skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that the staircasing effect is definitely the biggest drawback of Total Variation. In the "Smoothed" picture the noise is removed but the results are blocky.

The first way to deal with it is to take into account higher powers of the differences, e.g. using a linear combination p-norms or a Huber function.

The second way is to take into account second order differences. This promotes piecewise affine instead of piecewise constant functions. You can go further and look at third order differences, but the improvement is minimal.

Other than being more complex, the biggest downside is that all of these methods have some new parameter(s) to tune.
Mastering PHP
I said "risk of deadly instability through destroying most of nature" but really meant to say "high risk of deadly instability through having destroyed most of nature".

I.e. we might get ever closer to a world which is sustainable in the sense that humanity doesn't live off limited resources anymore (say, using machines to convert solar power to food more directly than using plants), but where most of nature has been destroyed and hence the possibilities for recovering by falling back to (even temporarily) using reserves increasingly vanishes (no place to build cheap or simple housing anymore, no land or even suitable climate to fall back on using plants as food). Thus all sorts of small crises can each lead to a lot of dying (perhaps like today's famines in Africa, but now all over the world).

But you may know more than me and your point may well be true. (I'm not a researcher, just fantasizing. I should get some experience in mathematical modeling.)
I'm tolerant of ads. I recognise the argument that in order to provide me content people usually need some kind of payment, and ads are currently that payment.

But ads are so hostile, and are everywhere, and result in really unpleasant behaviour (spamming; slurping as much data and not keeping it safe; etc).

I recently got a machine with Windows 8.1 with Bing, and ads are baked into whatever the start menu is called now. It's WEIRD seeing click bait ("18 bizarre home remedies that really work") on that panel page.

So I love this article, and I'm probably going to move to ad-blocking (and different OS) soon.
I really hope this whole linking-to-an-image thing is just a fad. Fascinating information; it's super annoying not to be able to copy bits out of it or zoom in without blurring.
It doesn't learn, it fully supervised and doesn't have feedback loop.

I don't say it's not interesting, it's step forward compared to other articles in my collection [1][2][3] about the same subject allows to dive easily into the metrics and heuristics used in IR.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJwFHSeFg44

[2] http://aakashjapi.com/fuckin-search-engines-how-do-they-work...

[3] https://class.coursera.org/nlp/lecture
It's an animation, not a simulation.

And not a very good one, gear teeth intersect all over the place:

http://i.imgur.com/xDWigpp.jpg
Aren't most of these reviewers in third world countries with horrible legal systems?
Plain text files are a great way to go. You should check out JRNL, https://maebert.github.io/jrnl/. It uses a single file and allows encryption and basically provides easy simple command line support for adding time-dated entries.
Totally agree. It has been an exceptionally difficult process to open a bank account for my UK company. Ridiculous amount of nonsense. Your point about the money laundering irony is also spot on.
As I point out elsewhere, lots of folks (backpackers, college students) suffer similar material deprivation, environment and stress. Yet they don't make the same bad choices.

Nearly all of India lives in far worse conditions than American poor folks and also don't make the same bad choices.

Your theory doesn't seem to be predicting the world very well.

would you then, in that world, see giving direct support as preferable to waiting for people in need to "get their shit together"?

The post you are responding to explicitly favors giving direct support - just in-kind rather than cash.

...continued studies of human behaviour show that we're much more influenced by our conditions than our inner character.

[citation needed]
> If you don't want someone to access your page, then don't respond to their request

> there's no easy way to always reliably identify the requester

That's the problem: you can't identify the person to block them in the first place.

Robots.txt is actually an explicit signal of intention for reputable search engines but that's all we have today and is easily ignored and does not work with these scrapers or anyone else.

Not sure what your last sentence means.
I'd imagine it's deliberately slowed mainly for illustrative purposes; for comparison the balance wheel in my watch is currently spinning too fast for me to see.

It could also be an fps thing
this post is truth.
i removed myself from linkedin because of the amount of recruiters spam / calls, the most annoying part was the constant incorrect matching of my skills with proposed jobs.
(i work with node.js but was getting tons of requests for php and java jobs).
the same recruiters didn't stop contacting me even after i found a job (without their help) and stated clearly on my accounts that i was not available anymore. this was super annoying.

at first i put a warning on my linkedin profile, but it didn't decrease the amount of spam.

then i started to threat via email every one using my personal email without any consent (seems like they sell cv database to each other).

i end up closing my linkedin account because i could not stop anymore all this annoying crap from recruiters. i still receive some emails once in a while and i threat them to remove my identity from their db, it seems to work for now.
I’m never going to be my hero
Because you show they received money for that opinion, with the intent of deceiving genuine customers.
Commercial speech is not protected the same way as political speech. More importantly, there are plenty of laws against fraud. For example:

"Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud

EDIT: A paid review isn't an opinion, it's an attempt to mislead for commercial gain. And civil suits are decided on a preponderance of evidence. As in 51% plausible. As in, a nudge more than a coin toss.
1) Reproduction is a natural right, and some people would consider having children to be a great fulfillment. The evolutionary basis of this desire would make it all the more powerful, and restricting it would only cause the drive to grow stronger over time (as traits evolved to promote the circumvention of the restrictions).

2) If there's no specific advantage to a lower or stable population, why is any particular number preferable to another?

3) There are lots of advantages of large population: larger communities for people with low-frequency deviations from social norms, a broader spectrum of human social and psychological possibilities represented, increased production and creative capacity, greater base of working-age citizens to support the non-working portion (retired, children), more people at the top of the bell curve to draw from for important positions (better leaders, more geniuses, etc)... This is not an exhaustive list.

4) Likely other advantages as well, which would seem to counter the disadvantages of larger population, judging from past human history (and assuming no weird non-linear relationships). If the world is better with fewer people, would you want to go back and live in a world with only 100,000? 1,000,000? Some other specific number?
Next thing you know people will be offering $5 legal advice against Amazon's lawsuits on Fiverr.
Thanks a lot. I almost forgot about Eric Schmidt while skipping through the others. I'm currently watching CS183C: Blitzscaling-9/24/2015 with Sam Altman [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxKXJWf-WMg
grep -r
Same thinking as "housing never goes down." How did that one go?
Thanks for the feedback, Sephr. I'm new to posting on HN, and want to make sure I don't repeat any mistakes that were made when sharing this article.

I am the author of the article, and certainly don't want to obscure that. I'm gathering from your feedback that submitting this article to HN with a title of "How I Check My MX Records" would be more appropriate. Is that correct?

The article discusses MX record concepts, and potential problems, followed by three methods for checking MX records. Using the dig and nslookup commands are the first two methods, and the DNS Check service is the third. My intent is for the article to be be useful for someone using any of those options. Is sharing that type of article discouraged on HN?

I read through https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html before posting, and thought I was following those guidelines. Are there any additional guidelines that you recommend I review?
Before then, people built distributed systems and (sometimes) assumed they didn't have failure modes.

Now, people build distributed systems and assume they don't have failure modes AND THEN post about how they've "refuted the CAP theorem". :)
I need a cryptography expert to verify this!
That's how I understand it. I just think what he said in the sentences before is potentially slanderous. Doesn't he basically accuse Novel's management at the time of fraud?
IMO Message ids should be defined as a sha512 of headers and content to ensure they are unique. A new protocol is required.
I don't think Dijkstra denies the possibility of "A picture is worth a thousand words". He just says that the opposite is certainly true, and warns against the habit of relying on pictures.
CS183C: Blitzscaling-9/24/2015; Guest Speaker: Sam Altman
The same as anything really. You try and write a system, you realise that logically it was harder than you first assumed, you note there are failure scenarios that you're aware of. You mitigate and ship.

Later as the bug reports come tumbling in you realise there were failure scenarios that you weren't aware of, usually because you were relying on something that you cant actually rely on.

The fact that this is formalised is great because it means people who don't talk about when their systems don't work aren't giving you the whole picture.
I am surprised there is no mention of Blendle:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/27/new-york-times-dutc...
"Wouldn’t a better approach be to initially train the neural network on more than just one person?
That is a great point! In fact Microsoft’s research arm published a paper last year doing exactly that. Although they achieved great results, their initial training cohort consisted of 94 participants! I, as a one man team, can’t possibly duplicate that. This is why I created a system that can adapt, eliminating the need of Microsoft level resources."

--

Rather than using an accelerometer (OP attached an old iPhone to his person while doing the movements) - you could plausibly point a camera and try to use video as the input.

If that pans out the next step would be using Mechanical Turk to cheaply and quickly build the initial training set (no pun intended) using publicly available videos of people working out.
I suppose, but the thing with doing something like this on a botnet is you need to put that bit of spotify listening software on all those infected computers. Once spotify got their hands on the software they could come up with ways to defeat it.
I use this user script to show how many new comments there are, highlight new comments and auto-collapse threads without new comments since the last visit to a story: https://github.com/insin/greasemonkey/blob/master/hncommentt...

A live version of the same functionality is also implemented in my read-only Firebase API client: http://insin.github.io/react-hn
The blog was posted 3 years ago. Sadly the link to the lecture on video.google.com rotted away since then, as if google was geocities.
A LSM tree is actually a good idea if you think about it.

The R/W patterns for a message queue are simple:

- Messages are key/value

- key is an autoincrementing id

- Writes are at the end, Reads are from the beginning

- Once a message is processed, it's deleted

So in practice this means that the items are written in an append-only fashion, get merged in bigger chunks, and then get progressively deleted. So at higher levels you don't see the huge latencies due to compaction because all records are deleted. Knowing that keys are only incrementing could also lead to a simple optimization: the compaction phase can be a simple concatenation of files.

So you get an append-only system that progressively removes older entries as they are deleted without resorting to mad science hackery [1]. Why didn't it work for InfluxDB ? All I can guess is that individual entries for each series are all mixed together (InfluxDB wants to be able to manage many series with many tags) and older entries are not deleted as frantically, so you get the latencies we all know with compaction and unpredictable reads.

Now, this is purely theoretical and of course further experimentations are needed to make sure this is correct, but LSM is in my opinion a correct pattern here.

[1] https://gist.github.com/CAFxX/571a1558db9a7b393579
Does quesium could be the name of the next incoming quantum (meta)-material?
It's worth noting that you can get similar benefits from Singapore.

Singapore doesn't have a cute "E-residency" program, but a foreigner can just pay a local agent and have a corporation opened. Corporate taxes are a clean 17% (lower for small businesses and startups), no dividend taxes, etc.

http://www.guidemesingapore.com/incorporation/company/singap...

http://www.guidemesingapore.com/taxation/corporate-tax/singa...

You also get a fairly stable and well established set of corporate law, which unfortunately Estonia doesn't offer (yet).

The real tricky bit for Americans is how Singapore's tax system (just corporate income tax!) would interact with the US's crazy one (e.g. dividends, capital gains, random other things).
I applied to this. It was a form online, and I paid €50.99 at the time. (€50 for the application fee and a €0.99 charge to cover the cost of paying with a Visa or MasterCard.) It took about twice as long as they promised with my application (although this was just after they'd started online applications), but with a little nudging by email, the package (card, reader, PIN numbers, etc) arrived at the Estonian embassy in London. A signature and some fingerprints, and they handed over the package.

I feel they could have been a little more transparent and clear about what stage my application was at, but overall it was fairly easy.

You don't actually have to go to Estonia to collect the card or do any of the processing in person there anymore. It can be done all online and everything delivered and finalized at your local Estonian embassy or consulate. When the program first started, to apply you had to make a physical appearance in Estonia. You still do to open up a bank account -- for now.

The software does work on Ubuntu. There's poor or no support for other distros IIRC.

I've yet to incorporate or actually use it for any practical purpose, but I expect to in the coming month or so. Estonia is doing some really cool things and it seems to be a decent jurisdiction to run a location-independent business from. I've still got a lot of experience to gain though.
Couldn't they just be suing the fake reviewers for breaching Amazon's terms and conditions?

(nb I don't know what's in their T&Cs regarding fake reviews. I'm be kinda surprised if there's not something in there about doing so honestly and/or not for profit.)
IIRC you pay corporate taxes when the profits are distributed, but aren't taxed so long as you keep them in the business.
Commercial coffee grinders are periodically calibrated to ensure they are providing the proper grind. When new both the $100 unit and $700 unit would likely provide similar results. Over time the commercial unit (built to handle higher volume) would remain in-spec without calibration for a consumer user whereas the grind of the $100 unit would likely degrade from wear.
And by the same token, there's no reason you couldn't construct a system where everybody helps everybody else defend their property simply in terms of "mutual aid".

Just such a system existed in the English common law, and from what I've read in the early days of America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue_and_cry
Sorry, I read it the other way because afaik hackintoshes have always been in break of license terms.
Ask HN: Portfolios. How little is enough? Does the type of content matter?
Short preface. My life didn't go so well (my own fault). I'm not that young anymore, have barely worked in my life, school didn't go so well, had to teach myself most of the stuff I know about programming. My friends think I'm pretty good and always seem to reassure me that I know far more than most of their friends who actually went to a university.

Because most of my problems stem from lack of motivation, focus and too much perfectionism. I fear the thought of being asked "Show me what you've created". It doesn't help that my friends think I'm a good programmer if I can't prove it.

But it's not that I'm not writing code. It's just that I'm usually tearing down what I've created. Like drawing on paper, then throwing it in the trash (no matter if it's good).

There is stuff that motivates me. Game development. Procedural generation. Visualization. It's just not that related to jobs I could have a chance of getting (like web development), if there is a chance anyway.

I had the idea that I could write example implementations and visualizations of algorithms used in procedural generation. Tufte-like. Perhaps a bit more in-depth than what is on the net already. I figured it has certain qualities that appeal to me, like being kind of modular. I can write one piece without having to worry about the next one, or having a tower named "things to do" in front of me. It's also not that much code, rather the code that needs to be written has to be clean and concise.

Would that be something I can put on my CV? If so, how "much" should there be so it doesn't look like "Hey that guy wrote 10 lines of JavaScript/C++/whatever and thinks we hire him". Even if I was happy to just get an internship.
I never encounter decimeter. Centiliter only for shot glasses, every kitchen measure thing I have only shows mLiter. Same with grams. There are no centi/decigram on my kitchen weighing scales.
You are correct that there are laws against fraud. The issue is that the expression of one's opinion, however biased, cannot constitute fraud under US law. If there are demonstrably false statements of fact in each and every one of the more than 1,000 reviews that they are suing over, then and only then will this lawsuit be successful.
The fact it may be less than the long term result isn't so relevant: there's an upper bound so the memory use of the JIT is O(1) with respect to the number of coroutines.
5 different methods to use an else block in python
Shortness of a license should not be a goal in itself. The GPL is long because without its length we would not have everyone pitching in patches to Linux or gcc for all different architectures. I know non-copyleft licensed software also gets collaboration, but Linux's and gcc's near universal hardware support seems to require the coercion of copyleft. Without copyleft, we would never have had any sort of free Objective C compiler either, and I'm still waiting for Apple to do good on their promise to free up Swift.

Also, unlike EULAs, the GPL is meant to be understood. Have you read it? It is long, but without reaching EULA lengths, and it's written with clear definitions and a language that aims for clarity. It was written by hackers and lawyers. If you're having trouble understanding it, there's a FAQ:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

Apple doesn't publish EULA FAQs, as they do not want widespread public understanding of each item in their EULA.
I don't know why amazon has to do this stupid (as others have pointed out on dubiously legal basis) crap - when they have lots of smart people, loads of user data and pretty much unlimited resources at their disposal.

It might be a hard to write an algorithm to distinguish shilled reviews from legit ones -- but it should be well within their competence.
I agree.

In this case, the text of the email is on the Wikipedia article for AltaVista: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
That's just not the way it works, at least in the US.
> Amazon gives anyone, whether they are customers or not, the ability to review products sold on its online store.

Makes sense for books. Anyone know why this policy is maintained for products?
It seems like fixing reviews would be a good startup opportunity right? Any ideas what you would do?
maybe some of these reviews had statements about purchases that didn't happen?

"i bought this book last week and I love it so far"

"my favorite part was when the dog rescues the cat" (no dog in the book)
Well, yes. But that's the general assumption for technical posts, so there's no need to exclaim your specific lack of expertise. (Except perhaps if you are willing to pay serious money to hire said expertise.)

After all, and drawing from recent HN postings, you would need a expert in an certain sort of experimental physics to verify quantum teleportation in 63 miles of optical fiber, and a certain sort of neuroscience expert to verify the decoding of the brain activity of the worm, and yet another type of expert to verify that Enceladus has a global ocean.

Edit: I see you were also the one to post this. Be aware it is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10394993 and that most of the HN discussion on the topic (243 comments) is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10390822 , which concerns a posting to https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/haldermanheninger/how-is-... .
type-safety allows for the generating of far more efficient machine code.
And you type your language everywhere, the difference is the time it happens and the consistency of the rules below handling type-conversions.

lua sets the type depending on the value assigned at run-time. There are a lot of non-dynamic lanugages who pretend to have dynamic types (var)but actually just let the compiler deduce at compile time the assigned valuetype
5 Startups Who Are Hiring – Updated 10/18
This makes heaps of sense, they say "wow it looks so much like a Gaussian kernel" and my first thought was "is Gaussian not the go-to kernel for image processing?"
That only shows they haven't purchased it on Amazon. If they didn't want to enable reviews for items not purchased with your Amazon account that limit would already be in place. It is very hard for Amazon to prove they didn't buy something at Target.
Interesting, this means you can't use OS X to make your videos if you're a Youtuber.
Amazon's tactic may backfire. They may publicly lose the case & then cause a swarm of me too fake review shops to bloom.
Show HN: Rawcode.io – a place to find and store code snippets
Yes, definitely. My app suffered for years in Apple's app store against a competitor with an inferior product, but with high quantities of glowing "reviews". If Apple can't figure out fake reviews, and Amazon can't figure them out... then I'd say there is a HUGE opportunity here.
Compile-time C++ RNG tricks
Web+Scraping+and+Crawling+with+Scrapy+and+MongoDB+-+Real+Python
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