-defense uses.

That sort of critical thought, though, isn't particularly fashionable....
> And would the Obama administration really endorse this?

The U.S government has been trying to get Japan to amend its constitution since the late 60s. So yeah, I believe every administration up to this point would have endorsed this. The U.S government has been the one pushing Japan to militarize. They've been pushing for decades.
"No True Scotsman."

You're saying that you define "advertisements" as the things you don't like.

Google ads sometimes miss the mark, but often are for exactly what I'm searching for. Why would I condemn them along with penis enlargement ads?

And ad blockers absolutely block those things -- Google ads in particular. I just saw, in another thread, how one ad blocker would pull out an ad embedded in the page that was tasteful and relevant, just based on its css class. And the ad block developer was proud of doing this, to the point of mocking the web site creator in the same thread.

My point is that advertising is a spectrum, and you can't just "block all ads" without throwing out the good as well. And a related point is that some advertising is good.

What I was responding to was the allegation that all advertising is bad. And until you're willing to pay for the content you create, that advertising is necessary to pay for it.

I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime to avoid commercials.
> In that case, making (NaN == NaN) == false also defeats it. false isn't NaN either.

With that logic, you could say making (1 == 1) == true is wrong, because 1 isn't true.

> If true or false propagates out of a function whose inputs are NaN, NaN has failed to propagate.

He meant Nan propagates through calculation operation, not comparison operation. As in, result of calculating Nan + 1 is NaN.

So if you have "A = NaN" and "B = A + 1", you have the situation that both A and B is NaN but A does not equal B.
Heroin in the Midwest: A hydra-headed scourge
Thanks for your response. This definitely seems like the right things to do. After all, I did commit to A. However, my immediate supervisor would be the hiring manager, and we had good chemistry. I can't speak to how well I get along with company A because I never met any of them, just a quick phone interview, after which they offered me a job.
The Witness release date trailer
Interesting, but at least the "top answerers" in given categories are just people who have answered a question in that category and have a lot of points regardless of whether or not those points were gained from questions with that tag.
My question is - why did not he take off his life suite as
soon as he get out of the water? Since t was filled with
water, having it on your body will only increase effect of
freezing, no?

^ he posted this, he is wondering why he didn't keep it off. And yeah, he was suggesting that he should not have put it back on.
Here's a poor quality recording of LeCun's presentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc-KbuZqGkI&list=PL513vUSBNc...
Thank you for saying that. This is very true. And, yet, somehow, we don't argue that any startup should just give their product away for free.
Trichinella is actually vanishingly rare in US commercial pork today. Most cases these days come from boar and other wild game.

http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/trichinellosis/epi.html
JXcore vs Nodejs Memory Consumption Benchmark
Let the laws of physics do the recurrent math for you. Analog RNN computers would be very interesting, but they would first setting in stone the basics of the algorithms we use. We are still only beginning to explore the algorithm space, and this requires a flexibility that analog computers (or even ASICs or FPGAs) don't provide.

It's still not clear whether the future of AI will even involve neural networks at all. Intuitively, they seem so inefficient.
"People get angry because their mind, consciously or subconsciously, detects that anger will be beneficial to them" sounds like armchair science. Do you have anything to back up this claim?
Alright! Focus on doing a great job at (a) and see how things go with B from there. Who knows, you may fall in love with the work you're doing at A and change your mind :)
> 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 capable of running a CDN myself. So I have to trust someone. I might as well minimize the number of potential someones I trust; I claim that gives me a concrete benefit.

Since I'm not writing jQuery myself, I'm not minimizing it myself, and I'm certainly not minimizing it by hand, I do already have some trust in the jQuery project and their infrastructure. I don't currently have any trust in a CDN. If I'm going to move to using a CDN, I'd like a route with lets me put slightly more trust in the jQuery project (who I already trust to some extent) than in some completely new party.

Alternatively, I don't have to trust jQuery. I can trust someone else who's good at running secure build infrastructure, auditing libraries like jQuery or anything else, and minimizing and signing the result. (This is, loosely, analogous to the role that a Linux distribution plays.) Then I can choose to trust these people or not based solely on how good they are at security, choose my library authors based solely on how good they are at writing libraries, and choose my CDN based solely at how good they are at distributing content. I don't have to conflate the security trust with anyone other than the people I intentionally choose to put security trust in.
Well, I think the mind's detection that anger would be beneficial operates at lower-level, and that in a modern environment it can misfire. For instance, let us say that an employer screws you over. Your primal instinct might be to get angry and make a big fuss. This is because in a more traditional environment, where everybody knows everybody, you need to get angry and fight for yourself, or else you will be seen as a pushover. Your primal instinct also recognizes there is no immediate danger to getting angry at your employer -- you can yell at them and raise a consequence without him beating you to a pulp. So your instinct says: "Get angry, defend your honor, it is in your interest to make a fuss."

But in a modern environment, few people, if anybody, know that you were screwed over by your employer. So there is no need to put up a fight in order to defend your reputation. Furthermore, if you put up a fight, onlookers will not be close enough to the issue to know if you are right or wrong. All they will see is drama, and they will associate that drama with you, rightly or wrongly. You will make an enemy of your former employer. So all around, anger is a bad idea. So in the modern environment, Dale Carnegie advice applies. Also good advice for the modern world is Chris Matthew's adage: "Don't get mad, don't get even, get ahead."

I also think that most modern bosses act in a sort of weak-willed fashion. Remember the classic scene from Office Space where the boss asks Peter to come in on Saturday? As typical for the modern boss, he says, "What's happening? So I'm going to need you to come in tomorrow, if you could be here around 9pm, that would be great." Rather than phrase it as an order, he makes it sound like he is asking for favor. Thus the boss doesn't pattern match your primal mind as being a boss. You have to reprogram your mind to understand that what he says is really an order, and not a favor. You have to reprogram your mind to treat your boss like a boss, and not like a peer you can get angry at.
The "either help everyone or help no one" mentality helps --> no one.

Also consider that usually a problem has to be solved in your garage before it's solved globally.

Other times the situation is that there are external barriers (such massive fraud, incompatible laws, etc) and issues (such as the market not being developed enough yet, little to no demand, etc) that prevent the local solution getting scaled out to a global solution.
Whoa! Great article. Even though I use the tool a lot, I didn't know it could do some of the things you highlighted. Definitely a good read for both pros and people new to Chrome Dev Tools :)
Hmmm. I wasn't trying to be passive aggressive, was just on a mobile device and wanted to point out the issue. Appreciate the perspective, though.
What do delays at the arrival end of your trip have to do with 9/11? Customs screening for international flights has always existed; only security on the departure side has gotten slower, and this is a problem you can solve with not very much money by enrolling in pre-check.

Your air travel experience will be much more pleasant if you exclusively do carry-on. I've never needed more than a backpack and a suitcase. Most destinations have laundry machines.

My understanding is that weather, taxi gridlock, and under-provisioned gates are the primary drivers of slowness in airports.
See http://pqcrypto.org/ for non-NSA work on post quantum crypto.
Global number of trees is order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate
The point in the introduction about people who work with developers needing to be familiar with the console is hugely important, in my opinion. It's the one bridge, short of someone having actual previous coding experience, that really makes my life easier at work. It also makes people feel, or so I observe, more confident and in control of their workstation.
Video Games: The Secret Life
To clarify your point, they don't. They have a self-defense force. They lack any serious offensive power since they focus on mostly defensive armaments.

There are also pretty big differences between Japan's SDF and a modern military. Only scraping the surface here, but members of the SDF can leave at any time, for any reason since it's a purely volunteer position. This weakens their military. They are afraid of being too hard on solidiers because if they are, they'll leave. This means you have an army of weak soliders who may not have the proper skills or training that an army like the U.S or China has.

This is why they need to be allowed to have a military. A country should be able to defend itself and the strongest defense, is a powerful and potent offense.
Random forests being black boxes is something that is widely touted even among active practitioner, but not really true any more. There are methods available for decomposing random forest predictions into feature contributions, so that each prediction is represented as the sum of the bias term and contribution from each feature (similar to what you get in linear regression, but at the level of each individual prediction instead of one for the whole model), see for example http://blog.datadive.net/interpreting-random-forests/. Also there are methods for extracting, pruning and summarizing random forest rules to make them human readable, see for example inTrees package in R.
Measuring the total number of violent break-ins

Is actually a bit hard. That's why we (our DOJ) and e.g. the U.K. mirror direct police reports (which have under-reporting by citizens and outright falsification by authorities) with surveys, and those of course have their own problems. But, yeah, easier than climate.

I'm not aware of any politically significant faction on the left claiming that violent crimes are not increasing

I think by this you mean you think the significant factions of the left claim violent crimes are increasing?

When violent crime has been decreasing for quite some time.... My favorite point to make here is that our post-WWII history may track demographics better than anything else, the thesis behind this being the more young men in your population, the more crimes.

Let me add a favorite statistic here: since I've been watching this closely, the number of people and guns in the US have increased by roughly 50%, and the absolute number of fatal gun accidents has dropped by 25%.
Any recommendations for beginner materials about this and other modeling and machine learning topics? I worked for a few years with the folks behind SciPy and NumPy and iPython, and helped package the suite of tools many use for this kind of work, and so I have quite a bit of familiarity with the tools for experimenting with this stuff, but I never dug into the math and I'm not even sure where to start on it.
SPOILER ALERT

I don't know about "hardest" but I do tend to wonder: who'd have thought to promote to anything other than one's own color? Kinda feels similar to doing some odd operation "in a single processor instruction" but the trick is that the ISA in question went the way of the dodo about four decades ago.