skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's some research on automatically deriving efficient algorithms for classes of distributions, e.g. getting a specialized EM-like algorithm for anything where EM-like algorithms are applicable: http://machinelearning.wustl.edu/mlpapers/paper_files/AA24.p...

But obviously that doesn't cover classes as big as "anything expressible in Church", so there's a pretty big gap. It's possible that languages like Church could use techniques like that as part of an optimizing compiler that recognizes specializable patterns, the way regular compilers do loop transformations and auto-vectorization and such. But, like auto-vectorization, not that easy to do.
And it's especially bad if you interleave them all:

var heights = lotsOfElements.map(function(el){
el.classList.add('ok');
return el.clientHeight;
});

Better is to batch the DOM updates and reads, where you can:

lotsOfElements.forEach(function(el){
el.classList.add('ok');
});
var heights = lotsOfElements.map(function(el){
return el.clientHeight;
});
don't do b), that's the worst option if the second offer falls through.
Have you signed the papers with A? If you have, might want to check the consequences of leaving early or is there a probation period of 1-2 months where you and company A have the right to terminate the employment within 24 hours? If yes, then I'd say take (a) in case B does make you a real offer after the background checks :)
I think I have learned some web design just from using the internet for the last 15 years. I'm not a phenomenal designer, but I've got some intuition and can make some simple choices.

And I get really nervous when my company's designer wants to adding a scroll bar to a modal dialog. :-(
I think you might still end up with something like the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis [1] maintained by the Vatican. And unless you "make up" neologisms you'll end up with stuff like "timer - instrumentum tempori praestituendo" which would be extremely tedious to use in a conversation. Purists might argue that it would be awesome if we could make grammar "stable" though. It's an interesting thought.

[1] http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/institutions_connected/lat...
How close is clean aviation?
I did coded a mammography scanner software (I am a radiologists) for analyzing the density of the breast and categorizing it according to how dense or fatty is. It's a wip but needs a lot of work, mainly on the scientific side.
Not Even the People Who Write Algorithms Really Know How They Work
They don't give users the ability to also filter iAd.
Think about Flash. There have been Flash-blocking technologies on the desktop forever, but they never made much of a dent on the industry. Then came the iPhone, with Flash blocked by fiat. At first, the industry laughed, and said that Apple would be forced to cave and implement Flash support or lose sales to phones that support Flash.

Meanwhile, Apple was trying to sell hardware, and Flash makes hardware suck. It runs hot, it sucks up battery, and consumers blame the hardware, not Flash.

Who says, “Flash has terrible battery life?” Nobody. They say, “My iPhone barely lasts an afternoon before I need to charge it again.” Flash freeloads on the hardware, because nobody blames it for their bad mobile experience. In hindsight, it’s obvious why Apple refused to support Flash: It degrades the iPhone experience.

So Apple “blocked” Flash, and iPhone grew anyways, and it was Flash that got killed by iPhone, not iPhone killed by Flash.

Now Apple is making it easy to kill ads. And it’s for the same reason: iPhone owners would rather read certain web sites on their desktop browsers, because the experience of reading on the iPhone is terrible, thanks to ads. They suck up battery and hog the limited viewport.

If this had happened five years ago, people would laugh and say Apple was shooting itself in the foot, and that web sites would simply block Apple users that use ad blockers. But having seen what happened to Flash, they realize that there’s a reasonable chance that Apple users blocking ads will take ads to the same place Flash went: The trash can.

The web sites that figure out a different business model will beat those that block iOS user who block ads. The newspapers that play along with iAds will beat those who try to serve ads through HTML. And that means the industry could be about to receive a major disruption, one that didn’t happen on the desktop.

Just as Flash wasn’t killed by Flash blocking on the desktop, but by Apple refusing to support it on iOS.
I forget the context, but I saw someone (a writer for the National Review, I think) say this to someone:

You must be one of those people that think that airplanes fly not because physicists and engineers found a way to propel steel through the air, but because the FAA allows them to.

This reminds me of that.
Why Bitwise Reproducibility Matters
hi. i'm one of the Stan devs. (i work on variational inference: ADVI).

happy to answer any questions here.
Sure, I mentioned abstract interpretation, but as you say all optimizing compiler techniques might be applicable.
That is a peculiar reaction to this research.

I take it from your argument that

1) you reject the IPCC scientific concensus that climate change is largely caused by human activity and will lead to significant impacts in the next century
and

2) you disagree with the introduction of regulatory frameworks to, for example, build the external costs of carbon emissions into the economy in the form of carbon taxation.

I also assume that you think you believe 2) BECAUSE you believe 1).

Faced with a research paper that suggests that often people adjust their opinion of research based on the palatability of proposed solutions, I find it interesting that you don't see this paper as evidence that you should go back and reconsider whether your rejection in 1) is, at least in part, driven by your distaste for the kind of solution proposed in 2).

What I don't see is any reason why this research gives you further confirmation for your position with respect to 1), which would therefore reinforce your commitment to 2).

Can you explain your logic a little more clearly?
> I'd probably be a whole lot less rational...

I think you imagine that you are being very rational, because you've studied some climate science and believe you're intelligent enough to form your own judgement, but you're wrong. It's extremely irrational to dismiss the consensus opinion of climate science researchers based on your own (epistomologically limited, non-professional-climate-scientist) assessment of their research.

> it still looks like your typical doomsday story dressed up as science.

And say the likelihood of this doomsday scenario being correct is 10% by your assessment: do you think a rational risk analysis would conclude that we should do nothing and go about business as usual? Do you also enjoy playing russian roulette when your not skimming climate science articles?
Why go through all that though? The fundamental principle is that it is flattening the buffer to one linear section of memory, making the pointers jump to a location that is likely already prefetched and possibly in the same cache line. Dumping to C seems like it is missing the point.

A library like Cereal should be able to do this almost trivially simply by serializing the data, unserializing it to a flat buffer, then pointing to the start of that buffer.

Also I should say that a random forest created by pointer hopping to each new level is a very naive implementation and will take a long time to create due to heap allocation and a long time to traverse due to cache misses.
Why not just start your own company?
I agree it is easy to throw a basic interface together in HTML/CSS/JS, oftentimes the code is reusable and this approach can be pretty effective. However, I'll present a reason you should NOT do that - if you are working with non-technical users /designers in a joint-application-design (JAD) or collaborative type session.

When you are sitting next to someone, and you are designing UI, and you have to open anything that looks like code, it can throw off non-technical people severely. Oh, sure I can make this box bigger, let me just change this property on some CSS, adjust this div and then refresh the screen?

I have done both styles, using tools like Balsamiq and Axure RP, paper prototypes, whiteboard prototypes, fat-client prototypes using desktop UI frameworks, and prototypes in HTML/CSS/JS. I think the advice here is, make sure you know the audience you're working with, and that having to interleave code with the design process doesn't throw off the workflow (even if only basic coding).
It is not video, podcast.
I allready accepted the offer and everything is finalized. Start this week. Since they hired me after just one phone call, I know they plan on reviewing my performance after three months, but that's about it. If I abandon the job, it says I'd forgo any compensation but that's about all in the contract and employment handbook
Really depends on the software what is a good fit. Some common options are:

a) for server software, you can sell a hosted version

b) for software for corporate use, you can sell support

c) for software users might want to change or integrate with their own code, have a strict open-source license like AGPL and sell differently licensed versions to customers that don't want to conform to the original license

d) sell closed plugins or companion tools (e.g. sell an iPhone app that integrates with your open-source web app)
Google the search engine doesn't have a monopoly, but Google the search advertising does (adwords).
Yes, really.

You're saying the same thing I am, Geoffrey. Sort of. I expect browsers to render the same way as the spec says it should. I then verify in each browser. When they don't, I adjust, but I never write code, only test in ... Opera ..., and expect it to be identical everywhere. I don't only read the ... Opera ... blogs and specs and expect it all to work the same all the time.
The Refactor Party: An idea I shared on GitHub
A lot of the data we have is incredibly inaccurate, to say the least. A recent study from Yale stated that the actual number of trees on Earth is almost 8 times the number previously estimated. EIGHT times! If we can't even count freaking trees, do you expect me to trust numbers concerning much more complex models of the atmosphere?

Also, claiming the parent post is "clearly out of ignorance" is both arrogant and disrespectful. There are published reports from reputable sources postulating vastly different theses/opinions.

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubt." -- Bertrand Russell
How to Use Chrome Developer Tools Like a Pro
My iPhone was made in China. Where was yours made?
No, it is not. may be in the 90's but this is 2015, we have search engine optimization, apps are not acessed on the domain, they run in the users device (case study http://vine.co ). Read advice from co-founder twitter, founder of blogger and medium http://evhead.com/2011/06/five-reasons-domains-are-less-impo...
However that music is just a product is not what many of the slogans around copyright say ("protect the artists etc").
uBlock works on Firefox for Android?
A few reasons:

+ Different skill sets: VC is very much a relationship/network/finance job, founding an operating company requires execution against many more functions, especially product.

+ Diversification: Often people who want to be VCs have had some success in founding companies, but modest. If you look at most entrepreneurs turned VCs, they sold their companies for relatively small amounts (with some notable exceptions e.g. Rich Barton, Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla). They know how hard it is to build an amazing company. Being a VC allows you to use those hard won skills while diversifying your portfolio.

+ Lifestyle: Being a founder is great, but it's a roller coaster. Being a VC is hard work, but a bit more steady state.
PC Magazine's Review: Best Social Media Analytics Tools of 2015
Microsoft Spending $75M to Boost K-12 CS Education, Put TEALS in 4,000 Schools
do let me know how it goes if you do try ADVI.

we're also working on making it more robust to initialization and step-sizes. stay tuned.
Some LBO guys would beg to differ ;-)
Totally unrelated, but it's nice to find another J. Rowley out there!
Which, as you seem to be acknowledging, is really the whole debate over the antitrust cases.
US Forest Service Prevents Its Own Scientists from Talking About Study
I see your sarcasm but Tesla shouldn't have been part of it :)
Stan is a fantastic language/library/tool. (Disclosure, I've taken 2 classes with Andrew Gelman[1].

For those who haven't used it, the typical usage is to use Stan in combination with other languages (most commonly R). In the Stan language you define a model, specifying the data you'll get, potentially transformations to that data, then a set of parameters you want to fit, then finally a model saying how those parameters interact with each other and the data. You can also define priors for parameters. Then typically you save that model, and using R pass in the variables to a Stan call. The resulting fit object is returned to your original environment automatically.

It actually fits the work style reasonably well. All data munging happens as before, but instead of having some complicated model expression in, say, a glm() call, you have it in Stan language.

If you're interested in this, Gelman has two great books. Gelman & Hill's Hierarchical Models[2] which is applied and geared towards social science researchers, and Bayesian Data Analysis[3].

[1] http://andrewgelman.com/

[2] http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/arm/

[3] http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/
Another paper comparing classifier methods, that also concludes RF is one of the best: http://jmlr.org/papers/volume15/delgado14a/delgado14a.pdf
You don't think that those others are solving problems for people? If they weren't, they'd be easy to unseat, or more likely would collapse under their own weight. Are there all sorts of undesirable consequences of their success? Of course! But tech isn't exempt from that. And even if, for the sake of argument, the undesirable side effects of tech's businesses was magically orders of magnitude less than any other segment, it's not unreasonable to talk about it in addition to the others.

The thing about "Big Tech" is that you think the word "Tech" has anything to do with technology. It doesn't. It's just how the companies in question managed to get into a position of power. At the level of business this article deals in, it's just an identifier for a market segment.

Tech business is no longer the scrappy young underdog doing good and fighting the good fight. Sometimes their interests align with the people's and we benefit when they fight to protect their interests. But they also fight to protect their interests when they're at odds with the end user's best interests.
Stan is very much a successor to BUGS, although I'm not sure BUGS is better known outside certain social science research communities these days.
Well, I'll put it this way: at the local craft brew bars in town, they have a pretty wide range of styles with 4-5 in each category.

And then there's IPAs, which have triple that.

They're a weird fad right now and, while I enjoy the odd IPA, there's more to the beer world than hops!

My theory is craft breweries realized that they could take a mediocre ale, dry hop the crap out of it, and then charge a premium for the result. ;)
Actually they do, and their html5 player is BROKEN in my browser. There is no way to seek, even touching slider resets video position to the beginning.
Yes or now any of dozens of apps in the App Store which is what makes it a turning point.
Volkswagen Admits to Cheating on U.S. Emissions Tests Business
Law is social, nothing is outside of existing law and being math can't change that because law is based on what is or isn't mathematically preventable.
Blink is a fork of WebKit and still behaves largely the same. Chrome really hasn't done a whole lot to the underlying layout/reflow logic...yet.
the Stan manual [1] is like a textbook. while it's a bit long (and a fair bit longer than a research paper), i highly encourage that you take a look. it's very informative.

[1] http://mc-stan.org/documentation/
I'm OP. I'm a dev, but not particularly spectacular at dev. I'm also not qualified to host or run an OSS project. I'm full of noobness in that regard. But I had this idea and I thought this would be the best way to try to share it and see if it's catchy for anyone else. YCombinator is one of the few places I've shared this link.

Side note: Tho I read the news here often, I don't post. My account here is nearly 8 years old and as of this post, I have two karmas!
PEP 0505 – None coalescing operators
Posters of the golden age of Soviet cosmonauts
Mmmm,

Yeah, as I understand it, the enthusiasm for deep learning comes because it scales well to truly huge data sets where most other machine learning algorithms tend to create artifacts of a similar size to the data in question.

That is to say that deep learning, random trees and SVMs all do approximately the same thing - non-linear regression, equivalently regression on a feature space, roughly drawing curves between two sets on huge dimensional space and using these curves for distinguishing objects.

Also - the linked paper giving all the actual details of the algorithm seems unresponsive.

This link worked for me:

https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~breiman/randomforest2001.pdf
No need to leave Google for that purpose - just use Google from incognito mode in Firefox.
Apple rolls out ad blocking because modern ads are hugely invasive and slow down the experience.

Those most impacted by this proclaim that big tech is too powerful. Throw in Google to skirt the thrust of the issue.

Color me unimpressed by the Times' "value-added" coverage.
If there's anything I take away from this discussion, it is that I miss the days when technology was about technology and people where skeptical about big corporations rather than having some weird personal relationship with them. Things have overall gotten better and better for people that want to create rather than consume, but I'm not sure it's going to last. It's weird to me that people put forward disruption as something prevalent in the industry, but they assume everything will somehow magically only get better.
Ad blockers absolutely block the ads at the top and of Google searches, which I specifically sited as useful.
This isn’t sufficient, you’d still get empty squares everywhere on the pages with ads.
American Experience: Walt Disney
Thanks. Did not realise this. Though $500 is still a huge chunck of change for people here. Considering the exchange rate
In my mind, there's two points to Stan. The first is the actual math -- it can fit lots of models, much faster and more flexibly than other alternatives.

The second is to go out and meet the practitioners where they are. That means making Stan models look like the equations in your paper. It means connecting to existing research software ecosystems. It means making it easy to adapt. In this case, if you end up tightly coupled to, say, specific R data structure then it becomes much, much harder to make it also work well for Python, and for Stata, etc. Additionally, it means that if I start on a model in Python then I cannot easily switch to using R (or vice-versa).

Using a DSL also has the nice property of cleanly separating Stan world vs R world. That makes it easier for users to build an accurate mental model for what happens when/where, which hopefully then leads to better performance.

Most importantly though, Stan code is incredibly concise and clear for specifying models.
If there was a formula for their success, nobody has been able to repeat it.

I know they plagiarized some old blues stuff, but all musicians do to some extent, and those old blues tunes were forgotten then and would still be forgotten if Zep hadn't brilliantly rearranged them.
Adults don't get bullied, kids do. Adults don't complain about how they were bullied, it's pathetic to hear an adult say he was "bullied" by another same human being.
I'm not a physicist either. As a student, some years ago I asked my physics teacher if this conception was right, but I only got pretty elusive answers. It turns out that general relativity and quantum mechanics are not 100% coherent on this point. I suggest you to read this short, a-bit-technical-but-not-too-much essay on the problem: http://quasars.org/photon.txt
>Advertising has approximately the same "context switch" problem[1] that programmers often complain about. By definition, an advertisement is not the thing I'm currently involved with.

No, it doesn't.

A good Google ad will be about the exact thing you're searching for. And yet ad blockers will aggressively attempt to block every such ad.

>Ad blockers (and this discussion in general) are talking about ads that are not the content the user requested; otherwise ad blockers would ban the entire page.

They block Google ads, and so are blocking content that can be useful to the user.
Masters of the Small Canvas: Drawing Icons and Emoticons for All Screen Sizes
I take issue with the characterizations of industries as "Big X"

They are Big. It's a word that describes how they can shape policy and public opinion in a way that smaller businesses can not, and that competitors' interests are aligned enough that they routinely collude via lobbying organizations or other means (Big Tech is catching up in this area).
Even more succinctly, funny, and cynically: "Four Chords Song" by Axis of Awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
This has nothing to do with assuming that anyone is automatically owed compensation, regardless of the value of what is produced.

As I said before: Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed. People doing things that are actually valued by others, where the site gets substantial traffic and ads previously paid for staff. This is not an argument that anyone who slaps something on the web deserves compensation. It is an argument that THIS model is failing when it once worked, so we need a new model to pay for the things we do value online. The expectation that all web content be provided for free is not a healthy or realistic expectation. And if this model fails and no other emerges, then either people work for free, whatever terminology you want to use for that, or things we value simply disappear, something I have already seen more than enough of over the years -- and compared to many here, I got online relatively recently.
Yay Stan! So what's the deal with BBVI? I heard it's integrated in the newest Stan, but can I use it? What for?
An overview of some groups who organized against the TPP, http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/stopTPP#.Vf2visT3arU

"In 2011 Lori Wallach began developing a strategy for taking the practically unheard of TPP out of the backrooms and splashing it into the faces of the public to awaken people to its multiple threats. Mainstream liberal organizations thought she was off on Mission Impossible, since the corporate side has thousands of trade lawyers, lobbyists, PR agents, and other experienced operatives working on this. Was Lori seriously proposing to confront that army with her 11 staffers?

Yes. Enlisting a core band of labor, environmental, and community allies, the dozen trade-watching stalwarts at Public Citizen divided into five teams and went after the Brobdingnagians of global corporate power.

...it's important to spread the story of the progressive coalition's successful confrontation with the Global Goliath. Its methods and achievements give us a new template for organizing (and winning) future populist challenges to the corporate order. And the breadth, depth, and intensity of this effort show what it will take to forge a real populist movement--multifaceted and with the long-term capacity to pursue our country's deep democratic principles. We can get there if we build on what we learn--and keep pushing."