skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I accept the downvotes; I don't think that, I know it. Notice that "a lot" doesn't mean "over 50%", it can also mean "too much for comfort".

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occu...

> We are living in boom times for the private prison industry. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest owner of private prisons, has seen its revenue climb by more than 500 percent in the last two decades. And CCA wants to get much, much bigger: Last year, the company made an offer to 48 governors to buy and operate their state-funded prisons. But what made CCA's pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.

> Occupancy requirements, as it turns out, are common practice within the private prison industry. A new report by In the Public Interest, an anti-privatization group, reviewed 62 contracts for private prisons operating around the country at the local and state level. In the Public Interest found that 41 of those contracts included occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/lockup-quotas-low...

> In 2012, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest for-profit prison company in the country, sent a letter to 48 state governors offering to buy their public prisons. CCA offered to buy and operate state prisons in exchange for a 20-year contract, which would include a 90 percent occupancy rate guarantee for the entire term. Essentially, the state would have to guarantee that its prison would be 90 percent filled for the next 20 years (a lockup quota), or pay the company for unused prison beds if the number of inmates dipped below 90 percent capacity at any point during the contract term (a "low-crime tax" that essentially penalizes taxpayers when prison incarceration rates fall).

I can't prove that this is related to the private prison industry. But I'm not buying for one second the sudden sharp rise was caused by suddenly increased vengefulness, either. So what gives?

https://www.google.com/search?q=us+prison+population+graph
Wondering what would happen if you apply this after enhancing (upsampling) something like what's shown in here as magic kernel thrice:

http://www.johncostella.com/magic/
> I've never seen a study which looked at extra cash injections for long-term unemployed.

This was done in London. Here you go: https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...

> giving moderate amounts of extra cash to a heroin addict is unlikely to improve their lives

It's hard to generalize without a larger-scale study, but the article has some evidence to the contrary. But if by moderate you mean $100 then of course they'll be begging again tomorrow. It has to offer a new perspective.
>>"They provide food, clothing, shelter and medical care to millions and millions of people who would otherwise be out in the cold"

That's one way of looking at it. Another way is that they entrap many people who don't deserve to be there and would be productive members of society if it weren't for some ridiculous punishment on a nonsensical law.

I think it's unreasonable to believe that even half the people in an American prison would be homeless without it.
Not quite sure what to say, other than thank you for sharing. My heart goes out to you. .
Opsight – Read the most insightful articles on the planet
Highly agreed! I would be really curious to see if someone could take a slightly defocused picture and run it through this to see what it would produce / if it would introduce a bunch of undesirable effects or not.
Creating a C API for a Rust library
What on Earth is happening in the hand picture at the top?
Nothing more exciting then a unregulated wild west. Especially for a place like China with 2x the driver mortality rate of the US, staggering deaths caused by pollution and industrial accidents and swathes of land irreparably polluted.

And of course the Chinese love it. That's why they are desperate for Western products like baby milk formula, vitamins and services in the health and old age sectors.

But of course the US is totally scared of science. What with being the hub of almost all successful startups.
I think you did not understand the full import of my comment. So let me clarify.

Your ask is for a society where every person is "needed and wanted". In other words, every person's (social) desires/ needs/ wants are to be fulfilled on a consistent basis. Given that Mother Nature is discriminative, this is simply impractical unless every one is forced (ala. communism) to equitably dish out attention/love regardless of the likability/attractiveness of the other person.

In response I stated that I'd rather live in a society where every person was self-sufficiently mirthful. By that I meant - where every person is content/ happy/ delighted on their own company. Everyone exhibits a "cheerful enjoyment of life; an exultation of spirit."[1] In such a society, people continue to interact with one another as usual - but such interactions would simply be a bonus-fun. There would be no "needs" and "desires" to be fulfilled by establishing a connection/bond with the other person (interactions happen freely without any demands/bonds/expectations; love becomes obsolete).

I finished off that comment by effectively saying that the very first step people need to take, to be on the path to being in such a mirthful society, is to acknowledge the role instinctual passions play in those "needs" and "wants" ... such as, for instance, how the underlying passions of nurture/ fear/ desire (regardless of culture) underpin the various social desires/ anxieties of needing-to-belong/ seeking-approval/ fearing-ostracization/ suffering-loneliness (varies somewhat by culture).

Therefore, my comment is about first acknowledging, and then minimizing to the point of finally eradicating those desires than satisfying or changing them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joie_de_vivre
I always wondered about that - it seemed like a great invention.
Yes, goleveldb was chosen because it's a ready to use library with a decent write and read performance, and no external non-Go dependencies. It can also be used to store multiple consumers offsets in future.

Regarding provided guarantees, with simple 'get work_queue' reads it provides at-most-once delivery. With two phase reliable reads 'get work_queue/open', 'get work_queue/close' it provides at-least-once delivery (although message is kept in memory on server during a reliable read and will be lost if you SIGKILL siberite. On SIGTERM and SIGINT siberite will gracefully abort the read and save the message).
I used to have your problem, then I clicked on the "unsubscribe" link in those 15 company's emails and now I mostly just get email from real people and robots I need information from.
Except giving drug users.cash stops them burglarizing and robbing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_period
I think the point is that Bell, who already tended toward introversion, no longer could (due to injury) nor had a need (due to not needing to work) to go outside and socialize.

That said, having an income was probably the biggest factor - that kind of back injury does not keep one from going out. I agree that his compensation is earned - but that sort of support has side effects on both the recipient and the rest of society. When taxes and regulation can be expected to take up the slack, people tend toward individualism and communities wither. Compare the strength of families and communities over the last 100 years. While good government can provide financial assistance, like how communities used to, it rarely provides the human socialization that communities do.
I'm from the UK. I had access to Janet in 1989 at Uni, and then Compuserve and then FidoNet. Internet access here was about 1994. I personally had it when Windows 95 arrived and I bought the Plus Pack which included Internet Explorer and dial-up software.

Though I must admit, I had an Internet email address I collected via FidoNet using Bluewave.
Note that this works for out of focus photos, not for enlarging tiny details of in focus photos.

They may look similarly blurry, but are mathematically very different.
Probably Predatory – Barely Legally
Thanks for asking. He is doing fine.

His doctor thinks the high test may have been a result of hard work he was doing with a personal trainer, after a few years of not working out.

He had AST/ALT tested again a few weeks later, also with Theranos, and it was down dramatically (though still above reference range).

It does sounds like he could have been be a victim of their accuracy problems.
Fine example of the platform's weakness: http://en.arguman.org/there-is-no-such-thing-as-global-warmi...

Inject enough irrelevant counterarguments and you get the same quasi-controversy with the same amount of confusion for the layman.
>Firstly, don't take advice that impacts your ability to feed your kids from random guys on the Internet

I'd normally agree but anyone on HN worth their salt knows who Patrick McKenzie is.
I'd love to see exactly what legislation they believe gives them the authority to enforce this kind of regime by regulatory fiat.

And I'd also love to see how they plan on getting around the very clearly required notice-and-comment period for new regulations, to say nothing of sweeping new regulatory frameworks (no way this happens legally by Christmas, which in this context probably means "day after thanksgiving").

This quote: "Under the plan, the government would work with the drone industry to set up a structure for registering the drones" makes me hope that they're planning on an ineffective and widely ignored warranty-card type system.
What's amazing about gulp-uncss is that it fires up phantomjs to run the javascript, so it would hopefully work with angular as well.
8 CMS is the most simple, lightweight and fast file-flat CMS in the world in PHP
Wow, that was really not as bad as I thought.
Yum, baclava! Or perhaps you're thinking of a "balaclava"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaclava_(clothing)
"I cannot, don’t even think about it, just plain can’t, make money from MPEG/H.264/AVC videos I create. For that, I need to buy another something from somebody."

This was pretty surprising to me. Why does Apple not allow making money from MPEG videos that you create? Does this include uploading them to YouTube?
Well, yes and no. I had exactly the same thought as I was reading the article, but the bit about noise is important: in the presence of even a tiny bit of noise, the de-blur algorithm collapses pretty rapidly. And the "enhance!" scenes in TV and movies are of images that are likely to be noisy.

They're also often un-detailed due to pixelation/low resolution as much as from blur, which violates this algorithm's assumptions, so that would be another reason that "click enhance" wouldn't work.
Just who is 'moralizing','smug and preachy' here? 'People want to moralize rather than enable'. Gosh! That's the debate over isn't it? Don't review current and awaited evidence just 'enable'.

Purely anecdotal but please <enable me> and I'll quit economic activity to devote myself to life-improving activities (and a big thank you to whoever is continuing them for my sake). Fortunately I'm an odd-ball and no one else anywhere would even think to behave as I would. So, my story is not only anecdotal but completely irrelevant.
Great blog entry. Some of it I don't fully agree with but still some great points!
Play Video Games for Cash – Beta Starting - Free Prizes
Android reverse engineering – Analyzing skype
Climb In, Tune In: A Renaissance for Sensory Deprivation Tanks
It is to do with MPEG-LA licensing.

Apple and Microsoft licensed the H.264 codecs for content creation which is a per user cost. They know this based on how many downloads. Users who sell their videos need to pay MPEG-LA a license per view which Apple/Microsoft can't determine. Hence you are on your own.

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Ar...
The AWS Solutions Architect Exam Overview and Course Outline
Did the "better outcomes" actually result in a net increase in tax revenues / reduction in welfare spending (ie, more than the 4k)?
The tech industry sold its soul, mainly because of Apple, and standardized on the "free" H.264/MPEG standard for videos. The caveat is that it is only free to end users for consumption (hence "free") and the bits included to handle encoding/decoding within your operating system or browser, doesn't legally allow you to produce content for others to consume.
And they just announced that it will come out on Wii U, and so you can use a keyboard for coding:
http://smileboom.com/press/20151017petitcom_en/
This is a very old link. Same feature has since landed in Photoshop
This was both insightful and highlights, i would argue, an unmet need. I would love simple write ups like this for specific software licenses.

In theory, tldrlegal.com is positioned to take this on, but in my experience they tend to deal with more pervasive licenses like MIT, GNU, etc.
Thanks, this is a good explanation of the "why".
Thanks! Maybe I've found my niche. I checked out tldrlegal.com first, but saw what you're talking about. It's more of a comparison tool for the bigger licenses.
The Black Chamber typically refers to an American organization[0] although, to be fair, it was not the only use.

> The term "Black Chamber" predates Yardley's use of it in the title of his book. Codes and code breakers have been used throughout history, notably by Sir Francis Walsingham in Elizabethan England. A so-called cabinet noir was established by King Henry IV of France in 1590 as part of the Poste aux Lettres.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_chamber
I'm not sure - YC icon is in the section "66 New Icons in 4.4" (latest version)
FYI: The magic kernel isn't taken nearly as seriously by people in the field of signal processing (almost my field). I'm always surprised as to why it keeps popping up.

One of the many articles on the internet explaining why the magic kernel isn't really that magic:

http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2011/03/03-24-11-image-filte...
Note: 2012.

As some people have mentioned in the comments already, there's been great work since on blur estimation at siggraph (particularly for motion).
Lonergan made video of himself testing the drug he sold as MDMA. He lied about his product and people got hurt as a result. Its as simple as testing your purchases with legally available test kits. People do need to realize there is a risk every time you put any drug into your body, some less than others obviously. If you can't be certain that the white powder is whatever someone says it is, don't take it.
Outside of scientific and engineering fields, most everyday interactions people have with their units of measure do not involve translating between orders of magnitude, and yet the metric system optimizes for that to the exclusion of all other conveniences, through its focus on base 10 and "it's so easy, just move the decimal point!"

Meanwhile, in most other areas of life, dividing into halves, thirds or quarters is overwhelmingly more common than dividing into tenths, hundredths or other powers of ten. If you wonder why the "unintuitive" imperial units have such staying power, consider that 12 and 16 are more typical bases for them, and 12 is essentially ideal (evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6) while 16 is better than 10 (evenly divisible by 2, 4 and 8).
H.264 comprises a ridiculous number of companies. It isn't just Apple.

As we saw with VP8 there is no such thing as a truly free and open codec. Back in the day MPEG-LA was going to setup a VP8 patent pool but didn't bother and instead just licensed Google the infringing patents. If they didn't do this VP8 could have been open but not free.

There are just too many large and powerful players with competing interests and a penchant for litigating against any possible upstarts. The only way to fix the situation is to exempt all file formats from patent claims as it is clearly anticompetitive.
This is why we aren't seeing things like Opus codec support in Safari. Apple is engaging in a codec war. I really hope it makes them a lot of money because for me as a developer doing web audio it's like the difference between FireFox circa 2005 and IE.
Nice read.
You should do more of these.

It would be great to have a site for crowdsourced EULA explanations of this sort.
https://tosdr.org/
Can anyone explain the Sudan thing?
I wish they had been more clear, sorry about that (I'll send them the equivalent of a pull request): you pay for Dataproc at a rate of $.01/"core"/hour regardless of which instance shape you use. However, you still pay for the underlying compute and storage; $.01/core/hour is the "service" fee.
The Go netpoller (2013)
The prohibition is against sending it to any “embargoed country”. Sudan is on the list: http://www.pmddtc.state.gov/embargoed_countries/
Not really. Advertising as a way of monetization might be easy to understand, but harder to actually implement and sustain. It is not like 'just put ads on it', then money will flow by itself.

It will take some non-trivial efforts for Pinterest to actually make their model working. The competition is out there: Facebook has one of the biggest and richest demographic data in the world, and it could easily leverage that to drive sales on Instagram, make it more appealing to advertisers, which I think Pinterest should be afraid of.
Almost everything in this title is misleading.

1. This isn't a CMS[1]. It doesn't manage content, it just delivers it. You can't edit the content using this software, for example. This is more akin to Jekyll[2] than a true CMS like WordPress.

2. This is not the most lightweight content-delivery system. Serving flat files would be lighter. Again, see something like Jekyll. Something like a bare Node server would also be faster, because it wouldn't require a web server (nginx or Apache) running in front of it.

3. I assume "file-flat" means "flat-file", which I then assume means "using the file system rather than RDBMS or document store software". This again is misleading because few people would think of a PHP file, which (in this system) can contain both display logic and data, to be a "flat file" in any traditional sense.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jekyll_(software)
Sounds like exactly what Noam Chomsky described in Manufactured Consent. Same tools perfected in war and brought back and used at home.
what's the language you do programming in?
To add to that, here's an article about this particular case: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/will-playboy-article-delay-...
Saying Goodbye to the Great UX Design Bonanza of 2004-2016
A case could certainly be made for providing easier, socially-accepted access to such substances, on individual humanitarian grounds, but also on the grounds that the current proprietors are majorly-violent criminals who are already at the extremes (who, rather than die/"go home", said "fuck it" and "went big"). The way things are, substantial capital is already flowing to murderers and other violent or tangibly-wrong actors. I think it's reasonable to expect non-profit distribution would cut into that, which sounds appealing.
Detecting moifications can be solved with a hash or signature of the message that is sent out and always kept by the recipient. Doesn't solve the retracting though, or the social aspects of what to do if you actually detect a hash mismatch.
Your experience seems to be wrong. In controlled experiments, the quality of service increases when tipping is banned, assuming the employee can expect a decent wage.

There are some fairly entertaining podcasts which will give you a rundown of several decades of research into this topic[1][2].

In your examples, you are certainly a sample size of one, and there are too many variables. The culture of the US, where tipping is the norm, is not much like any country where tipping is never expected.

1. http://freakonomics.com/2013/06/03/should-tipping-be-banned-...

2. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/06/24/137346289/why-w...
Specifically against exporting "dual-use" technology (suitable for both military and civilian use), in this case likely strong cryptography.

Of course it's completely pointless since they would just pirate the software anyway.
This provides a good description of how the balance wheel works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_wheel

It is manually tuned, via weights and spring tension, to oscillate at a precise interval.
Many aspects of CV and signal processing in general produce almost magical results. It's a little less magical when you think back to stats examples of fitting a curve to some signal + (known) noise process. For linear models, the noise term can get really bad before simple regression won't persevere. Least squares in one form or another finds lots of use in image processing.

Images are just functions, and almost all of the mathematical techniques that you would use to analyze one domain hold for the other. Certain perturbations such as camera jitter are easier to deal with as "undoing" them is tantamount to assuming some underlying regularity/structure on the signal and filtering accordingly. Others, such as removing an occlusion, are harder. Humans do it well thanks to our power of inference, learned from the litany of visual examples that we take in over the course of a lifetime. It's not trivial getting an algorithm to visualize what should have been behind the person who photobombed your insta, but we do it somewhat naturally.

For occlusions and finding relationships between partially overlapping scenes, really interesting things are happening with deep learning. For noisy images, techniques continue to improve. Compressed sensing and signal recovery is an active area of research that's already paid huge dividends in many fields, especially medical imaging. I can't wait to see what becomes possible in the next five years. And, as has been noted - this article is dated. There are already more powerful techniques using deep learning for image super resolution and deblurring.
There is this misconception today that you can argue everything, including the laws of nature.

For "For software engineers, open-plan offices lead to greater productivity than individual offices" we don't need arguments but experiments and science.
"I’ve got to read the separate rules that came with the fonts, and obey them. (I can only borrow those too.)"

Thanks for writing this. It would be great to have the font licenses in plain English too.
15 Astonishing Railways You Ought to Trip Before Death
What's the use-case for this over, say, SQLite?
[citation needed]

What makes you believe this is true, beyond simple assertion?
Think of the main spring as the battery, and the balance wheel as a kind of resistor. The balance wheel is manually tuned to oscillate at a specific rate, releasing the stored energy one little beat at a time.

You are right that a mechanical system like that isn't perfect. You will get a kick out of a thing called a "Tourbillon" if you look that up - it was an attempt to improve the accuracy of mechanical movements by having the entire movement rotate as it unwound, in the hope of mitigating the effect of gravity on the accuracy of the watch over the course of the day.