skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having read significant chunks of both ESL and Understanding Machine Learning (albeit UML much more recently) I would argue that for many readers UML is superior.

ESL pays short shrift to the computational complexity of learning whereas UML explicitly handles both statistical and computational complexity concerns. It doesnt matter how statistically pure your algorithm is if its running time scales exponentially with your data.

All of UML's chapters are conceptually unified even when discussing different ML algorithms, with ESL being more of a grab-bag by chapter.

Still, both high quality and free!
Can we outlaw John McCain?

This is the guy who gave us Sarah Palin. He needs to go away.
I think it is only one photo. They are just changing the overlay. Note the traffic in the streets and the parked cars--they are all the same before and after.
In principle, yes, but in practice, no. Tools let us think previously unthinkable thoughts. See Bret Victor's Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [1], where he quotes al-Khwarizmi from the ninth century:

What is the square which when taken with ten of its roots will give a sum of thirty nine? Now the roots in the problem before us are ten. Therefore take five, which multiplied by itself gives twenty five, and amount you add to thirty nine to give sixty four. Having taken the square root of this which is eight, subtract from this half the roots, five leaving three. The number three represents one root of this square, which itself, of course, is nine. Nine therefore gives the square.

He's solving x^2+10x = 39 by completing the square.

[1] https://youtu.be/oUaOucZRlmE
Birth of a New Planet
I'm not defending the title, and I don't think lots of discussion over said title is really that useful. I found the contents of the article interesting.
Governments regularly intercept plain old SMS messages. If the government can demonstrate cases where this has prevented a terrorist incident in the past, wouldn't that suggest that similar snooping on iMessages would prevent terrorism in future?
I personally interpret non-establishment as a state of mind more than anything else.
The security line is almost by definition pre-security, and often includes dozens or hundreds of people.
I believe the problem to lie in the fact we expect people who are no different than you or I to be able to create laws about things they have no clue about. This guy might know a thing or two in field A and B, but has no clue about C-Z. I know I have little to no knowledge in most of the world, and I am not suited to be a lawmaker. What makes him/them any different?
Moreover, "commonly bound" need not be ergonomic. E.g.: qwerty.
Eclipse eclipse's JetBrains's products that much is a fact and it far exceeds Visual Studio still.
John McCain also wanted to be president. I wouldn't worry too much about what John McCain wants.
There are a variety of algorithms which are safe in a post-quantum crypto world. Developing and deploying them will take time, but they exist. Making them safe will take longer, but it will happen.

The threat you describe sounds like a race. But in fact, it's more like a switch. Right now the world is pre-quantum. When the switch is flipped, to post-quantum, a lot of algorithms will break. But not all of them.

See http://pqcrypto.org/ for some interesting reading.

Post-Quantum Cryptography, Bernstein, 2009: http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/135832/Post_Quantum...

Regarding your point, I don't think that people here are being dismissive of your ideas. You're quite right. But there are reasons to be positive about the future, while highlighting the negatives. Isn't it so interesting that certain algorithms can be safe in a pqcrypto world?

Notice where the algorithms spring up from. You mention a hackathon, but that's not where these algorithms root. They're from universities. And universities are interesting. If the legislation will face resistance, it will probably be from academics, like in the last crypto war.
What alternatives? I2P is much smaller, and has only ad hoc clearnet gateways. JonDo is too small. VPNs provide much weaker anonymity than Tor does.
and people wonder why Republicans (Libertarians mostly) didn't turn out to vote for him 2008, here is a hint - it wasn't Palin that was the stain on that ticket. We remember McCain/Feingold
He didn't say "A players", he said, "Focused teams".
See Kevin Mitnick's business card:

https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/shopping/kevin-mitnick-lock-...
I guess I'll have to give it a go then! Probably in VirtualBox though. I am loathe to repeat this process.

Also, any reason you'd recommend this over GhostBSD? I don't really know the difference. They seem to be offering similar things.
The Myth of the Terrorist Mastermind
That's %65 of the amount that would otherwise have potentially gone to pay liabilities to the people wronged. Instead of going to the victims of those accidents or that fraud, it went to the government.

This is the amazing thing about the government provided judicial system-- for many crimes, instead of making the victim whole, the "justice" system instead profits via fines, or denies the victim justice by incarcerating the criminal.

Which would be better for, say, a person convicted of stealing a car and then wrecking it-- going to jail for 5 years or paying the owner of the car 5 times its retail value (over the next 10 years)?

The "justice" system will put him in jail, making it effectively impossible for him to repay his victim and make the victim whole.

Whether this supports an argument for a police state or not, it certainly supports an argument for corruption-- denying victims compensation and taking it for yourself (in the form of fines, or more bodies for the prison industrial complex which pays you back in campaign donations) is corruption.
Another idea: Outlaw terrorism
> Nah, what we need is fewer rich people and more women and people of color

Please no sexism, classism, and racism in choosing people. Best people for the job regardless of their income tax bracket or their skin color. Just put people in office that understand how to run a country and limit the powers of government.
Except autistic people are different in specific, objective ways as a whole from most of society that results in confusion and ostracism. Further, society usually tries to convince them that this isn't the case: they're merely normal people that are insensitive, weak, anti-social assholes. Or something like that.

Validation that one's brain really is wired differently than most with specific strengths and weaknesses is useful information. Lets that person chart a more effective path forward accepting their weaknesses rather than believing a lack of effort or whatever. The ability to send a link to people in the majority category explaining it to them and from qualified people is even more valuable. Sometimes, when people around understand, they change their reactions and how they associate with that person to work with the strengths and around the weaknesses.

All in all, getting a diagnosis like this must have been a relief for her which validated the coping choices she made plus led she and her husband on a discovery process that will continue improving their lives. Most people don't need it. People whose brains are hardwired in ways that puts them at the mercy of tyrannical majority do.
It's also a 2nd amendment issue. From wikipedia:

Since World War II, many governments, including the U.S. and its NATO allies, have regulated the export of cryptography for national security considerations, and, as late as 1992, cryptography was on the U.S. Munitions List as an Auxiliary Military Equipment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
I love the concept of building more hands-on toys to teach STEM concepts without requiring use of a screen, especially when dealing with kids. If nothing else, screens are expensive; blocks of wood, less so.

I'd really like to see where this goes, some videos of kids playing with it, some studies done to determine if the kids get out of it what the founder (Filippo Yacob) thinks they will.
it's funny they are ok with everyone having guns but encryption that's the worst kind of evil.
And also it seems to me it'd be easier to walk in and steal tablets, phones, and laptops which are actually worth something really quickly compared to casing the whole house for jewelery which may or may not be locked up, can be very unique, and probably way harder to fence.

So you've got expensive non-unique items that others want in easier to find locations, a definite win for the burglar I'd think.
This is a bit like a Republican version of gun control laws.

If real encryption is outlawed, only criminals will have real encryption.
That statistic is very wrong. Even in mainland California (no islands!), it's easy to beat 10 miles from a road. Googling suggests that in the continental US, the maximum straight-line distance from a road is 28 miles. The distance on foot could easily be two to four times that. It is hard to find a great source on this. However, here they list a number of places that are ~20 straight-line miles from the nearest road: http://remotefootprints.org/project-remote/expedition-journa...
Humans of New York: Stories of Syrian Refugees
Thanks for pointing out these issues.

Authenticated encryption seems to get popular just these last couple years. Besides injecting unwanted data into the encrypted data, what other attacks can be done with it? For encrypted code, injecting unwanted code in the middle of it would be a big problem when decrypted and run. For pure data file like the the password database, would it be just adding extra garbage?
You want to remove the terrorist impulse from all of humanity forever? That's...ambitious.

But let's take at face value that that's possible, you'd still have to assume that all terrorists have a) some rational set of demands; and b) even if they did, that we'd be willing to meet those demands.

What ISIS believes is incompatible with Western democracy. There is nothing we could do to eliminate their desire to attack us that wouldn't mean our own destruction, anyway.
Wow, that's priced at ~2.8x 2015 revenue. So low.
It's "$9", not "9$".
The site took ripped all the images from original source without including the Japanese translation of the crest and just presented on their own blog in a list. Sure, they credited the source, but the idea of ripping all content from another site without really adding much to it seems kind of scummy. For example, if I liked an illustrator, I'd just choose a few of their works to highlight while linking back to their website to see the remainder of images.
It looks like the stats may not have been accumulating earlier. I just saw that the numbers are updated and the main keynote shows just over 6000 views and the other two keynotes are hovering around 1000 views.

By contrast I was curious to see what Google I/O keynote stats show on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V-fIGMDsmE

It appears that graph starts from day one at over 800,000 views (not sure if that number includes live broadcast stats).
It's not a fork of atom.io. It's completely independent project which started as web browser based editor. Electron(http://electron.atom.io/) was used to convert that web based editor into a standalone application.
why we call a technology encryption if it can be cracked?
Personally I'd love it if TV networks would bring up ESPN style player stats summary sheets on politicians involved in a story listing a few key 'stats' such as what their top 3 sources of funding are, former employers, brief voting record summary etc. For so many politicians their motivations are so obvious when you see their records, but for most people that aren't willing to do a bit of digging, its essentially hidden in plain sight.
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Surviving a Tech Bubble
> The problem is, I suspect, more the delusion that if there are backdoors, only MURICA will be able to exploit them because GODDAMN GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD! They would find the idea that there are talented individuals and groups, outside the US, who are capable of exploiting these facilities, absolutely incomprehensible.

I don't think that's it at all. I think it's because they expect everything to work the way the phone system did. For a long time, tapping a phone was just a warrant away. And it really was significantly harder for anyone except the government to listen in on phone conversations. Now, the world has moved on from POTS to connections that allow arbitrary data to be sent instead of just sound. In that world, the control in the system shifts to the endpoints and away from the network. We (the kind that reads HN) understand why that has to be the case, but lawmakers and law enforcement are struggling with that paradigm shift.

I see it as being very similar to the problems encountered by the record companies in the late 90s/early 00s. They were comfortable selling CDs and understood CD copying well enough to deal with what little piracy there was. But then Napster came along and showed that their product was just bits that could easily be transferred freely across the globe. We all understood this reality, but the industry spent the better part of a decade trying to make uncopyable bits (DRM) and to stamp out piracy in a torrent of lawsuits. At this point, they've mostly come to terms with the new reality and are adjusting.

Government is going to need to come to terms with that same new reality and adjust.
Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
Why do you think you know more about why Al Qaeda and ISIS attack the West than Al Qaeda and ISIS? They have explicitly and repeatedly stated other reasons for their attacks on the West than those you claim. Why don't you believe them?

To put it more simply: when Danish cartoonists are threatened for offending Islam, is that also because of imperialism?
> It's clear to me that these people have no idea what encryption actually is and only have a cursory understanding of what it does.

I'm not so sure. Even if McCain (and other politicians) have a perfect understanding of encryption, I would expect some of them to make statements like this. I interpret it as pandering to their audience in an attempt to look tough on terrorism. It is unfortunate that if this pandering becomes a reality that it will do real harm to our security and economy.
> Both India and China have a lot of diversity and are home to 40% of humanity. A fairer immigration system WOULD see a lot more Indians and Chinese.

However, you've then penalized someone born in in Mongolia, simply because they come from a less populous country, vs the opposite that is happening now.

I'm not claiming there is a moral argument to be made: the way the US residency program is implemented is neither moral or immoral.

> I'd rather have US as the home of the best and the brightest, not based on whether your parents were born in Mongolia or 100 miles away in Inner Mongolia that happens to be in China.

How do you qualify "best" & "brightest?" I'm a 1st generation US Citizen (of Indian decent). Both my parents immigrated here. My dad was drafted for Vietnam and then continued to serve in the US Army for 20 years, and my mom was a lunch lady. My parents don't have CS degrees, and instead worked blue collar jobs to make sure we could have a better life than they did.
Hence 'download from Canada'.
Don't forget: Hillary Clinton and Fritz Hollings sponsored the horrible SSCA bill (all electronic devices must have a back door) when she was a junior Senator.

At the time I wrote to my representative Bob Stump and he went and talked with Hollings and sent me a synopsis of their conversation.

It was Warren Buffett who said that we have had class warfare, and that his class won. So true.
There are indeed plenty of third-generation Algerians in France. The ones I know are happy being in France though, I am not sure it is home-grown, it has been planned with local help, but the source was tracked in Turkey, then lost. I think they have a good protocol to handle communication outside internet.
Your argument that the victims were drug dealers has several problems that I can see:

1. Presumption of accuracy Just because the cops claim that the money is "Drug money" doesn't make it so. As a victim of asset forfeiture, that money was claimed to be "Terrorism" money but it was laughable on its face.

2. Presumption of guilt. Even if it was taken from a genuine drug dealer, the dealer is innocent until proven guilty, but the money is taken before this proof is achieved. Thus this denies the dealer the opportunity to provide for his defense.

Someone I went to high school with was the victim of this. He was not a drug dealer, he was a doctor. An oncologist who had a great many terminal patients. He was raided by the DEA because he was giving these cancer patients "too much" pain medication. His assets and house were frozen, he was taken to jail and his wife and kid were left homeless while he had to try and defend himself...with no money to hire a lawyer. His wife worked part time as a receptionist in his office- so the prosecutor threatened to put her in jail as an accomplice, forcing his kids into the "Care" of the state if he didn't take a plea deal. He had no money for counsel, and no choice so he plead guilty. This is a doctor whose "crime" was caring for his patients. You would say he must have been guilty because he was convicted. And therefor this is drug money, but that's a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, and misses the point that he was forced to plead guilty by having his ability to hire a defense team denied to him via the theft.

Finally, you're being absurd to say that you have access to the courts and that they are impartial. As my case showed me, the judge knew that the affidavit for seizure of the property was fraudulent-- he knew it, because he had been presented proof of it the week prior-- yet he still authorized the theft. The cops and the judges and the prosecutors all work for the state, and the judges are not independant. They are dependent on keeping their job by towing the line.

This is why cops and judges are almost never prosecuted. No cop would dare testify, no prosecutor will bring charges and no judge would allow the case in his court.
Glasgow Uni Researchers Make Graphene Production Breakthrough
> additional motor support

http://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-robot-suit-approved-...
I don't think that page explains it very well, but have poor math background. I imagined notebook paper with horizontal lines spaced L apart and then the needle dropping at any angle. When the needle is vertical the probability it cross a line is 1, when horizontal it is zero. The length of the needle L is the hypotenuse of a triangle. If we call the angle from horizontal x, the "height" of the needle can be anywhere within h=Lsin(x) for x between 0 and pi/2.

The "lines" are like a sample of a point from a uniform distribution U with width L, and h is an interval inside U. The probability a number sampled from a distribution of width L will fall within interval h is h/L. Substituting for h gives p(cross|x) = sin(x).

Then assuming the needle is equally likely to drop at any angle, for any one angle theta we get probability density p(theta=x) = 1/(pi/2-0)= 2/pi.

The probability the needle drops at angle x AND crosses a line is the product of p(theta=x)p(cross|x)= (2/pi)sin(x). As mentioned, x can range between 0 and pi/2. To get the probability the needle drops at angle x1 OR x2 OR x3, etc and cross we need to sum all these. So take the integral of (2/pi)sin(x) from 0:pi/2. This gives 2/pi.
Yes, I wasn't meaning to imply delta "functions" are elements of Hilbert spaces. My first paragraph was just about delta functions as tools for representing impulse responses for mechanical or electrical systems, not QM.
You wrote: "Most of this money comes from drug busts... not seized from John and Jane Doe for no reason"

Yet, reports in the media [1] fit a common pattern: the officer encounters a person carrying several thousand dollars in cash, and takes it asserting it was drug related. This assertion doesn't require proof or even that the person involved be charged with a drug offence.

[1] John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, Oct 5, 2014 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks
Sounds like a good pretext for putting anyone politically inexpedient into prison.
Not going to go dig for the SEC filing, but transaction revenue is not something look at, as that is basically booking money they are moving on behalf of someone else. I would suggest looking at EBITA, fraud loss, avg transaction fee schedule and transaction number volume.
How This Engineer Turned His Blog into a $400M Business
Not to detract from your point that math is important, but in that example proper methodology (e.g., cross-validation), proper feature engineering, and especially domain knowledge are probably even more important. You can be aware of the strengths & weaknesses of different machine learning algorithms without being intimately familiar with the math. Ideally, ML methods are not treated as a "black boxes", but some aspects are inherently black box, even if you do know the math (e.g., parameter tuning).
You don't think it is feasible develop a messaging system that employs bank transactions?
Let's just outlaw math.
There are other options for a more efficient Emacs.

https://github.com/chrisdone/god-mode

http://ergoemacs.org/misc/ergoemacs_vi_mode.html

My understanding is that Emacs keyboard chords are not healthy.

https://ergoemacs.github.io/banish-key-chords.html
It's interesting how the first one looks like a triquetra. John Bonham (of Led Zeppelin) would have no doubt been pleased.
Since our current batch of politicians is predominantly wealthy white men, it seems to me like we may already have sexism, classism, and racism going on.

That said, I'm not advocating quotas, and frankly speaking I'm all in favor of getting rid of sexism, classism, and racism.

But my money's on, if we did, our politicians at all levels of government would better reflect who they represented.
The US propped up the Mubarak regime for decades. That was instrumental in creating the conditions for their revolution. The US only stopped its intervention when supporting Mubarak was obviously not viable anymore. Sadly it seems like they're back to a somewhat "stable" authoritarianism in spite of it all. In tech parlance, revolutions are hard.
Tinder's CEO broke SEC quiet period rules with this interview
Why would they price it at such a low multiple of revenue? Massive liabilities or something?
With rumors about  device to device payment talks[1], Square is in tough spot.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-in-talks-with-u-s-banks-to...
Betting Big on Literary Newcomers
> The security line is almost by definition pre-security

The security screening line is (just) outside of a particular layer of security; the area of the airport outside that layer, including the line, is still one of the most heavily patrolled areas open to the public in the US, it is not "unprotected".
No one feels like subsidizing more of Starbuck's' transaction costs?
It's amazing how cheaply the public interest gets sold out for.
If our government can crack it, so can many other governments, hacker groups, corporations, and so on. Oh well, back to rot13.
Code is definitely not Atom. You should give it a try. It's free.
> don't see a difference between encrypting your bank transaction, and encrypting your online conversation.

How is my online conversation with the bank any different than my other online conversations? Sure the content is different, but it's all the same medium, using the same sort of technology.
> Square Prices Its IPO at 9$

Not a very helpful submission title. Without knowing the number of shares or previous share price, this is meaningless. The market capitalisation would be better. Including the previous projection better still.
According to crunchbase, they raised money at a $3.25B valuation in 2012.

If they are IPOing at $2.66B now, that means a lot of stock options granted in-between are going to be worthless, unless they were granted at some very different price...