skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interlaced stream of RTP h.264, audio stream, and FEC channel
Maybe Python 2 to Python 3.0 didn't introduce many "awesome" features, but 3.4 and 3.5 have been great.
A lot of sites seem terrified that users might (gasp!) leave their site to go elsewhere. The result is ridiculous articles like this: 42 startups that grew to be worth billions in 2015. Not a single link to any of the comapnies mentioned in the article.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/new-billion-dollar-startup-uni...

Another horrible trend is to hide links behind Javascript. Simple Hypertext links should never require Javascript to be clickable, on many websites they very often are.
Deep convolutional networks have enjoyed great success in image recognition and understanding in the last 3+ years (see the ImageNet competition winners). One of the main reasons people believe they are so powerful is due to translation, rotation, and scale invariance of the learned networks: the top layer coefficients are very similar (in terms of squared norm) regardless of the target object's location, size, and rotation in the image.

This paper basically shows that the structure of deep convolutional networks (specifically: shared convolutional kernels at each layer, subsampling / pooling across layers) are the main reason behind this behavior. Furthermore, the relative invariance increases with the depth (number of stacked convolutional layers).

They show this by first showing that a wide variety of convolutional kernels and pooling behaviors provide said invariance (the tools they use are from the world of graduate level calculus + analysis: wavelets and frames); they also show stability with regards to nonlinear deformation (even if the original image is swirled around / deformed a bit before shifting, rotating, scaling; the coefficients still don't change much). That's one major result of this paper.

Then they show that the invariance property is not tied to the kernels per se: you don't need the intermediate convolutions to be a wavelet, fourier transform, or whatever. This is important because neural networks don't use a fixed convolutional kernel - they learn one on the fly from training data. The theorem in this paper that shows the invariance is somewhat independent of the specific coefficients of the kernel and therefore general convolutional neural networks share these same properties.

That said, the learned kernels of the lowest layers of convolutional neural networks do tend to look like wavelets / curvelets / shearlets / etc, while the higher convolutional layers tend to look like higher level features. So neural networks' kernels are already close enough to the theoretical family of possible convolutional functions studied in this paper for the theorems to more or less apply.

Since it's impossible to prove that a Conv NN trained empirically on a dataset of natural images actually exactly learns wavelets or anything possible to study theoretically, it's nice to have a paper that says it's not the kernels themselves that are super important, but that the structure of pretty much any deep convolutional NN, is the important part.

Finally, the paper extends a neat way to think about convolutional neural networks (by extendint Mallat's initial work): that the layers represent functions which are invariant to group operations like rotation and translation, and stable with respect to deformation. This means you can study these types of neural networks using group theory (abstract algebra); an area of math where it's easy to gather insight about how things work and develop new algorithms that you can translate back to the real world.
That's what I'm wondering, too. Mercurial (which I prefer) seems to still have pretty decent usage in the Python world. And Bitbucket still pretty Mercurial.
Yes to all of the above :)
Tesla catches fire during charging (Norwegian)
Mozilla Addons Blog: Loading Temporary Add-Ons
Not sure what open source would accomplish here - without a standards paper you can't get multiple conformant players for a format, because the company can just constantly move goalposts around as much as they will.

The best way to implement video standards until now has (as pretty much everywhere else) been a good tight specification coupled with a several conforming decoders without any monopolizing the market. It keeps the vendors honest.
That is...genius!
We use R to do analysis, but it actually includes a very powerful programming language which can be used to conveniently teach (and execute) bits of the lambda calculus.
Source code hosting is an area where longevity is probably the single most important factor.
FEC stands for forward error correction
If there ever was a company that became 'too big to fail' it is github. A major security breach at github would have earth shaking consequences and if they ever went out of business it would take a long time before the rift was healed.
Backwards incompatible language changes having not killed the community and gaining traction after 7 years is pretty good going.
Finally, a blowhard too young to remember AOL and the Eternal September. I feel old.
The counterpoint is that at no other point in history has it been that (1) having a higher education was crucial to success and (2) the middle class (or what used to be the middle class) had access to higher education.

That having been said, most people in the broader economy still need to fill roles with practical value as opposed to e.g. working at a think-tank. The critical skills the author describes are nonetheless important, and one of the terrifying things about this whole education business is that large parts of the middle and upper classes lack this, in spite of said higher education. But I digress.

The point is that we have more people going to university. So you put that together with the needs of the students and of course there will be an overall de-emphasis on ivory-tower activities. But I wonder if the total amount of such activities hasn't changed much, with regards to the size of the country or economy.

That said, we still need a place for those sorts of things to happen. And it does feel like it's been pushed off into "grad school," whereas undergrad has become a career mill much like how high school has become a college mill.

What I'll give the author credit for is the value of the mill. He's right that there isn't that critical thinking, and isn't that what we needed to begin with in the creative economy? And I do remember what that was like in school, and even today. People like the idea of creativity and critical thinking until you make them do it.
Yes, but I also think you have to consider how those links are presented and interacted with. It's not just a link, it's got "like" button. What you see is people posting and even crafting links to optimize for that "number of likes" metric. That's how you end up with the stream of junk on FB: quick bait links with the potential for instant gratification.

Also for many people this stream is their one-stop-shop web, which is fine, do whatever you like, but now it has reached the point where social media has to be appeased just to get people to look beyond the stream, which I think goes against the openness philosophy of the internet. As the builders of the web (majority of HN base) we should stay conscious of this philosophy.
The surprising thing ancient mummies tell us about what to eat
I think it is a good idea. It is a bit more complex than using Unison, but it should be more generalisable.

I think the real key to creating a simple and low cost reliable system is to have this in mind when you design your application. I could have used a database just as easily as a flat file approach, but this would have made things much more complicated to replicate between the nodes.
It goes a lot further than that. Github quite literally becomes the hub of the projects it hosts. Without the hub the spokes will have to reconnect and many of the glue bits will be lost in the process and some of those bits are very important. A public home is a very important thing to an open source project.
Likewise, one of my previous advisors has stopped doing any quick and dirty math in python. I am seeing Julia a lot more (for astrophysics and ML) and more C++ (physics) for the more important simulations.
I like http://openweathermap.org/. They have historical data: http://openweathermap.org/history
I think it's rather telling that this "exposé" Blogpost doesn't link to anything actually incriminating and tries to call someone a "rape apologist with neonazi friends" based on supposedly who they might have talked to once on Twitter, since there are links to RooshV who doesn't seem to have anything to do with the entire matter or FreeBSD in any way, but no links to what the accused supposedly did wrong. The links I posted indicate the moment these two people intersected, after Randi Harper was furious someone didn't like the idea of "safe spaces" and "Code of Conducts" and went after him, herself acting like a harasser on IRC and otherwise.

Not to say that this is not the only or first time Randi has behaved like this or done this to someone if you are aware of her larger Online presence, for instance she did it to Vivek Wadhwa: http://www.stopthegrbullies.com/2015/06/01/randi-harpers-bul...

She said this about Anne Rice, the 74 year old female author of The Vampire Chronicles / Interview With A Vampire: https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/605650789348995073 https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/605736216625938432 https://twitter.com/freebsdgirl/status/605636162653417472

She even did this to Open Source developers like Ted Neward (who she wanted to "drive out of the industry" over a single inappropriate comment) and pulled his supposed "target" Iris Classon into it, upon which she had to defend both herself and him from Randi: https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/535151831027302400 http://archive.is/g2556 http://archive.is/T9Hvm http://archive.is/9GUle

Another Open Source developer, who was chairman of the IGDA Puerto Rico and part of several Open Source communities, and was subsequently forced to step down from the IGDA any Python Cuba she did it to was Roberto Rosario: https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/624257540948393988 https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/625866078925647872 https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/588123915488223232

What exposing someone who pretends to lead an "Online Abuse Prevention Initiative" while being one of the biggest abusers has to do with a "misogynistic campaign" you'll have to explain.

It's very basic DARVO. It's a pattern of pathological behaviour with this person of attacking/going after someone and calling everyone that calls it out "bullies" or "harassers".
Definite +1 on the italicization of 'quite'.. GitHub's UX advantage over Gitlab is marginal at best, at least as far as their web client is concerned. The desktop experience is pretty nice, but we've otherwise got SourceTree for non-developers who need a decent UI.

Gitlab is the first piece of open source I've seen in probably a decade where I haven't a single bad word to say for it, their attention to detail is superb, starting with the installation process. I'm usually by default a critic of pretty much anything I encounter (aka. "typical HN comment author") but I find myself advocating Gitlab constantly
Anyone that likes the concept should look at SAFE and CHERI projects, esp SAFE. They're applying lessons from old tagged and capability systems to modern CPU design for security. Similar techniques improve reliability.

http://www.crash-safe.org/papers.html

(See esp "SAFE: A clean-slate architecture for secure systems")

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/

Far as old stuff, there are at least three more greats along Burrough's style: System/38 (later called AS/400 & IBM i), Intel iAPX 432, and Flex Machine w/ Ten15. Sole survivor of those is System/38 in form of IBM i. It lived up to future-proofing, reliability, and relative security its architecture intended. Like with Burroughs (later ClearPath MCP), (slow clap) "Bravo to the designers." :)

iAPX 432 and System/38 here:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/levy/capabook/index.html

Flex and Ten15 here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_machine

For availability, NonStop deserves a good mention for a series of ground-up designs that did great:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers

Still looking for proper docs but OpenVMS's system-level decisions and clustering were so good by 90's they're still worth copying to some degree:
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/whitepapers/high_avail.htm...

So, there's old and new with the old stuff still being better than a lot of new stuff in integrity and availability. Makes me smirk at all the young, hot-shot coders in cloud market acting like they coded the best thing ever. I'll be impressed when they top 1960's-80's era technology at their own game. Although, I'd rather they learn the lessons and exceed them given it's (censored) 2015. ;)
> The technologist, specifically the software developer (ie.. the typical HN reader) seems to often be a non-conformist, even contrarian. Why do you think that is?

I'm a mathematician, not a software developer, but I think that both professions train their practitioners to believe that the way to get good tools (or theorems) is to try to break them, and to keep only those that survive—a 'confrontational' approach that it is (perhaps too) easy to carry over into the rest of life. I won't deny that there is probably some arrogance in my contrarianism, too.
You can edit and delete your comments, no reason to spam one-liners, especially not without connection.
How to get a 10,000 points StackOverflow reputation
Nobody should be specifying fonts in pixel sizes anyway. Just use ems everywhere and let the browser scale them for the current display resolution.

"Designers" hate this because they can't massage every pixel into just the right location on their cinema display and can't be bothered to accommodate different hardware. They'd rather just send users 300 DPI images of everything and let the proles deal with downsampling them on their ever so inadequate devices.
I'm not scared of Github. If they take bad decisions for the community, we will tell them. But I have to agree that the worst is the lack of competitors.
As a counterargument, if Instagram allows links there is a very good chance it will become a spammer’s playground with affiliate links all over the place.
Projects that use github merely as a mirror always run into the issue that of all features pull requests are the only one that you cannot disable, and they have to deal with closing pull requests, pointing to the real contribution process. So far github has always rejected the possibility to disable pull requests.

The problem with Sourceforge is that we now have a thousand unmaintained projects only available there as an archive and are risking to lose them if we're not careful. It seems easier to build a github-to-new_thing service as long as github cooperates (web api throttling).

If git is to be the dominant tool, it should support a wiki, tickets, code review and more complete distribution. Kinda like Fossil++. I hope git-appraisal or at least the idea gets more popular.
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Great comment which really made me think. You are right that unmanned projects are a no brainer. I would argue that both are important, and even with the budgets we have, we have been able to do both.

You made two assumptions that I would not, which make me believe we should continue to pursue manned exploration.

1) We have 5 billion years to figure this out.

There are many ways in which humanity could be wiped out on Earth, not just the death of the sun. Also I remember Elon Musk had a counterpoint to this as well that it's not a given that technology will always move forward. We need to exploit this chance while we have the capability.

2) The cost difference between a manned and unmanned mission are 1000 to 1.

That may be true for some missions, but I can't imagine that is anywhere near true for something like science missions for a station in low Earth orbit like the ISS. I would be interested in knowing what the actual cost differences are.
Apple ad-blocking software scares publishers but Google is target
I have no problem with people living in suburbs as long as they pay for it. Everyone else is subsidizing (too low gas tax, wars for oil, obesity epidemic weighing on health care system, free parking) and accommodating (huge roads through downtown, small sidewalks, insane parking requirements) their car oriented life styles.
http://edge.org/conversation/geoffrey_west-why-cities-keep-g...

Tldr; Universities used to be structured like cities, or be an extension of a city. Cities are so far essentially immortal. In keeping with modern doctrine, universities have been transformed into commercial corporations. We know that as a form, corporations have a limited lifespan. The average lifespan of a company in the s&p 500 has decreased over the last century from 67 years to around 15.

If you turn a university into a corporation, you limit its lifespan and should expect it to die after a few decades. The evidence is clear.
It's funny that when people ask what use in their lives will learning math and science have, we answer that it's about the clarity and discipline in thinking that will make them smarter - and then we turn around and refuse to believe that people whose training is in applying math and science to life can actually be smarter.
iOS app See postings in your neighborhood. Give me feedback plss
Why's this downvoted, it seems like useful advice to me.

Also cffi is definitely awesome.
Well, that’s why some ISPs in Germany give you a free website and a free domain (plus free self-hosted, managed email) with every contract.

Mine (TNG) is one of them.
Bloom's dread was of the Rolling Stones; now elder statesmen - Sir Mick Jagger, once arrested for soft drugs.

This reeks of his attempting to separate culture into low and high, and no, he shouldn't have to explain himself. Oh really?

Computer science has a long border with linguistics. Somewhere on the other side of that border is rhetoric - the Liberal Art - so computer science is a roundabout way there.

This completely ignores the two most significant intellectual innovations - that of Claude Shannon, which revolutionized physics itself and of Godel, who diagonalized logic itself ( at least the Peano calculus ). These represent towering intellectual achievements unlike any other in history.

Trying to map classical society onto modern society is an exercise in futility. Classicals were bloody, venal, voracious and cruel. Our engineers, whether they're called that or not, made the difference. We live after the Scots Enlightenment, in which Man was freed from a destiny as a draft animal with thumbs.

As an exposition of the phenomenon in the article, I much prefer "I Am Charlotte Simmons."
That's not Eagleton's point. The guy's a literary critic and is upset that STEM fields have taken the prestige position in universities, which to him means universities are "dying". While I have probably more respect for the humanities than most people with a scientific background, Eagleton makes the error that a lot of people with his background do, which is to assume that only people trained in the humanities are capable of critical thinking and that STEM fields generate robots with no interests outside their technical fields.
Often not immediately agreeing with a mainstream opinion, or stopping by to evaluate pros and cons, is seen as being contrarian or signaling smarts.
Look at it from the other side of the coin.

I bought a home. It was a responsible purchase, in line with my earnings. 30 years later, I pay the home off. I retire on a fixed income which accounts for the roughly fixed costs of my home and its upkeep.

Now a big company builds a campus next door. Home prices skyrocket. What do I do? If my property tax is bounded, I'm fine. If not, then suddenly I lose my home because my fixed income did not account for my property taxes skyrocketing.

Sure, Prop 60 accounts for that by transferring basis, but maybe I'm 54 when this occurs so it doesn't apply. Or maybe I'm not retired, but have 3 kids in the local school district and having to uproot my family because I can't afford my home is extremely disruptive.

One of the points in buying a home, rather than renting, is to guarantee that stability.

I agree that there are problems with prop 13, but fairness is a two sided coin. It is certainly not fair for my home (which I own) to suddenly become unaffordable due to external circumstances. Likewise it's not fair for a neighbor to pay double for roughly the same consumption of public services.

I don't know the solution. Possibly decoupling property tax from home values might be the answer. It certainly isn't a very good tracker for public good consumption.
Perhaps that wouldn't be true, if the WWW were more of a federation and less of a republic.
Allow me to inject a cynical slant to your hopeful suggestion that people 'today more than ever' can chose their peers. People with a certain education supported by an infrastructure (personal and technological) that allows for choice have this flexibility, but those without see only the threat of 'the other,' not an opportunity to rethink fundamental principles. Worse, political leaders continue to exploit ignorance, but with sophisticated mass communication tools and technologies Twain could never have imagined.

Prominent examples:

1. Lower-middle class Southern whites in the U.S. (with whom Twain was intimately familiar) embrace right-wing rhetoric (devout opposition to a godless, liberal govt that rewards a free-loading underclass) while the Republican Party caves to the self-interest of the mega-corp oligarchy. These folks who would benefit from social reforms reject all such liberal notions because, well, they still believe anyone who's not white and Christian is out to take away what little they have. But regressive conservative tax policy is actually doing them harm. (tl;dr: see the success of Fox News, with its overwhelmingly white/old audience. http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/04/02/rat...)

2. Given the above in the U.S., is it any wonder radical Islam succeeds in less affluent, less educated areas of the world--where there's very little exposure to outside ideas. And there's certainly very little opportunity for social/intellectual/economic mobility.
We're aiming to begin disclosing architecture and software details in March, with talks at 3 or 4 major industry conferences between then and August. As I said, we have our 28nm shuttle run booked for May, so baring any major issues, we're aiming for a August/September public demonstration of our first chips.

We have already been evaluating architectural models and FPGA demonstrations with partners for the past couple of months, but we feel its better to wait for real silicon to publicly show benchmarks, but so far so good.