skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something about the current deep learning hype reminds me of fractals and cellular automata back in the day.

They're all very important and useful scientific advances that can be used to produce visuals that seem to automatically create something strikingly natural. This seems to make people kind of overreach about exactly how much of nature can be represented by this one method alone.

The world is probably not a fractal, the universe is probably not a cellular automaton, and the mind is probably not a "deep learning system" either (of the specific type currently implied by the term).
The trouble with neural networks is that they're just good enough to keep us from continuing to question our assumptions about human intelligence.

A thousand years ago, even Ptolemy's geocentric model was good enough. After all, it offered an effective means for simulating and predicting planet movement and solar eclipses. But it was complex. It took men of "great learning" to understand the solar system according to Ptolemy's model --something that most current grade schoolers understand intuitively.

In all likelihood, concepts like string theory and neural networks are comparable traps for us today. This is not a pleasant thought. So we're not motivated to search for better alternatives until the current model evidences an insurmountable flaw.

I'm not saying that string theory or the neural network approach is wrong. Obviously it's not. Just remember that Ptolemy's model wasn't wrong either, at least with regard to the moon.
Does she like games? Watch some cool making a game in 5-days videos.
Hardware patents can be valid.
Of course the missing item in that calculation is the last mile. Netflix could set up a cage at each landing point and the savings would be nearly 99%. And that adequately explains why international transit is rarely the biggest cost issue (obviously there are corner cases around the world where this is indeed the biggest issue). The biggest part of the cost in the infrastructure (systems, staff, maintenance) is from PoP to customer.

Having said that some ISPs (especially ones that own the infrastructure) have a habit of increasing prices (if they can from limited competition; i.e. roll out costs are high so not too many companies roll out to a region) and/or leaving customers to rot on old infrastructure (in order to maximise return on sunk cost; makes the CFO happy).

EDIT: clarification.
Does anyone know if she had taken any legal action against Ripoff Report first? It seems odd to take action against a search engine instead of the company that was actually hosting the defamatory language.
Muon-catalysed fusion reduces the width of the barrier - the muon is ~200 times closer to the nucleus (since it's that much heavier) and so the coulomb barrier is that much narrower - and the reaction rate is exponential in that.
The problem with self-driving cars: who controls the code?
> 2) All these financial experts can figure out a way to protect their necks without leaving the employees necks under the axe.

Liquidation preferences are not the default in startup financing. They show up when money on better terms is not available.

Any management team is free to walk away from a term sheet that has liquidation preferences spelled out towards a term sheet that has VC buying common shares with no downside protection whatsoever, if such term sheet exists.
Profit is not co-extensive with value created. Profit is a function of value created but also your ability to control and monetize the delivery of value to customers. Software is a great example. Creating a shrink-wrapped software product creates a lot of value, but it's almost impossible to monetize shrink-wrapped software these days. That's why everything is moving to SaaS--it's much easier to monetize.

The way the consumer electronics market is currently structured, what drives your ability to monetize created value is strong, vertically-integrated manufacturing capability. That's what Apple's and Samsung's profits are built on. Creating technology delivers value, but you can only monetize it to the extent you can build and deliver Chinese-made products into the hands of consumers at high efficiency.

A great example of this is Apple buying P.A. Semi. A7-A9 have created tremendous value for consumers. But Apple purchased P.A. Semi for a pittance. The value-creation potential in P.A. Semi was not monetizable without access to Apple's incredible manufacturing muscle.
Tesla's Model X Is Here, and It's as Awesome as We Hoped
Cell Size and Scale
Boston Dynamics' Robo-Dogs Pulling a Sleigh Is a Terrifying Christmas Future
He doesn't seem to be serious, but I don't think one could really call the domain a "joke". It's using a word who's sole connotation is as a racial slur.

And i don't see why there shouldn't be impulsive disagreement, considering how terrible the word is.
Unions are important. They give voice to people within companies who have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of employees. Most people are not adept at negotiating for anything. So, yes, conceptually, they are a good idea and they should not go away. I never proposed that they disappear.

The problem is that American unions succeeded at entering into a destructive feedback loop where union management had to justify their existence (and huge salaries) by always grabbing more and more for the membership. Even to the point of the ridiculous examples I laid out from the automotive industry.

This seems to be a common failure in both government and organizations such as unions: Past a certain point it is nearly impossible for management to go to their members and say something like "We need to stop asking for more on pensions, salaries and benefits because we are going to cause damage to the future viability of this company".

Why? Because of pandering or populism. There's always a sick would-be leader who will step in and counter that with gifts-a-plenty while vilifying the guy who proposed moderation or, the unthinkable, cut-backs and concessions in order to ensure things remain viable for the greater good.

That's the mechanism that has turned a lot of unions (not all) in to agents of destruction rather than responsible participants in an ecosystem. Union members are NOT bad people. They, like anyone else, would like to live better, earn more and retire well. They trust and follow the people they hire to represent them, the union leaders. This leadership, high on power and, yes, in cooperation with incompetent company executives ultimately fails their membership by creating situations where the company's own survival becomes mathematically impossible.

You know, what's interesting about this is that down-votes fail at masking reality. We have an entire city, if not a state, to serve as evidence for the sheer destruction caused by the combination of bad union leadership when combined with incompetent corporate management. Had these companies not been bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars Detroit would have cratered under the weight of an utterly unsustainable equation.
It isn't about not wanting them. It's about them being constructive as opposed to destructive in the long term.
> Regex is just the wrong tool for lexing and parsing

Funny; I recently wrote an Island parser that extends Regex to create a token stream: https://github.com/musesum/Par

Quoting the link to Rob Pike's post:

> Consider finding alphanumeric identifiers. It's not too hard to write the regexp (something like "[a-ZA-Z_][a-ZA-Z_0-9]*"), but really not much harder to write as a simple loop

Maybe I'm missing something, but does this suggest replacing a declaration with a procedure? Oh the horror!
Better article without the paywall: http://www.rcrwireless.com/20151221/business/ericsson-and-ap.... This is for Ericsson's LTE patents. The number is big because Apple rejected an FRAND license and so willful infringement was on the table.
No. What I meant was if a company isn't willing to discuss giving you a higher salary but lower equity it probably means that they don't really value their own equity. And not valuing their own equity is a proxy for not valuing the future of the company.

You don't generally want to work somewhere the company leadership doesn't value the future of the company.
God tells Guardian
I'm not saying we should legalise all profitable things. But when the profit:social harm ratio is large, making them illegal may do more harm than good. Every extra product line helps the cartels - if it wasn't profitable they wouldn't be doing it. Kidnapping and racketeering are expensive and dangerous; drugs are not their only source of income but they are a big one.
Just to be clear: it's Apple's iPhone revenue that's on the order of $100-150B for 2015. So Ericsson would be getting something like $500M or so.
What are the unfixable problems that prevent manufacturing in India?
I really enjoyed Kevin Kelly's 'What Technology Wants'.
> Just remember that Ptolemy's model wasn't wrong either, at least with regard to the moon.

Yes, it was, even with regard to the moon. Though, since the Earth-Moon barycenter is within the Earth, it may have managed to be tolerably wrong with regard to the Earth-Moon system. But, still wrong.
We took alpine, added the oracle jre, and use it as a base image for our clojure apps. Seems to be a reasonable choice for that use-case since you just need something that will start your jar.

I'd have thought the same would be true for apps written in Go.
I don't know anything about he NFL (rich players, high class problems). Various Hollywood associations were crumbling under the weight of their unsustainable pension obligations. The solution is always the same, financing of some sort that kicks the problem forward a few years for someone else --or the next generation-- to deal with. That is morally and ethically wrong.
Free Internet Security Review
I worked for this company (Good Technology) from July 2012 until Jan 2015 in their San Diego office.

I never exercised my options (they clearly weren't worth the strike price I had as a late joining employee at any time that I had vested shares) so no skin off my back, though I do know people who got screwed by exercising options because they left the company prior to the sale to Blackberry and were essentially forced to exercise the shares or just lose them. (I'm all for the trend pushing for much longer windows on this).

I also know a lot of people who came from companies this company aquired who stuck around for the eventual big payout that was much bandied about by much of the C-level management the entire time I was there who basically traded years of sweat equity for nothing (better than walking away in the hole, though!)

I found the article to be a pretty fair writeup of the events and a useful warning to people on the risks of stock exercising prior to liquidity events. This is a lesson I learned the hard way years ago (first dotcom boom), so I didn't get burned this time, and actually really enjoyed my time working for this company because the team in San Diego (which was pretty well isolated from the teams at the Sunnyvale headquarters) was a great group of people to work with, and I was paid pretty decently.
Moved to the Bay Area ~6 months ago, heard about Sonic and even though their service is slower and slightly more expensive than Comcast, they are an excellent company that I have 0 regrets about signing up for.

10/10 would be a customer again.
37,000 is a bit more than lots of patents. Nikola Tesla had around 300, presumably all his own inventions, and Thomas Edison had just over 1000 (US) from his own work and his employee's work. Those set an upper limit on what geniuses can produce in a lifetime for pre-IT Industry patents. (eg: before patents got out of hand.)

Does Ericsson employ the equivalent of 1000 Teslas? That seems unlikely, so I'm guessing many of their patents are relatively trivial or vaguely generic. Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to produce so many of them.

On a practical note, how can Ericsson make use of a patent library that large? I don't mean licensing, I mean how do their engineers make use of the existing patents to create new inventions and products? It must be as bad as software developers trying to use a huge standard library (like .NET) which I guess I find surprising.
Landing is already severely constrained by the minimum thrust of the engine though. At a minimum using two would make the tolerances much, much tighter. Remember it wouldn't be double the thrust but rather several times the net thrust, since the downward thrust from gravity would stay the same.
Who is this we? If people in Africa want to exploit their natural resources to develop and improve their lives, they should be free to do so. Everybody else has.

It's a little hypocritical for Westerners who have already reaped the benefits and costs of development to pull the ladder up after themselves for the rest of the world. I'm not of the persuasion that colonialism was the worst thing ever since the start of time, but it is especially hypocritical and racist to say "Oh, sorry, we built some shoddy infrastructure, wrecked a lot of your traditional society, and used you to extract resources, now you should go back to living in grass huts and dying of treatable diseases to save the rhinos."

If Africa can develop by skipping some of the shittier stages of agriculture->industry->post-industry evolution that we've experienced in the US, or Europe, or China, then that's a good thing.
Enter your info and find out :) (don't do that)
Riyria Revelations trilogy - quite good. Follows two thieves for hire. Read the books in publication order

Ready player one - liked it

samurai's garden

Expanse series by James Corey entertaining

Steelheart and Firefight by Sanderson- good but like Mistborn better

Worm online serial parahumans good

Nonfiction I read: Delivering happiness, Drive, Power of Habit, Power of full engagement
EFF Responds After License Compliance Services Attacks Fair Use
Debian Pure Blends are not derivatives. [0]

[0] http://blends.debian.org/blends/ch02.html
"Consider Your Options" was recommended at one private company I worked for that was nearing exit http://fairmark.com/books-fairmark-press/consider-your-optio...
Would it? It might harm their brand's reputation with audiophiles but I don't see the average customer caring.
Excluding primary residence :)
The biggest issue is that Google associates her name with an attribute nationwide (or even worldwide), because of their gigantic market share, and their status as "the front page of the Internet". While one could quantify how many people found her through the Ripoff Report, it's nearly immeasurable how much damage to her reputation may have been done by Google.

It's worth considering that Right To Be Forgotten laws are specifically designed to cover these sorts of cases, like defamation, and Google upholding such a policy, even voluntarily in countries which haven't passed such laws, would probably save them money by absolving them of a lot of liability. (Surely, in an RTBF-covered country, a defamation suit against Google would go nowhere if the plaintiff hadn't filed a RTBF request.)

EDIT:

Also, in further investigation, Janice Duffy goes into detail on why she feels Google is specifically culpable here: http://www.authorizedstatement.org/statements/authorized-sta....

Namely that a senior Google employee recognized Ripoff Report's business model as suspect, and Ripoff Report's ads had already been suspended by Google's ad products for unsavory business practices, yet Google had still refused to remove the defamation against her.
So doesn't this just validate the Ripoff Report in the first place? She just used the .au court system to censor both Ripoff Report and Google, instead of, you know, suing whoever posted the post on Ripoff Report (which, last time I noticed, was a US website to begin with).
I'm shocked. How does AC find time to 1) read a 10 page paper everyday 2) understand it 3) write it up?
I've read two rather old papers on different cross-validation techniques:

A Study of CrossValidation and Bootstrap for Accuracy Estimation and Model Selection (1995) http://robotics.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/accEst.pdf

Improvements on Cross-Validation: The .632+ Bootstrap Method (1997) http://www.stat.washington.edu/courses/stat527/s13/readings/...

And one on MIMO techniques:

V-BLAST: An Architecture for Realizing Very High Data Rates Over the Rich-Scattering Wireless Channel (1998) http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~jiantan/E6909/wolnianskyandfosch...

I find it to be a good way to get concise and accessible introductions (with the associated results) to current practices.
The best example I know of is Papa Carlo:
http://lakhin.com/projects/papa-carlo/

I had been working on an incremental-compiler-generator in C++, but suspended the project recently because it's a lot of work.
Thanks for the first of these, I've put it on my "eventually if I ever get serious about writing this programming language" list.
A few years back I made the mistake of allowing Anaconda to prepend it's path to .bashrc without realizing it. I was a bit of a novice back then, but I had a number of existing projects in virtualenvs on my system and was rather upset when everything stopped working because my default python had changed. For those out there that would like to test out Anaconda but already have a lot of projects using their default installation, I would recommend using this installation guide to keep things separate:

http://giusedroid.blogspot.com/2015/04/dont-let-anaconda-eat...
Are metros devoid of poverty? It is the first group of poor people who might be aware of Internet but do not have economic power to attain it. If I start something like FB basics, I will start with Urban poor, not rural poor. Advertising on Channels, I do not have much knowledge and you may have a point there.

Even in First World, people are cutting cord and using their mobile phones as sole Internet connection, that Internet is capped, has priority traffic etc.

I prefer net neutrality, but am willing to give some exceptions esp. when catering to lower economic spectrum, who themselves cannot exchange money for Internet connection.
The Hardest, Shortest, Lesson Becoming a Manager
Easy to say now. Much harder to follow through when you're relying on your paycheck to pay your rent or buy you food.
Reading the recent history of Zimbabwe's (soon to be previous) currency makes Bitcoin look tame.
Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft and Collaboration
Anyone have the text? uBlock Origin blocks the site.
How to get rich in tech, guaranteed
"google" might be more specific, since "search" can imply searching locally on HN.
You missed the obvious fact that the bug change might happen to an API you already use. It doesn't have to be a new API -- just a new release of it by Apple.

So the problem remains: you can't easily extend the class with your own fix to bring out a bugfix release for your app.
Standing on the shoulders of giants you sometimes have to pay them for what they did so far.
Wow. Employees get hurt, and the CEO gets awarded "CEO of the Year"

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/good-technology-chairman-ceo-c...
it creates generations of people completely dependent on the government

Where are these magical people that aren't dependent on government?

Are you one of those? How do you travel? Do you build your own roads? What do you do for mail? Do you use UPS for all mail, and they use their own roads?

Did your employees learn literacy from private schools? Or did government teach them? How did they learn to follow work instructions?

I would like to find these magical people that aren't dependent on government. They sound like they are awesome people. Maybe they also have guns to defend themselves from invading armies, and have fire-proof houses?

You are dependent on government. You can ignore your ego that actively harms you by telling you that you aren't dependent on government. The quicker you learn this, the better off you will be.
OS X Prank: Say things over TCP
A somewhat tangential question I've had since seeing the landing -- why are these rockets trying to land by themselves, which seems really difficult, compared to say getting the rocket roughly in the right place and then having a robotic arm attached to the ground reach out and grab them?
I think it's important to recognise there is a minimal relationship between book and movie. If one keeps them mentally discrete it is much easier to enjoy both. Do Androids Dream... is a very spiritual book. The movie doesn't / can't capture that element and wisely creates a totally different experience from the same elements...
So you just lobby that a meta-law is generated that disallows creating laws that requires adherence to a standards containing patents.
Show HN: Highlighter for Buffer Chrome Extension
Alternative article: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-23/google-ordered-to-pay-...
Or perhaps he/she worked on the holiday time calculator code too :)
Ericsson has well over 100,000 employees, has been around for 139 years and has acquired many other firms and their patents. 37,000 patents doesn't sound excessive.

Machines are a lot more complicated these days and I'm sure if Tesla and Edison were around these days they would file for a lot more patents too.
So utterly absurd that those things can be patented.

All I need to do is drop tens of thousands of dollars patenting anything and everything to do with anything up and coming - drones and delivery, autonomous cars, autonomous taxis, space stuff, solar stuff, energy storage and selling etc. etc.

"Method to hail autonomous taxi"

"Method to identify and optimize autonomous taxi routes"

Etc. etc.
In Chrome, you can also drag-select any text, right-click and select "Search Google for ..."
This wasn't a US firm, so US tax laws wouldn't have applied. I'd definitely consult a local accountant when setting up a company.
Well, more that we should give up because it's hard, and the benefits are almost non-existent.
TSA Can Now Force Passengers to Go Through Body Scanners
No, I'm just looking for more places like the ones I linked ;)

Searchable database of leaked documents that can be linked in flamewars ;)