skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for that pointer. I agree with GP's criticism, though, at least the way the article is written. I was trying to understand it through the lens of the nuclear analogy and failing drastically, because whereas those scientists were developing PRO-nuclear technology, these ones are (a priori, to first order) developing ANTI-surveillance technology.
The Real Story of Apollo 17 and Why We Never Went Back to the Moon
Progressive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide
Two examples outside of science fiction:

- The horse population declined dramatically after their work abilities were exceeded on every dimension by machines

- Homo Neanderthalensis disappeared after the appearance of Homo Sapiens.

I'm not saying these are perfect analogies. But you are saying they're completely irrelevant. Why is that?
This Is Northrop Grumman's Idea of a Sixth-Generation Fighter, Is It Feasible?
Factually disputed. The concerns raised in this area originated in the 90s, conceived prior to release of the first Terminator film.
The homeownership rate has plunged more than people realize
If you only fire up Tor when you want to do something secret, you're leaking information about yourself that could get you caught. A Harvard student who emailed a bomb threat got tracked down this way. Obviously I don't support one's right to email bomb threats, but the principle is the same, the investigation narrowed down to him because of the exact time his Internet connection connected to a Tor relay.

So I second your call for us to run our own relays, full-time.
The Air Force Finally Realizes It Needs to Greatly Expand Its Drone Fleet
Isn't it better though to omit the -v switch and do `ls *` and/or `tree` afterwards? That gives you the same information but structured so it's much easier to understand.
Given stories like this: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/city-to-drain-reservoir-after-te... (Notice that was the second time in just a few years because of it)

I have a feeling people are only unconcerned about ex-urine water because they are unaware and trying to improve awareness is not likely to help.
Looks good. I was able to put together a fairly complex diagram in about 15 minutes. Thats better than I can do with most traditional diagramming applications. In that way having limited options helps because there's less things to get distracted by. Anytime I try to make a diagram in Visio or Omnigraffle I spend (at least) 15 minutes just adjusting fonts, sizing, etc. It ends up being a very frustrating experience. So much so that I've mostly gone back to making paper diagrams.
There are loads of millionaires and rich companies with an interest in security in Silicon Valley. Why haven't any of them made us a proof-of-concept certificate?
So for what is the $100B to be used? Does this amount to the buying of carbon indulgences?
What qualifications are needed to criticize habits?
Why Coinbase is now hiring remote engineers
Yeah, but the truth doesn't appear to be that much better. It doesn't seem likely that it will be 100% fatal, but with runaway climate problems, you're potentially looking at mass flooding, natural disasters, crop failures and starvation, and potentially the collapse of many societies in the ensuing unrest. It seems likely that it will result in large changes in the makeup of vegetation and wildlife, potentially to the point of mass extinction, if the food chains in the oceans and on land break down. Our social systems are not set up to deal with this kind of event, at all. The planet's ecology will rebound as it always does, but that happens on timescales not very compatible with human lives.

Then again, maybe it will happen slowly enough for us and the ecosystem to adapt. I hope that's the case.
Navy Women Secretly Filmed Showering for Almost a Year
“Encryption” Is Just Intel Code for “Failure to Achieve Omniscience”
If only crypto users were as vocal and organized as gun owners. We could call our organization the National Rijndael Association.
Looks neat. Why did you bother using <PAD> words to have sentences be the same length, when you're using a bag-of-words (document-term matrix) model anyway?

Each sentence vector ends up being the length of the vocabulary, so they're already the same length. You can probably drop step #3 in this case.
If you knew a person committed suicide in your apartment, your mind might dwell on that, you might experience what some psychologists call "intrusive thoughts" of how they died, what caused them to die, the effects their deaths had on their families, maybe of your own death or that of your loved ones, or of their potential suicide, etc.

How many people want to be reminded of that every time they come home, or when they see their family resting or playing in their apartment, or when guests come over and the subject of their apartment comes up, or when they just reminisce about its history?

Many people actually know someone who's committed suicide themselves. How many of them want to be constantly reminded of that?

Such reluctance doesn't necessarily have anything to do with believing in ghosts.

On the other hand, there is something known as the "contagion heuristic"[1], which is "a psychological heuristic leading people to avoid contact with people or objects viewed as "contaminated" by previous contact with someone or something viewed as bad". There's also the "law of contagion"[2] which is "a folk belief axiom found in magical thinking which suggests that, once two people or objects have been in contact, a magical link persists between them"

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_heuristic

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_contagion
Machine learning: Trends, perspectives, and prospects [pdf]
Stuart Russell (co-author of AI:MA, one of MIRI's research advisors) argues on http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26015 that AI systems with "the ability to make high-quality decisions" (where "quality refers to the expected outcome utility of actions taken" and the utility function is represented in the system's programmed decision criteria) raises two problems:

"1. The utility function may not be perfectly aligned with the values of the human race, which are (at best) very difficult to pin down.

"2. Any sufficiently capable intelligent system will prefer to ensure its own continued existence and to acquire physical and computational resources – not for their own sake, but to succeed in its assigned task."

The first of those is what Bostrom calls "perverse instantiation" and Dietterich and Horvitz call the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" problem (http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/10/192386-rise-of-concern...). The second of these is what Bostrom calls "convergent instrumental goals" and Omohundro calls "basic AI drives."

The first of these seems like a fairly obvious problem, if we think AI systems will ever be trusted with making important decisions. Human goals are complicated, and even a superintelligent system that can easily learn about our goals won't necessarily acquire the goals thereby. So solving the AI problem doesn't get us a solution to the goal specification problem for free.

The second of these also has some intuitive force; https://intelligence.org/?p=12234 shows Omohundro's idea can be stated formally, so it's not purely sci-fi. Averting the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" problem in full generality would mean averting this problem, since we'd then simply be able to give AI systems the right goals and let them go wild. Absent that, if AI systems become much more cognitively capable than humans, we'll probably need to actively work on some approach that violates Omohundro's assumptions (and the assumptions of the formalism above). Bostrom and MIRI both talk about a lot of interesting ideas along these lines.
> Replicating intelligences might be like black boxes which we don't understand but can generate, or grow, if you will, from simpler primitives.

I strongly doubt that.

>As an example, "Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t quite sure why." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151203-big-datas-mathematic....

If you read the HN comments on that very article, I recall posting some links to papers giving theoretical grounding for why deep learning works so well.
UPDATE: and they just took the time to e-mail me to tell me about the export they just added, great response!
Secret Lives of Superhero Hackers
As patio11 mentioned in the sibling response, it is likely that family members had signed as guarantors. It is very common that the landlord demands that, even for short-term lease.

If family members aren't guarantors, then there's technically no legal ground for landlords to sue the family members. But just being sued is a big stigma in Japan. If the family member has certain social position there's a strong incentive to avoid being sued, or to settle it asap if they are actually sued.
I would like to pay for my mobile os, as long as its open source and I can reinstall it. Why does the os have to bundled by the phone for free and spy on you?
Just because we will understand, in principle, how to control it, doesn't mean we'll engineer that control particularly well.
Calling this a "polyfill" is a stretch. Not that I think the term deserves to be protected
- "No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."

Funny that this is coming from a reactionary and status quo aficionado.

- "Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith."

Funny again that this is coming from a colonialist and imperialistic person. Apparently, it's bad for Islam to have expansionist and supremacist ambitions but it's OK for Britain. Hypocrisy much?

- "Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it (Islam) has vainly struggled"

Funny that it was the other way around for Christianity and Islam in Europe's Dark Age and Islam's Golden Age [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
My masters thesis is building a super low-latency, lock-less IPC mechanism for passing cache lines between cores. NUMA systems are crazy, for numerous reasons. For instance requesting remote cache lines across sockets have asymmetric latencies. For example on the r820 server we use for testing requesting a cache line from socket 1 to socket 0 (Socket 1 receives the cache line from a core on socket 0) the latency is 528 cycles. But if you reverse the experiment and socket 0 receives a cache line from socket 1 the latency is 384 cycles. So when building an application, if you're into reducing cycles things like this creep up on you and become very confusing until you do experiments like above.
I think this is a really strange thing to say. Why do you care? Why would some famous hacker need to live up to your expectations? What you're saying comes down to a teenager complaining "why are you still on Facebook and not on <social network du jour>!?".
At least some reasonable evidence that the habit is harmful. Hard to argue that Richard Stallman suffers (productivity, or otherwise) by doing his computing in text mode...
WP+Site+Guardian
And if you'd prefer to manually maintain a list of aliases instead, you might like my project, Jumpy: https://github.com/notduncansmith/jumpy
ping: cannot resolve localghost: Unknown ghost
Churchill did not like a lot of non-Western nations. He had his mind made up at a young age. He was also against Indians and Hindu thought.

Europe does not fall because there has not been an Islam v. Europe war for centuries. It's been a slow integration of North African & Arab cultures with a continued focus on European social values, science and leadership.
Oh, I was expecting a full LEGO Technic replica of the Engine :(
Wolfram and Babbage are so wonderfully alike, and Wolfram doesn't even see it in his own pomposity (or maybe he does and the joke's on us).

Exclaiming "that's the school I went to" added nothing to the story, like so many other asides.
Note that the ratchet won't start clicking until 2030. There is a real risk of countries postponing increases in emission cuts until then. Hopefully they won't.

Another interesting point is wrt. financial aid to developing nations. IIUC, developing nations will not be compensated for damage due to climate change, but they will receive funding for efforts to cut their emissions while continuing to develop.
Seems like poetry is something that could be automated fairly easily.

For example a limerick is:

(1) u u S u u S u S
(2) u u S u u S u S
(3) u S u u S
(4) u S u u S
(5) S u u S u u S

where u means unstressed syllable and S means stressed syllable. With the additional constraints that the last symbol in lines {1,2,5} and {3,4} form rhyming sets.

Would be straightforward to build, once you have information about rules for stressed / unstressed syllables and rhyming. Use a grammar checker to make sure the result makes some kind of linguistic sense.
Hi! It is not using a BoW model. Each input sentence is a vector of size [sentence_length] (or, in theory, a matrix of size [vocab_size, sentence_length] with one-hot vectors) so the padding is required.

There is a way to do it without padding, but it's less efficient from a training point of view. You could instantiate a new network for each possible sentence length then share the paramaters between them, and then batch based on your sentence length.

Also, the padding isn't striclty necessary in theory. The feature vector will always end up being the same length, regardless of sentence length, due to the pooling layer. However, Tensorflow forces you to specify the exact size of the pooling operation (you can't just say "pool over the full input"), so you need it if you're using TF.
Mitch McConnell is from Kentucky. That alone is enough to explain his actions. Because, you know, coal mining, Kentucky... likewise whatsisname...ah, Inhofe ... from Oklahoma.

You know that people from states with strong extractive industries have a conservative tendency because of the really large business cycles, right? Throw in that these climes also sport lots of farmers, and.... Not everybody can move to the large, overpriced urban areas.

If Congress/the Senate is bought off that cheaply... which is always a questionable thing ...
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/10/ten_thin...
Are we sure we should be getting all our lessons from historical figures?

Churchill on Gandhi:

Gandhi should not be released on the account of a mere threat of
fasting, We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if
he died.

Churchill on using poison gas on uncivilized tribes:

I cannot understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am
strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.

Churchill on white race being superior:

I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the
Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not
admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a
stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it
that way, has come in and taken their place.
OpenBGPd and route filters [performance]
I'm personally on your side of the argument and against Facebook's stance, but this statement is strictly speaking not true. At worst, it will be equivalent to protection provided by an encryption scheme without authenticating the other party and it defeats passive attackers. That's not quite as bad as sending plaintext (in practice, it is much much better when it applies to the internet broadly: cf. firesheep).

P.S. that's basically the state of SMTP encryption, which is quite sad.
Facebook depression is (surprise) regular depression. With all the regular symptoms which includes suicide.

The only difference is that (heavy?) Facebook users are more likely to suffer from it.

If you want to argue against it, I recommend you say that the actual mechanism/cause is on shaky ground.
— and in danish ⌘ https://twitter.com/kseistrup/status/675775244565655556
Rogaway's paper starts with an extended discussion of the role of scientists in the nuclear arms race.
most people can't. They say they can, but under scrutiny it generally falls apart. At some point, you're listening to sound and not music anyway.
This article is meant to be illustrative, its particulars are not the crux of my main point (to which you seem to imply only doubt sufficies to refute)
"Bionic Bird benefits from strict quality controls that are so rigorous that each bird is built like a prototype." ....um, what?
Typroquest
Unfortunately I can't even read a book cover to cover, only skim through interesting parts.
I stand corrected: they were just second class citizens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_laws_concerning_imm...
How to even comment this !?
I find this curious, since nobody seems to have a problem with hospitals where lots of people die. If people haunt the place where they die, wouldn't a hospital be crammed with them? Why don't ghost hunters look in hospitals?
> why can't Warren Buffett (or anyone with a big fun pile of money) buy during high production years, store the syrup and then sell it in low production years?

Isn't that a price fixing scheme ? The only difference is that it uses a huge pool of purchasing power to acquire the ability do dry the market.

The only difference between price fixing by "buying power" and establishment of a cartel is that the profitability increase goes to oligarchs instead of farmers.

How can that be more acceptable ?

I am against cartels in general, since they are a form of monopoly, and I am against monopolies in general.

However I think that in some cases, they are the "less worst" solution. And I totally think that the fact that a government can "legislate into existence" cartels is problematic, and creates plenty of room for dirty politics.

Now that I think about it, my opinion on the "evilness" of a cartel is that it's proportional to how much the "legislated good" is necessary for survival. The less something is essential the less you can pressure the price upwards.

In this case, we're talking of a luxury good, which is why I see no scandal in the situation, or perhaps a minor one.
How much of that scenario are actual scientific predictions? Sources?
Note in particular that the oil price reached a new low on Friday, after declining for a week following the no-action OPEC meeting on Dec. 4.
There is definitely an absurd comic anime plot in there somewhere.
Game of Drones!
True. I've been wondering why mainstream films are getting longer, too. 2-2.5 hours has become the norm.
New Superconductor Has Three-Dimensional Charge Density
Pybind11 – Seamless operability between C++11 and Python
Backslash: a toolkit for protesters facing militarized, surveillance-heavy cops
The Armenian Genocide was carried out by the Young Turk movement towards the end of the empire. The YTs were distinguished by a stark materialism and secularism, and actually sought to revert the theocratic nature of the empire prior. So, not really Ottoman Islam, per se.
Another common opinion is that they used India/China as an excuse for not having to do anything. The saying goes "no one is responsible if everyone is responsible".
When I started engineering, being new to atheism and the internet and all sorts of cliches like that, I was super into "rationalism" and making fun of "liberal arts". I brough up Sokal's essay "debunking" post-modernism a lot, I thought Steven Pinker and his ilk were super intelligent, etc. Old me would have loved this piece.

Nowadays a piece like this one, making fun of estoeric language with the least amount of philosophical charitability possible, just makes me cringe a little bit.
Don't confuse a Wikipedia excerpt with an endorsement of the views...

You missed this one:

> By August 1943 Churchill refused to release shipping to send food to India. Initially during the famine he was more concerned with the civilians of Nazi-occupied Greece (who were also suffering from a famine) compared with the Bengalis, noting that the "starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
> completion rates that can fall as low as 20% for some titles.

I have so many books to read, that I don't bother finishing a book unless it's really good. The "some titles" are probably simply poor books.

Also, the number of pages isn't necessarily a good indicator of size. The typography can greatly influence the number of words on a page, and the typography can and does vary widely.
Depending on the exact film/genre I don't have a problem with that.
[too late to edit] My understanding of what a cracked SHA1 amounts to (per cert, not per user) was wrong. Seems obvious after explanation. Thanks.
The no true Turk fallacy
>adolescents who suffer from Facebook depression are at risk for social isolation and sometimes turn to risky Internet sites and blogs for “help” that may promote substance abuse, unsafe sexual practices, or aggressive or self-destructive behaviors.

How is that remotely the same as actual depression? It's an insult to people who suffer from this medical condition.
Show HN: Site Rank Data – Historical rank info for 6.5mil web sites+
Is this a recent router? If it's 5+ years old, I think this might be one of those situations where it's time to decide to just upgrade our devices and be done with it.
There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devşirme
So, is man-made climate change solved? If the whole world agrees that we will all collectively take steps to reach an agreed upon level of temperature rise in 100 years, what else is needed except to do it? The rational thing to do is stop funding more and more studies, stop having summits, and just do what we all said we would do: carry out the plan. The whole world has agreed they are satisfied with the future climate this deal will bring us.

If Congress legislated tomorrow that all gun sales and manufacturing were to be banned, and all existing guns should be collected and melted down, then should we still spend time and money researching gun violence and lobbying for stricter gun laws? I think everyone would agree that would be a waste of time because gun control is inevitable given the plan to ban them.

Why does it feel like funding additional climate studies and appointing more bureaucrats won't stop like it would for the gun control example?
I like really long non-fiction series. A 100,000 words is just a starting point. But to get there, it has to keep my interest for that long.
That doesn't make the maneuver any less abhorrent or coercive, unless you regard attacking the development of your country's infants as a positive, of course.
Non sequitur! Most lotteries and similar contests have negative expected values. The house always wins!
I think it's because, unless the hospital gets deserted/abandoned, it's generally always filled with plenty of living people. A house, on the other hand, would more-easily appear ominous because it's not as public.
Curious, can you specifically search for suicide apartments? If I could save 30-40% with the high cost of living in Japan that is where I would want to live.