skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lawyer here. I do not know how soon AI will achieve either the humanity or know-how to replace lawyers, but will offer a few observations as a practitioner.

As for the know-how: Processing and comprehending legal texts does not seem to be an insurmountable technological task. However, the breadth of legal practice areas (family law, IP, criminal law, administrative law, etc.), and how these several areas often overlap to influence our daily lives seems a much more complex task.

As for the human element: legal problems are frequently extremely personal and require an empathetic response. This is so at the lawyer-client level, as well as the lawyer-lawyer level. After all, most legal issues require navigating complex relationships between humans, or groups of them. I don't think our society is ready for automated justice at this point. My clients certainly aren't.

So, it seems the human component isn't immediately threatened by AI, while the technical know-how might benefit those with deeper pockets and access to the "better" AI. Practically speaking though, the deep pocketed clients already have armies of lawyers at their disposal. With that in mind, the technical advances are likely to benefit smaller practitioners and clients (like me) who have limited resources.

I fully expect to be practicing law in 2030. If all the lawyer jobs are fully automated by then, I'll have MUCH more to worry about.
Co-workers clock each other in and out
@matthewarkin You may want to use letsencrypt.org for SSL and save further on costs
It's just the name. Whatever a monad is, it must be worth the name.

(Yes, I know the history of the term.)
Senna.js
New developments in printable hydraulics
CISA does not require any company to hand over any data. In fact it explicitly prohibits such requirements.
Thank you for your reply. Payment can be done via Freelancer.com escort service. Yes it's about 2 hours from SF to San Ramon and back. How much is appropriate for order and delivery? If there is similar cake shop around San Ramon, that would also be great.
The .se domain is well-known, even through word of mouth. Thus, I can be fairly certain that it is actually a domain that belongs to the project. I have no such information about the onion domain.
As my kids climb on their favorite jungle gym and scream in my ear, I too am tempered to raze them ;)
"Scala has a lot of rough edges already around getting a build environment, SBT pain, IDE environment pain" I never had this issue with Scala. Maybe because I'm an independent dev, but regardless, I had scala, sbt, emacs, and g8 ready within 5-10 minutes.
Super Dang
Another Feynman quote that comes to mind:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
I'm curious, did Balcones follow a similar path to success, or was it able to bootstrap itself and do it legit from the start?
Blood tests are not all that expensive. You can get the most common 25 blood tests done for a total $50 (including drawing blood and paying middle man costs with no insurance.)
Playing Amiga Games at Christmas
Netify Jump: Open source program that converts PC into a WiFi router
You can write down a procedure to weigh them, measure them, document chain of custody, etc.

With a computerized process, how do you assure that the code isn't tampered with? Or that the OS is tampered with? You can do it, but the average auditor from KPMG or Deloitte can't, and the people who can are hard to find.
Short Bloussant Sequin Dress
Libertarian support for limited government turns into a grey area when it comes to infrastructure. Efficiency is not gained with competing infrastructure, even Hayek says as much http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2012/05/24/were-all-i...
Docs are a model of their kind. Uses the HTML5 history API, for better or for worse. Code is documented well, examples are straightforward, and BTW it runs like a bat out of hell, as advertised. As recently illustrated [1], there is no more penalty from Google. Its crawlers now read single-page apps as well as HTML.

[1] http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascri...
The Dangers of Super Smart Compilers
It's so bizarre that it must be intentional.
Found that at Microsoft, too (disclaimer: that was 2 decades ago). Finding good testers at all, no matter how popular your product, is just plain hard. Standard usability testing is somewhat easier. You just put them in a box, ask them to follow some instructions and to explain their thought processes as they fumble through your brilliantly designed product, and sweat blood as they invariably do things you wouldn't dream they'd do in a billion years. Then you pay them. A lot--I find it hard to spend less than $100/tester here in the Seattle area.
Avi. Literally just Avi really wanted it.
Assignments and Pattern-Matching in Elixir
I just got an email from a FSF employee asking me to remove comment. That was fast.

> How, pray tell, is it Marxist?

It's a meme from #/g/technology on irc.rizon.net.
Sure, there are people in history who found their own way and we're the better for it, but for every 1000 people that "go against the grain" 999 end up just being people with not enough self awareness and a lack of personal insight.
If you want people to listen maybe you need something better to say than ridiculous generalizations.
I don't quite understand the negativity this company is getting. Sure the product that it is developing may not turn out successfully but that is the risk for any company that tries to innovate.

Ms Holmes seems to be solid leader in the sense that she is well-connected, possesses salesmanship and communicates a clear vision. She has certainly been able to raise large funds.

Sure there might be hr problems but that is the case with any company and surely professional mid level management can be hired in to fix that.
It's a common misconception that AI needs to be able to perform essentially any task a human can do to induce the "collapse" of an industry. But really, all it needs to do is make each lawyer 2x more efficient (by automating the easy-to-automate tasks) and suddenly half of all lawyers are unemployed even though every lawyer employed today does some tasks that can't be automated. That's a collapse.
Even though the login behavior on a web app's home page can cause hiccups with password manager compatibility, the alternate login form on the "You are now logged out" page is usually barebones enough to be compatible.

Compare the login forms for Verizon Wireless:

Home page - https://www.verizonwireless.com (upper right corner)

Logged out page - https://login.vzw.com/cdsso/public/c/logout

Tweaking your password manager settings to log you in through a site's logged out page can often bypass the compatibility headaches.

Using 1Password's Chrome extension, this trick has worked for me so far, although your mileage may vary.
The interesting thing is that the stuff named after O. Teichmueller is originally named after other mathematicians. Those journals all have the same name until the postwar period when they become taboo to cite. The names were changed and some of the propaganda was removed during the reconstruction of Germany.

However, the unreferenced and politically reprehensible nature of Teichmueller is just reasons for his extirpation from the mathematical literature. It is the best way to do justice to his German contemporaries, some of whom were Holocaust victims.

Consider Felix Hausdorff as the injured party who worked on exactly the same subject of topological metric spaces. The lack of information on Teichmueller is because his record is obscene, and thusly being curtailed. He would have been found guilty of war crimes had he survived the war.

The problem with Mathematics under the Nazis is that most academics engaged in plagiarism, and justified the theft with false notions of racial purity. The draconian Nazi party forced their best minds to emigrate, and the list those who fled includes: Herman Weyl, Kurt Friedrich Gödel, Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl, Emmy Noether, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, Wolfgang Pauli, and Max Born.

Topology is not too difficult to understand, it is only esoteric. The historiography of brutal dictatorships is both arduous and mysterious. I am only familiar with the ten names because I have enjoyed citing them in my work.

The most inspiring part of the story is that the intellectual migrants were employed in the research and development of weapons that would later defeat Nazism.
I used Knowledge Graph when I was a contractor at Google. Graph queries are not cheap, entity lookups should be inexpensive.

I am very happy that Google opened up this API. I used to use Freebase, and I use DBPedia a lot. When I get home from traveling I am looking forward to kicking the tires of the new API.
Most of Google's data is scraped from Wikipedia, so either/or is probably pretty similar. I assume Google ranks the results of the data better, mind you.
This assumes there's a fixed demand for legal help. You might as well envision that the efficiency gains cause a huge drop in legal costs which unlocks a huge latent demand. For instance software engineers are probably 10x more efficient now compared to 20 years ago, but this does not mean mass unemployment.
I'd love to see a Firefox add-on or Chrome extension that automatically reissues the request through a proxy (such as Tor) if the response code is 451. Change proxies and repeat until a non-451 response is received.

This probably won't work in China, but it could be useful in countries with only mild censorship, such as "right to be forgotten", porn filters, and region-locked content.
best telethon ever
Star ASCIImation Wars [A New Hope]
There is so much ... hype around this technology. But some of their use cases aren't all that useful, and their technology (while supposing to be cheaper) is often done on handheld units at the moment in isolated regions.

Let me explain:

Use cases outlined in this article that have minimal real medical benefit, but sound great:

- Home blood testing (why? there are only 2 types of people who may find this useful: patients on Warfarin, and patients on dialysis. Dialysis patients (if not on home dialysis) get tested 3 times a week when they go to dialysis. INR is usually stable once established, ceteris paribus)

- Field blood testing (Mostly pointless. Clinical signs are much more useful in a casualty situation. Arterial blood gasses are useful in resus rooms in emergency departments but in the field you want to keep them breathing, not go reversing exotic blood gas abnormalities)

For the majority of tests (EUC, CMP, LFT, FBC, Coagulation studies) in rural/isolated places, the i-stat machine is used in australia. This is priced ok... around $40 per cartridge for around 6-10 results.

The i-stat works with not much more than a couple of drops of blood as well, although it needs to be drawn from a vein, not a finger-prick.

Other tests, like lipids, or antibody markers, etc, are rarer and much more expensive. It would be great to have them cheap (but again, we don't really know how cheap theranos is saying tests are going to be)
which may make them more common, but again there just isn't much benefit in taking them regularly.

Theranos may well be a white elephant. which is unfortunate. The promised technology (fingerprint testing) would be great. But I can't comprehend how they could go for 12 years without a product. And as a doctor, I would be very suprised if the technology works as advertised.
There is unfortunately too much hype surrounding this product for me to believe that we will get what has been promoted, but you never know and I would love to be pleasantly surprised.

I wonder how popular this viewpoint will be here on HN - the home of lifehacking and microanalysis of bodyfunction (often without the corresponding knowledge to go with it, but prefaced with a view that 'more data will always be better').
It is my experience that these figures are well on the high side for Philly though.
Yeah, I would imagine that a large percentage of being a good lawyer is being able to recognize when a particular case is not a good candidate for routine handling. Same with doctors. On the surface, a case might be a good candidate for sending the patient home with aspirin (or whatever). Being able to recognize the unusual cases when that's not appropriate is where the real skill comes in.

Sometimes, of course, both doctors and lawyers screw up on this.
I don't think so - I am pretty certain I aced both technical phone screens, answered the questions fast, and explained everything clearly with a high level understanding of everything asked (including all the nuances) while remaining calm & jovial the whole way. The technical screens were some of the easiest interviews I've ever had.

I should note that I didn't get to the in-person interview, and that was because salary negotiations start beforehand. I did my research afterwards, and everything I found seemed to point towards cheapness.
Oh, I would say there's negative environmental effects of hydroelectricity, including the destruction of habitat.

Dams also have a life span, which is measured in decades (or less). Once the silt has built up, the dam doesn't really work in generating power any more.
> Yes, but hydro is the only renewable power source that is weather-independent.

Droughts?

https://wrrc.arizona.edu/drought-diminishes-hydropower
there's been work on writing stylometry, namely detecting authors by style of writing. Now academic papers might be a combination of enough authors that the results are not easily classifiable, but still, just stripping author names is not enough.
Fascinating! I do wonder what happens to the traditional white-shoe partner track, where associates make their bones do sixteen hour days of grunt work (albeit with fantastic compensation) as a method of gaining experience and reputation. The skills of a high-level attorney, regardless of the practice, are honed through decades of experience. How would systemic AI affect the development of the profession?
> but the fact that she didn't spend the extra year or two finishing her degree will make it more difficult if she does fail.

If she weren't so well connected or known I'd agree with you. But she isn't some unknown dropout who failed fast and hard trying to get into YC or bootstrapping in some random location in SF. Unless Theranos gets revealed as a giant fraud, I doubt she'll find it tough to find another position in the future.
After Copland was killed Solaris and Windows NT were the first options Apple considered. They also had discussions with Be before finally going with NeXT.

This was all pre Cathedral and Bazaar (1997) so Linux wasn't really on the radar at most companies.
"I wonder if people ever said that about travel agencies?"

Yep, they sure did. Or consider the restaurant business. With all other factors being equal, most of us would probably prefer a personal chef (or at least an expert one), an attentive, high-quality wait staff, fine china, real silverware, crystal glassware, linen tablecloths...

But they're not equal. In practice, McDonalds has a helluva lot more customers than Wolfgang Puck.

If this happens, it's probably going eat the legal industry from the bottom up. The rich will no doubt continue to have personal lawyers, just as they still have personal chefs. It will be the guys who want to contest a speeding ticket who will be the early adopters.
Brother MFC 295CN Driver Download
12.1% of their GDP is from travel and tourism, so I don't think they're counting planes coming in, or taking off from their airports.

They also import food, that's grown elsewhere. So, that's another hidden cost. The only thing they produce in large quantities in country are rice, and beans.

http://news.co.cr/tourism-sector-in-costa-rica-poised-to-gro...

http://www.fas.usda.gov/regions/costa-rica
You can also tell quite a bit based upon the citations. I've been able to guess at who was the original author based on how the paper was written/structured and the citations.
The prosecution is saying it's a rootkit. So either they found a rootkit, or the prosecution just though tit was a sufficiently tech-ish enough word to build a case around while hoping nobody would call them on the lack of evidence for one (the latter would not surprise me).
Another advantage of the Z80 if you ever want to assemble (or disassemble) programs manually is that its instruction encoding is very consistently arranged in an octal, 2-3-3 pattern:

http://www.z80.info/decoding.htm

This design was likely influenced by the 8080/8085, and x86 followed the same organisation too:

http://reocities.com/SiliconValley/heights/7052/opcode.txt

Due to how it decodes, the 6502 has a 3-3-2 pattern, which doesn't look quite as structured:

http://www.oxyron.de/html/opcodes02.html

http://www.llx.com/~nparker/a2/opcodes.html

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=39
Martin Shkreli is an example. Criminal allegations aside, he founded Retrophin which currently has a $750 million market cap.
And now there's https://www.openhunt.co/
> This isn't all that different than today's beauty regimes.

Not just beauty regimes, but basic personal hygiene products as well. Just look at the EWG ratings for all the bestselling soap, shampoo, deodorant, sunscreen, moisturizing lotion, face soap, toothpaste, fragrance, etc.
On pay-what-you-want pricing, can you deduct that from income if you're a business? Might be better to have business pricing, personal pricing, and demo/free pricing, and just rely on an honor system for people to select which bucket applies to them. But if you only expect people to pay a small amount, then I doubt tax deductions are much of a concern.
Theranos changes none of that. Unless a test is CLIA waived, it needs a prescription to be done. They are trying to make it easier to take samples by requiring less blood to be drawn but it is silly for those in the field. Most chemistry tests take only several microliters of blood so yes the "nanotainer" would work for that. But most tests need venous blood, so it is irrelevant if you take a tube vs a ml when you have to take a vein draw anyway!
I added a pull request based on your comment.
Obama: law enforcement monitors public social media as part of visa review
Basic panel of blood tests is reimbursed $8 from medicare. That is pretty darn cheap. I know here we always think that industries are ripe for disruption, but the lab industry is mature, highly competitive, and has a high barrier to entry that is not possible to circumvent (FDA/CLIA approval) for tests.
That's BS. Non-diabetic advanced body builders/strongmen/powerlifters/juicers frequently use insulin (termed "slin" in those circles) to achieve super-human results that even typical steroids by themselves can't provide.

The guy is basically just saying he doesn't abuse it, because he's not allowed to. There is a massive wink involved.
15 years is a crazy long time. Technological / scientific progress is exponential - we will witness much, much more change in the next 15 than we have in the last 15. And, that's a daunting thought, since 2000 was such a different world than it is now.

The only forces keeping law in its relative stasis are its attachments to slow-moving government processes, its 'guild-like culture' and the resulting protectionism. But, once capital moves faster in that direction (and it will) those systematic factors will slide apart quite easily.

It's good to be confident, but having participated in and thus seen the wave of progress in AI over the last 20 years, I'm pretty scared for my own career. It is definitively an exponential process and one that probably rivals Moore's law in effectiveness.
There's the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) that one has for a paper in digital form.
To me HN is the weapon supplier
a). Yes,
b). That is one of the ways to block access to Tor: either block torproject.org (in which case you use the GetTor service or mirrors), or the DAs, in which case you can't bootstrap. The way around that is to use bridges (unpublished relays to which you connect) or pluggable transports which now come bundled with Tor Browser. (https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html.en)
Well breadth of legal practice areas are what machines are good at, a machine that can analyze one law can analyze all of them and with constant quality. To give a concrete example, if some rather arcane part of insurance law may be relevant for a contract, a machine can then analyze the insurance law just as it did with contract law. By contrast a human lawyer has to ask for advice from a more specialized lawyer.

The human element is a quite good argument, at least without a major shift in perception of lawyers. However, I think that automation will realistically change what lawyers do, as well as the overall market for lawyers. One 'easy' area of law would be scanning employment contracts for standard clauses and you get some information at each paragraph what it means. Third page: first paragraph gets a green background and a note on the side says standard language, three more days off per year than standard. Second paragraph gets a yellow background and a note that says may get you into trouble if you use a company notebook for recreational programming. Third paragraph gets a red background and a text "Highly non standard, check with a lawyer." In this example, a lawyer still gets involved, he just does not have to check for the routine stuff and if history is any indication, this is what will happen. The routine stuff gets automated and the interesting cases are referred to the few remaining humans.
FTA:

> In some jurisdictions, I suspect that censorious governments will disallow the use of 451, to hide what they're doing. We can't stop that (of course), but if your government does that, it sends a strong message to you as a citizen about what their intent is. That's worth knowing about, I think.
Amazon's STEM toy section reinforces gender stereotypes: Please change the image
Hadn't thought of that one, yeah. Thanks. So either we destroy the environment or we destroy the environment (unless fusion actually works)...
Judging by the hours my patent attorney friend works, automating 50% of what he does would bring him down to a 60 hour work week.
Not being factitious here. Do you have a better (more technical) alternative?
Software is the exception since its a new industry that is simultaneously expanding demand by orders of magnitude while automation dramatically increases the productivity of individual SEs.

There are plenty of people who were in industry and were forced out because they could not adapt to more efficient tooling to keep their jobs. Those that learned on ASM and Fortran may not be adapt for a world of prebaked containers and building everything out of node plugins that do the work. Even less are they suited to training heuristics for genetic algorithms that implement some of our most sophisticated software projects like speech recognition or vision.

By comparison at least those with money have saturated their demand for lawyers. Law is a particularly targetable field since its often considered overhead or expense.
A more revealing model might be a race, since one's performance is not obviously linked to another's and there's only one variable being measured (time to completion).
You can also guess who writes reviews. There was this one guy who got pissed off at me at a conference for nonchalantly discussing who I thought the reviewers on our paper were... whatever man, it's my review now.
Yes, and from what I've gathered (IANAL), many fear that judges would not look kindly on things that do not specifically leak "gagged" information, but go against the spirit of gag orders (i.e. warrant canaries). The IETF's "permission" certainly doesn't supercede state or federal governments. So in practice this status code is cute, but it won't move the needle on reining in state censorship any more than before.