skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would argue that it doesn't even matter, but I'll try to clarify my reading of the article. The example name they give is "an obvious case" (nevertheless giving a name like this of someone who isn't convicted is an egregious violation of due process).

But here's the paragraph I'm talking about:

> Soft-spoken and gentle-mannered, Constable Collins carries a baton and pepper spray, but no gun. His weapon is his memory: Facial recognition software managed to identify one suspect of the 4,000 captured by security cameras during the London riots. Constable Collins identified 180.

Note the nice, round number. I wonder how that was established. Note that the sentence strongly implies that the only thing that makes these people suspect is being "captured by security cameras during the London riots". Those security cameras are pointed at streets, not shops, not office buildings, not private property, they couldn't have gotten a good look at the people who looted and burned.

This footage is very low quality: grainy 640x400 or less (cheap image sensors from around 2008, also the common resolution of the example images) black-and-white filmed in very bad lighting conditions at a distance of at least 6-7 meters (they hang those cameras up high), with most people on those cameras at at an average distance of 30 meters (my guess at half the distance between two of those security cameras from walking around in London). At that distance, a face is between 5x5 and 20x20 pixels.

You can't tell me they have less than 10% error rate. And of course, the subject given is black, and all the police officers mentioned are white. I'm not even implying racism here, people are notoriously bad at identifying members of other ethnic groups correctly. Example of footage here[1]) And aside from the people who were right next to the police, I doubt there were many assaults at all, though I'd expect a few.

But even if they do find the looters. They're not catching any reasonable percentage of them, they're just randomly punishing 4000 people : let's say they actually "catch" 2000 of them, and let's assume a 30% error rate (seems like the absolute minimum reasonable to me). So in effect, they're slapping jail on 660 innocents, and 1340 people who damaged property during a riot. Of the people who burned and looted, that 1340 is going to be, comparing with the numbers reported looting, somewhere between 2% and 5% of them.

The point is that this is going to be very bad for the social situation in London, and not going to change the fact that there's a very high chance that you can loot and get away with it during riots. It's all the bad, with none of the good.

[1] http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/criminalminds/images/7/7... http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/07/us-britain-bombing... http://i4.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article5828360.ece/ALTERNATE...
Instagram is pretty trivial: ads. AFAIK, their user base is largely female, and this catalog of inventory is very much desired by advertisers.

In terms of Whatsapp, micro-transaction maybe? That I am not quite sure, it is not going to be as straight-forward as Instagram.
Stylesheets is a community-generated collection of the best CSS resources
i have learnt a lot than in 3 weeks than i did in the whole time i was in college, i always have work to do. I love it there
Blip: A bytecode compiler for Python 3
White House Refuses to Say No to Encryption Backdoors Will Quietly Ask Companies
Guess they didn't get the tweet about cover sheets on the TPS report.
I'm pretty sure it's a competitor for Patrick's StarFighter game. It's not supposed to be impossible to beat.
Cockroaches can survive extremely hostile environments that more "advanced" creatures cannot. They might not be pretty like unicorns, but they are extremely well adapted to resource-poor environments.
Flexport is hiring a Director of Marketing
>EU bureaucracy is a destructive force.

It's a defensive force in this case.

Have people suddenly forgotten what happens with data in the US?
In my experience (a few years ago though, to be honest), RDS was absolutely terrible for high performance and/or latency sensitive write workloads. Due to how (again, at the time) replication was handled -- amazon apparently did (at the time? still does?) synchronous writes to each AZ, and only completes the transaction when both return. When one AZ/RDS-instance was slow or dropping packets (seemed oddly frequent at the time for cross-AZ traffic -- again about 3 years ago though), our production stack would catch fire and come to a crashing halt. Never again!
It's cool that they has Games Made With Piston page with links to Github repositories, that will be very helpful for anyone who is trying to catch up with Piston.
Yeah, it sucks being alive, but having to sometimes defend oneself will always be a part of it. The only society where no one has to carry a weapon is one where everyone is physically separated all the time.
The attribution of that quote to Mussolini has long been discredited.
Well, it'd be encrypted with my login password as part of Keychain password storage under OS X (and with my device key + unlock code under iOS) so at rest it's still going to be fairly secure.

But, as I said, I don't use password managers for passwords that are really important, I use them for the bulk of online services where I'd like to use a different random username/e-mail & password for each.
Except that's not what he was saying. It's been known forever that stated milage and actual mileage differ because the lab test is in a lab.

If people want more accurate tests, then the lab test needs to be modified to be realistic.
I'll tell you a true story a few years ago while I was supervising a training session for divers at the swimming pool, someone broke into a some of our lockers. He got away with phones, tablets, credit cards, cash. Stupid crime because we can remote-brick devices now, cancel credit cards, and the money he stole from my wallet was actually Mexican. Anyway, he was captured on CCTV inside the building and outside, but all you can tell from the footage, that the police showed me, was that he was a black guy about 6 feet tall, and that's it. So when people worry about the surveillance state I just smirk. None of it actually works in any useful way, it's all security theatre.

Oh, wait, it is useful for extorting motorists who stray into an unmarked "bus lane", but that's about it.
The world’s first Muslim woman in space
While not stated eloquently, I do think there's some truth in that.

1. Open API's, good documentation and community engagement goes a long way in establishing developer trust. I don't believe developer trust is correlated significantly with revenue (directly), but it's absolutely correlated with acquisition. I'd argue that Angular or React were partially successful because of the stickiness of their communities, and that's a powerful self-perpetuating force.

2. Monetization is in the queries. Facebook and Google know this. Throwing aside all of their auxiliary services, emerging markets, hardware, et al... between 70-90% of their respective revenue is from direct advertising. If there's a way to scale or "ramp" their revenue model, this would be the portion to focus on.
Basic ideas yeah, like dom diffing and unidirectional, immutable data flow. I'm also sure the learning curve is far nicer than it used to be back in the old days when it was an immature framework.
That's more due to stupid retards abusing tor for spamming... with tor you have to draw the line somewhere.
I think it's meant to send the message that looting and burning a city on a large scale will cause you to be hunted down, actually.
http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=niche is also a bit like that.
I wonder what roads will be like in 20 years when batteries and motors reach peak efficiency and lowest cost of production.

I jog on the side of the road every day and I have to wonder what all these cars that cheat emissions are doing to my health and how I can't make the manufacturers pay for my future lung cancer.
depends on the commodity NIC. but yes, an E5 with an Intel 10G card can almost do 14Mpps "out of the box"
You're right, that's not a complete thought.

"Does the need to train troops for urban combat provide enough justification for the military to conduct realistic exercises in actual US cities?" is how I wish I had written that.
No it's not, and unlike email, it's a proprietary system under the control of a single company.
Brute-Force amplification attacks on WordPress rely on XML-RPC
Exactly, this implied he'd elected not to carry a gun; most police in the UK that carry guns are special armed units.
Manufacturing ERP setup in 3 days, with no cost
Minecraft streamer buys $4.5M mansion – PC Gamer
It's not as though there haven't been issues with gaming these tests to a degree for a long time. Almost certainly this has been an issue of walking backwards into a big mistake little by little, which is the typical process of making big mistakes. You start by figuring out how to game the system right at "the line" as much as you can, then the day comes where you decide to be more explicit about it and build it into the software. You probably decide that you just want to play around at the edges, with incremental differences between "cheat mode" and real driving in the same realm as the bit by bit gaming they've been doing already. But once the system exists the natural process of optimization would push it to the limit of what was capable, and it turned out that was a lot. But by then you're committed, and it would take a lot of fortitude to walk back from such a mistake.

I'm sure the same sorts of dynamics have played out in many other auto makers, though it's notable that some, with a more developed sense of ethics seemingly, have not gone down that road.
> most of them are actually pretty good programmers.

What is 'good'? In 'software development' 'good' is usually connected to writing clear, maintainable, test covered code. In most scientific research it means something completely different. I think on HN most adhere to the former definition of good and in that sense most researchers (especially in physics, but also CS / ML) are not 'good' according to that definition (because you need quite a lot of years of experience in a corporate setting usually) and actually even bad. But the code works and implements the concepts in their papers so they are 'good' in that respect. That is more rapid prototyping to make a POC to show it works, after which you properly rewrite it.
Instagram already does this since a couple of weeks ago.
It's produced by HBO and has incredibly high viewership, so I imagine it's paid by (1) the increase in HBO subscribers, (2) other networks that want to run it, and (3) advertising run during the show.

Stealing content is good because otherwise, the content isn't available. I'm pretty sure that in countries like Poland or Slovenia, shows like Game of Thrones arrive with a substantial delay, if at all.

Plus, requiring the people to subscribe to the whole of HBO and dozens of shitty shows just to see Game of Thrones is essentially an abuse of the market, like a monopoly (which copyright always is).
Companies want you to buy your own phone, buy your own laptop, and now, rent your own desk. But does the money they save show up in your paycheque or go into the pockets of the boss? And the funny thing is workers are doing it to themselves...
Thats a very good point on scopes and loops. Thanks
This is just a strange thing to say. There are so many languages out there with very interesting features, I'm not sure why you insist python is the only obvious choice. In my experience, all of the advanced research for proprietary companies in this area is not being done on Python, at least not those who are willing to speak at conferences. There's a lot of GPU computing also available to Java, if you think that's the reason Python is the only option. Python is certainly more widely used as a teaching language, so I guess you might see more libraries that are widely known because of universities in the academic environment, but I'm not sure why you think that means that it's the only language that major institutions are using? Because the reality is that almost all the cutting edge stuff that I've read about is not being done in python at all.
How long ago was this? The quality of the images from CCTV has increased a lot in recent years. See for example the number of people convicted after the London riots. And combined with gait analysis (did you know that most people's walk is fairly unique) and tracking of their cellphones its even more effective.
Please don't post dismissive comments to Hacker News.
Please google "joint enterprise". Just being at the scene of a crime can be enough to convicted of it in the UK.

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_purpose

Also you don't need to be convicted of a crime in the UK to be given a record. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_caution
(In Haskell)
The issue appears to be, that lab testing does not emulate real-world driving conditions. So in the field, emissions are higher than in the lab.
These four car makers involved in the report differ from VW: they do not have a defeat device in their design. Their results are solely because of the lab-vs-road issue.
I think too !
I think it's supposed to work like this: assuming more users == more revenue, then opening up and promoting the use of APIs creates alternative channels to acquire new users (partner apps have their own incentive to attract users etc). Where it can hurt is when the integrating apps either don't substantially move the needle on new user acquisition, or worse they cannibalize your user base by creating reasons for your users to NOT visit your site.

IMO though the API "shutdown" was shortsighted by Twitter. If people are using a competing interface instead of your own, then maybe you should fix your own rather than just shutting down the API. Of course that's easy to say as an outsider. I'm sure the truth is much more nuanced.
Apparently there were a few minor changes in the search engine and the results given
Is China Coming Around on Cybersecurity?
These are all things that actual militaries do for exercises. In fact, under certain conditions they'll fire their weapons a LOT without blanks (live-fire exercises).
There's been info on doing this with Espruino for about a year now: http://www.espruino.com/Headphone. There's even an online-only version of the Web IDE that does two-way communications: http://espruino.github.io/EspruinoWebIDE

With 3.3v logic, it turns out you don't even need the transistor - just a capacitor and bias resistors.
Why is 80 characters the 'standard' limit for code width?
I would be interested to see codebase comparison with CPython compiler.
3-4 years maybe
Sorry for the downvote, I meant to hit up and I can't seem to change it
There is http://www.espruino.com - where the toolchain runs in the MCU - you can then just send the JS code you want to execute straight over to it :)
Ask HN: How do you find a cofounder for your project?
I am launching a project and I am finding a cofounder. I've seen several pages like www.waxidea.com to find someone. Do you think they are a good way to find someone?
www.waxidea.com
A song about Alex Jones and “gatekeepers”
How old were the cameras?
The spec doesn't define field ordering anywhere, which is why it's undefined. Russ Cox commented on the bug I linked essentially confirming it:

> It seems fine to me for the spec not to guarantee anything about struct field order in memory. The spec doesn't operate at that level.

And while he adds

> That said, no Go compiler should probably ever reorder struct fields.

the final result is struct memory layout is unspecified and implementation-dependent (essentially identical to repr(rust), as I understand it)
I still use Delphi to maintain some existing Windows projects. The feeling it gives me is very well matched by the design of this webpage...
This can be used to rile up protest against it:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/slavery-really_b_7462...

This in particular does not go down at all well with the strongly religious, even the religious right. So far it's mostly escaped their notice, however.

I have a feeling that if enough people call their Congresspeople and asking why they are voting for slavery and the destruction of American sovereignty some of them will get cold feet. Bonus points if the congressperson purports to be religious themselves.

For once, if you're in a flyover state, you can actually do something to help.
i've often felt that hn should support some sort of flair for people who want to make it clear that they are speaking for their company
Also, after removing a covered casserole dish from the oven, take the top off for a second. Otherwise moisture can form a seal around the lid so tight that when the air inside cools, it will shatter the pot inwards.
London Police ‘Super Recognizer’ i think it is correct !
No idea. The ones outside tho' I'd guess were normal, unless they upgrade every one of those million cameras every few years.
I thought that this whole "secret" thing has been explained ad naueum here and on reddit already. It is t secret before it becomes law, or is going to get snuck in under the radar. It will be open for review before it is voted on.

Also you don't give away your bargaining wants to your competitors before you sign a contract, kind of like how you don't go to a job interview and tell them out of the gate the exact minimum amount you'd be willing to work for. Thus, the wants of each party are kept to themselves before a final draft.
Generally speaking, what are the advantages of such a compiler vs. the standard interpreter?
Hahah, good point and great link! However, it might be possible also to include links to pronunciations in US and UK English.

Here is a decent example: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/ore...

Having said that, this is not quite what I was expecting: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/alu...
Is this definitely not algorithmic? I've been noticing for a while that videos might have an incidental flash of cleavage and then that is used as the thumbnail. I'd always wondered if this was arising "naturally" somehow (people pausing that scene perhaps?)

On the basis of the type if video I'd discounted manual intervention. Though if people can just upload any image I'm now surprised that they're not all like this.
Tech Startups Chase Something Other Than Profits
Which kind of co-founder are you looking for?
At the very least psychedelics should be a legitimate subject of serious inquiry in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry.
I need an expert in marketing to complete my team.
None. Standard interpreter automatically compiles modules to bytecode on the first import and stores them in .pyc files. Compiling specific files is also possible. I am assuming this project is simply an exercise on the author's part.

edit: precision
If the political landscape shifts, yes. I'm looking forward to seeing security policy grow at the massive scale and rigor that characterizes China.

What I don't think some realize is that it can also go very bad very quickly...
But does amazon have a reasonable claim of being able to fulfill those requirements considering secret court orders that can't be challanged by european citizens, NSLs and the microsoft case[1]?

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/09/microsoft-...
Perhaps with your level of familiarity with HIPAA, this is layman's terms, but for people who might not even know what HIPAA is about, this is far out from layman's terms.

The first sentence kinda made sense, but the second one just made it far less clear in my opinion. Why should a layman care what it's called (or what the equivalent name might be in another form of regulation?). They're trying to understand what it's about. No?

For the record, I do know what HIPAA is (broadly), but unfortunately still don't think this explanation makes it easier for me to understand. If I was being cynical, I would say that the entire reason you posted the comment was to self-promote your HIPAA PaaS on AWS. I didn't downvote it to give you the benefit of the doubt.
XML-RPC allowing hundreds of passwords per login attempt
> It doesn't store them, and it certainly doesn't, say, try to make them available in a searchable away to everyone in the world.

Back of the envelope calculation: If your messages are 256 char messages, on a 128GB ram server you can fit 500 billion of them in memory; incidentally, that's one day's worth of tweets these days. I recently got a quote for a beefy 256GB ram server from Dell for $6,000. To make things easier, let's assume $10,000 with redundant 1TB SSD and everything else you might need. The data is extremely easy to shard.

With proper caching, you can probably keep 99.9999% of all tweets shown in just one such servers, and serve them within a few ms. I don't have recent experience with web frontends, but a properly configured nginx could probably server on meager hardware can do a few tens-of-thousands requests per second. a Seastar server on beefy hardware can probably handle a significant percentage of Twitter's load.

Search is a little harder, but not by much.

Is this engineering trivial? Far from it. But I've worked with stunt programmers who can build this in a few months with a 3 person team. At least one of them commands a salary of about $500K last I heard.

Is that all Twitter is doing? No, I'm sure they have 10 backend "things" for every user visible "thing". They needed something like Bootstrap for internal use, after all. I don't really believe you can run Twitter with just $1M/year in capex, just $1M/year in opex and just $1M/year in engineering salary - you need a whole lot more than that; In fact, to pull in revenue of $2B/year (which Twitter seems to be on track for), you probably need 50 people just in accounting.

What I am saying, though, is that the technical challenges faced by Twitter (at least those that are visible to users) are highly overrated. If you know what you are doing, Twitter can be run on $50,000 worth of hardware; This has been true since 2007 - Computers were weaker and had less memory then, but Twitter had much less traffic too. I've looked at the numbers every single year since 2007, and at any point in time, the "bare bones essential hardware for interactive response" was in the $50,000 range. Which probably means if they spent more than $1M/year on hardware (or depreciation-equivalent-hosting) at any point in time, they should have hired better engineers.
Well it might be possible for this one to implement a better bytecode optimiser and a better "stack flow", the standard interpreter only has a fairly simple peephole optimiser so it will e.g. store to locals to immediately reload the same local, or repeatedly load a name from the local or global scope rather than load it once and dup it:

>>> @dis.dis
... def foo():
... print a
... print a
... print a
...
3 0 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (a)
3 PRINT_ITEM
4 PRINT_NEWLINE

4 5 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (a)
8 PRINT_ITEM
9 PRINT_NEWLINE

5 10 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (a)
13 PRINT_ITEM
14 PRINT_NEWLINE
15 LOAD_CONST 0 (None)
18 RETURN_VALUE

I don't know how much value the optimised bytecode would bring though, likely not much outside of specific tight loops, and even then it's still only interpreted cpython, for little more cost you can integrate scipy solutions (e.g. numba) which'll likely have a much more significant impact.
Ouch, isn't automatic failover one of the big selling points of RDS?
I thought they did exactly as you said: the APIs are available as long as you pay Twitter for them...
> How can the human mind do this?

I think the most interesting point about this is that the human mind doesn't know how the human mind does it.

I wonder what kind of software they compared to Constable Collins. Did that software use designed features or learned features? What sort of data set was it trained on?

It wouldn't surprise me if current state of the art software that learns features from real CCTV footage fared a lot better than what they were using in 2011.