skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a weird essay. I think it goes wrong from the very beginning. From the second paragraph:

[B]y helping startup founders I've been helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality is bad and should be decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders. No one should be.

I think this is ridiculous. Creating new millionaires is not increasing inequality. I don't know anyone who thinks that (not to say that Paul might not have run into a few people who think that way). The problem, as you say, is the profound concentration of wealth into the hands of a few multi-billionaires. I would say also, it's the fact that the middle class in the US is actually shrinking.

The fundamental way that the wealthy can help the middle class, while helping themselves at the same time, is by investing in new businesses that create jobs. This is precisely what YC is doing! This isn't increasing inequality but decreasing it. Not only are they creating jobs directly, they're also doing so indirectly, by teaching people -- even those who don't get into their program -- how to start startups.

Founders don't get rich unless they build a successful business. And again, I don't think anybody minds that they can get rich; after all, a lot of them then either start new businesses or become angel investors themselves. There's nothing wrong with any of this, quite the contrary, and if Paul really does run into people who think there is something wrong with it, this is what he should tell them.

I would go so far as to say that YC and its ilk are among the most creative, hopeful, positive things happening in the US economy today. Though I'm not involved with them directly -- I haven't even worked for a YC company -- I am very glad to have them here in the Valley, and I'm excited to see what they do in the coming years.
Oh hi 2012, what are you doing here?
Bunnie Huang (of MIT fame, original cracker of Xbox, proponent of open hardware [see: Chumby, Novena, etc]) has a really interesting talk given at the Media Labs in '15 at his alma mater[1]. It's about 1:15 but fully worth the watch including the QA, if you have any interest in 'open hardware'. That Rockchip run's on a fairly complicated 4core ARM. So which while the instruction set may be open, so is Intels. They'll happily ship to you their 3 volume multi-thousand page ISA. (Open is when you get to see any of final Altium/Cadence files that were used for the tape-out to make production wafers). At best you might get a few block diagrams. Good luck getting anything more than that. The closest you'll get to something open might be collaborative open standards a la the OpenPOWER (still, not that open) or RISC-V (which is probably still fab'ing at what, 65nm? 45?)

Anyways, that Rockchip is far from open. watch the talk to see his rationale behind choosing Freescale as his microprocessor of choice. He remarks on how $2.25 SoC picked up on the streets of Shenzhen have the full capabilities to run on GSM, which is really pretty remarkable. Obviously they're stealing IP and probably using grey-market tech/seconds that failed QA, but when he talks about the innovation _within_ that grey-market its fascinating. Even with his PhD in EE from MIT, experience in taking consumer products to market multiple times, fluency in Mandarin to aide in his ability to navigate the markets of Shenzhen, he'd have a real difficult time making a low-unit production run to compete with half the functionality of a low-level Android at twice the price because of the massive barriers to market. (Starting with easy things like UL certs and proper EMI shielding to more difficult political issues in getting a phone like that through the FCC and to the consumer). There's no economies of scale to help when Johnny doesn't know why he needs OSS.

Tangentially - if the N900 was still around I'd pay retail for it.

[1]http://www.bunniestudios.com/
[2]The reason it's so cheap is because they're clearly not paying any licensing fees to the appropriate IP owners. Every time a phone gets pumped out in a market where companies have litigious recourse, you have compliance with FTDI and pay your taxes to use USB, rent your little carved out spectrum from the FCC, etc.
Cryptography gives you control, but not autonomy.

Open formats and standards that are fully usable on other platforms are also important. Many companies provide "export" functionality, but actually using your own data from some XML file often means a non-trivial programming project.

You need formats where you can make them usable easily, using free software (ideally several options), on multiple different kinds of platforms (cloud, local pc, mobile).

That gives real data autonomy.
Sure. What do you believe is the purpose of saying what that clause says rather than badsock's shorter and clearer "A party may only make laws that are consistent with this agreement"?

You seem to be suggesting that somehow the lengthier version is more precise. I don't see how. Am I missing something?
Author here. The simplest way to describe those 42 values: the value we want to output (the shortest value) is very close to the midpoint between two floating-point values. Since the best answer so close to a midpoint, its difficult for the algorithm to decide which direction that number will round.

So, how can we make sure that such numbers are converted correctly? The answer from Steel & White's paper is to perform arbitrary integer arithmetic and leave nothing up to chance. The Grisu3 algorithm by Loitsch showed that 64-bits correct converts about 99.5% of numbers. As you increase the amount of precision, you can improve your accuracy, but there is no guarantee that even 128-bits or 256-bits is enough to correctly convert all numbers.

Instead of trying to be 100% correct, our algorithm sidesteps the issue entirely by enumerating all failures a priori.
A few favorites we've done:

1) Placing an an Annoy-a-Tron (small devices randomly emits a sound) right above someone's computer under their desk. Employee goes nuts trying to figure out how a virus got on their system and tech support tears the system down trying to figure it out.

2) Hooking up a small air horn to an office chair, so that when someone sits down (and depresses slightly the pneumatic seat height leg) the airhorn goes off scaring the crap out of the seatee. This one happened to me, holy crap...

3) A classic, there's always a hunt-and-packer typist in the office. Switch a few keys on their keyboard.

4) Or a modern take of the key-switch, cover their keyboard with hello kitty stickers.

5) Place not one but three annoy-a-trons around a desk.

6) If someone has a combo wireless keyboard and mouse, but doesn't use one of the two, get out the piece they're not using and randomly press buttons or move the mouse about for some 'phantom wireless problems'.

7) If someone leaves their station unlocked, send a quick group mail offering to buy coffee for the team (or beer, or pizza, etc).
I'm not noobermin, but for me it's not really the cost of the trip, it's the loss of the income I would have generated during the trip. I could take vacation, but I don't wouldn't want to rush through the trip. Ideally it would stretch across a few months.
This is so beautiful. I wish I have the opportunity and courage to make the same rational decision when the appropriate time has come.
Current top post quotes the most negative observation of the paper. Here's the most positive, and perhaps the most useful to HN readers or investors who are exploring the space:

"Deep learning has produced amazing discriminative models, generative models and feature extractors, but common to all of these is the use of a very large training dataset. Its place in the world is as a powerful tool for general-purpose pattern recognition... Very possibly it is the best tool for working in this paradigm. This is a very good fit for one particular class of problems that the brain solves: finding good representations to describe the constant and enormous flood of sensory data it receives."
This is even easier to do with awk.

awk -e '!a[$0]++'

This also preserves the original input order, which is a nice property.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917949 and marked it off-topic.
SpaceX had a hard landing – one leg is broken
Right. So, kind of like Ecuador letting Occidental back in after kicking them out for breach of contract. It might have had something to do with the lawsuit Occidental launched against them that cost them their entire health budget for the year but then again, perhaps it was just an extraordinary coincidence.
Save for the very few who do something significant to advance the species, how are we that different to apples?
Is it naive though? Naivety is a suggestion showing a lack of wisdom or experience. Stallman has this in spades. I'd peg this as 'idealist'.

To wit, imagine a world where:

* Everyone has a block of static, globally routable IPs (no NAT).

* Consumer broadband etc was less asymmetric, and not strangled my media conglomerates.

* Everybody ran a decent operating system with a package manager that handled updates for all their software.

* Server and P2P software was so easy to use that it became invisible

* The Internet hadn't become synonymous with 'the Web' for most people in the 90s/early 2000s. (Remember when we used to talk about 'the Web' just like how we talk about 'the Cloud' now? That's because, as far as most people are concerned, it's the same thing.)

... in such a world, suggesting everybody run their own server doesn't seem so crazy. In fact, there's still a lot of grass-roots belief in these ideals : http://redecentralize.org/
I'd say it was a warning sign.
The stuff I made in 2015
blip.strongloop.com is dead – what is this?
My more conspiracy-minded thoughts have wondered about this. Yeah, it's probably a satellite connection and they can be flaky, especially at sea, but isn't it awfully convenient that the feed cut off mere moments before a bad landing? SpaceX PR is quite good indeed...
Well, actually it's reinforcement learning and not supervised. Anyways, the point is that no knowledge of the game is required, just the score.
> And yes, nothing is completely "free" - I'm just arguing about monetary access. Ads means you're paying with attention which has it's own costs and externalities.

Just wrote that in another comment. For the mainstream audience of 3 billion people online, the monetary cost outweighs the rest.
Uh, it's a corporation that sues the host government. For lost profits.

This is presumably supposed to be a strong incentive to prevent host governments from changing their laws in such a way that they might damage guest company profits. Much like a fine for breaking the law.

Why would you consider that a controversial point of view?
"Yet, the net amount of money that’s been made by the shareholders of airlines since Kitty Hawk, is now a negative figure—a substantial negative figure."

I first heard that about 20 years ago, but then it was at breakeven. Apparently it's become worse.

Berkshire Hathaway owns NetJets, an airline for the 1%. That's profitable.
Rather homotopy type theory ;-)

(explanation: homotopy type theory (HoTT) in difference to ITT also considers types of higher order).
Read the TPP.. Skipped right to the HN comments about the TPP.
Couldn't you just sync a folder with your phone (via dropbox or a thousand other apps) and just save whatever webpage the video is on to that folder. If you do it your way, you'd have to worry about text that's associated with the video that the user may or may not want.
Fun fact: An open source[1] version of BTSync called Snakebite was introduced back in 2006, predating BTSync by 6-7 years.[2][3] These days, it's not well known at all, and the Internet seems to have mostly forgotten about it, but there it is. Van Jacobson made a couple of offhand references to Snakebite at a Google TechTalk he gave in 2006.[4] The student who created it went off to do international NGO work or something, but his co-conspirator ended up working at BitTorrent, Inc for a bit.

I don't know what BTSync is like today, but a few years ago when the call for beta testers first went out, its UX as described at the time was more or less the same as the way Snakebite's web interface worked.[5]

1. http://sourceforge.net/projects/tristero/files/Snakebite/

2. http://slashdot.org/story/06/08/29/0441202/new-auto-seeding-...

3. http://www.webknowhow.net/news/news/060829SnakeBiteBittorent...

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM

5. http://web.archive.org/web/20070320161111/http://actlab.tv/s...
Start-up firm mines data to aid Detroit blight fight
This is one of my favorite novels. Well worth reading. The background surrounding its writing is fascinating and makes you appreciate the novel even more.
There was a superb adaptation at the Barbican in London a few years ago. It returned again the following year.

I've no idea if it will come back again, but it's more than worth catching if you can. One of the best plays I've seen, with an incredible cast.

http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?ID=13735
I would buy a robot that could fold clothes, but that turns out to be a really hard problem (http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-robots-still-cant-fold-your-..., although there seems to be some progress in the lab: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1192259...)
Using a tether is the same as in med mooring a yacht. [1] The anchor is released and tight while the engines are in reverse. It's possible with a windlass to slowly take up or release more anchor chain.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1rUXmzdtMY
If that were the case annual technology sales should be zero. After all, phones, PCs, and laptops get cheaper and faster ever year. If what you say is true, no one should buy any this year. Let's all wait until next year.

Clearly this thought experiment doesn't model the real world. There are theories of the time-value of money and marginal utility that can help explain why this is. At the root of it, we have a finite amount of time on this earth and can't wait around forever before acting.
Thanks! I'll checkout it out.
At least Elon Musk is not really implying what technology will get us there. He is assuming that once we do, it has serious implications. It's hard to disagree with that. We will be sharing the planet with another intelligent creature for the first time ever.
Oh cool! And retro-web too. URL changed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita.
I disagree. The most common form of debt in the United States is the mortgage. Mortgages are often entered into because of an assumption that equity growth will outweigh interest.
Author here. We intend for the GitHub repo (https://github.com/marcandrysco/Errol) to be the primary source for Errol. We still want to add a few improvements to the existing implementation: selecting the middle-most shortest number and an implementation for 32-bit floats (and maybe __float128).
Low-Cost Nickel Based Catalyst for Hydrogen Fuel Cells
about 3 years ago HN was about 50/50 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785277

I'm always amazed at companies that don't train their people. It's easier to say "they couldn't use HAVING in a query, pass" than to say "I believe I can teach them SQL effectively." But the freedom to think the latter lets you build a very strong team.

It's the genius of Facebook's OSS policy. Let everyone use their stuff so that new people can pop right in, learn on your own time before we're even paying you...
1) My interest, and I think the interest of most people here is to understand the economic and political consequences of the TPP, not to obscure them with legal sophistry.

2) Delong's point is that the members are binding themselves to an international framework that will be difficult or impossible to back out of. He connects this with the problems of the EU. This is absolutely about sovereignty.

3) Unfortunately the main article appears to be a Monk debate which isn't available online.

4) Delong is a voracious advocate of free trade and also a political ally of the president who's trying to ram this one through. The fact that he's increasingly become hostile to this particular agreement is an indictment of the agreement, not of him as a critic.
Thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of what we call “luck”
It's 2013; see the modification date at the bottom.
Got any videos of that Navy technique? Can't say I've heard of it, and a few minutes of Youtube searches don't find anything. I have been in helicopters landing on ships at sea, though not in rough seas, and they didn't do anything particularly special. The helicopters did have landing gear with suspension and shock absorbers, though. I wonder how much shock absorption capability the F9 landing legs have, and if they can add in some more.
You may say this is not ruinious, but it still seems messed up ( especially considering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl#Healt... )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor-state_dispute_settlem...

> Between 1995 and 1997 the Canadian government banned the export of toxic PCB waste, in order to comply with its obligations under the Basel Convention, of which the United States is not a party. Waste treatment company S.D. Myers then sued the Canadian government under NAFTA Chapter 11 for $20 millions in damages. The claim was upheld by a NAFTA Tribunal in 2000

And there's more:

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/nafta...

> Canada has been the target of over 70% of all NAFTA claims since 2005. Currently, Canada faces nine active claims challenging a wide range of government measures that allegedly interfere with the expected profitability of foreign investments. Foreign investors are seeking over $6 billion in damages from the Canadian government. These include challenges to a ban on fracking by the Quebec provincial government and a decision by a Canadian federal court to invalidate a pharmaceutical patent on the basis that it was not sufficiently innovative or useful.

So I wonder: did you actually have a look yourself and came up empty, or do these examples somehow not fit the bill? I'm not claiming to be up to speed on this stuff, maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here.
I've always wondered this: would you necessarily trust a food engineer to make you dinner? Does that qualify them?
People did lose their jobs, and the new jobs available went to a new set of differently skilled people, that doesn't help those who lost their jobs. Technological change brings with it social upheaval that must be dealt with; AI brings potentially mass unemployment because any "new" jobs will be handled the by the AI, not the displaced people.
An article telling men to be less aggressive considers telling someone they're too aggressive to be a form of sexism.
It's not settled. These links are annoying.
Ask HN: Where are all the non-web jobs?
I'm a fairly "fresh" developer (less than a year out of college) who will be moving to the Chicago area in May. Since graduation I've been working at the company I interned at and was able to secure that position through the internship program at my university, so hunting for a tech job is totally new to me.

Using some of the more standard online outlets for job searching (Dice, Stack Overflow, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc.), I've found very few jobs that aren't web-related. I have seen a handful of embedded programming jobs, but those tend to require a background that I lack (EE or CE, whereas I have a Comp. Sci. degree). My only other prospects seem to be in the financial and gaming industries, but those positions are few and far between and tend to require previous professional experience that I lack.

I'm afraid I'll have to pursue a masters or doctoral degree in order to pursue jobs in any area outside of the web. Is this accurate, or am I simply looking for employment in the wrong places?
Should we post every book on HN now which is worth reading and appears on nearly every list "xyz books you should read"? Don't get me wrong, the book itself is very good.
I think that we also need it in cases where the data is made unavailable at some future time or when a mobile connection isn't available.
I agree that preventing node-locking is a critical step in being able to make data decisions. I'm on a bit of a personal crusade against lock-in, actually, but I'd argue that's different from the kind of autonomy (probably better described as agency [1]) we're referring to in this context.

Having control over information creation, retention, and sharing is what I would describe as agency of data possession. Node-locking, open standards, etc, create what I would describe as agency of data use. They're both incredibly important, but you can't use data without possessing it.

[1] Linked because it's an infrequently-seen term outside of philosophy and sociology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_%28philosophy%29
The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter
different significance

Citation needed.

Its not as if somebodies coins will suddenly become worthless.

Bitcoin has a lot of actors. Users, investors, miners, exchanges, shops... And everybody will have some hassle with a fork.

Just like on the WWW where there are webmasters, webdesigners, users, browser vendors, shops... And every has some hassle with browser compatibility.
rest-server.py uses the flask framework which just happens to default to localhost:5000. You can run it on any IP address or domain, see http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.10/deploying/#deployment

Questions of the kind "how to I do X in programming language Y" are better answered on stackoverflow.
No one knows yet how big the leap needs to be, but the most amazing thing about ANN's is that the feature layers a CNN arrives at may functionally resemble some of those found in the visual cortex:

"The oft-cited resemblance of the imagery to LSD- and psilocybin-induced hallucinations is suggestive of a functional resemblance between artificial neural networks and particular layers of the visual cortex, a matter which merits further study." [0]

Also see "How brains learn to see" from Pawan Sinha [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/pawan_sinha_on_how_brains_learn_to_...
First flower blooms in space aboard the International Space Station
Great post talking about PickAxis an amazing MineCraft Server
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAbm2XDpx9w

The video above shows the technique being practiced. I actually saw it as part of a show on small helicarriers that the Marines use, probably the show "Firepower" or "Wings" there was a period of time when I was researching military equipment in support of an RTS game design and I went through hours of documentary type shows to understand the capabilities around modern (late 20th century) weaponry.
What being a flight attendant taught me about human trafficking
You run the program for 2^(bits of state) steps. If it's still running, it will never stop because it must have repeated a state at least once. That means it's in a loop. So it takes a long time, but not an uncomputably long time.

By bits of state, I only mean the bits that the program is allowed to change. It doesn't necessarily include OS code or initialization code, as long as they are immutable while the program is running.
people still use Express? Koa is where it's at.
i realize it's "easier" to get a loan now so they jack up the prices, so it's just that greed?
There was a recent paper [1] about learning visual concepts from few examples. I don't know if it generalizes or not, but it seems too early to assume that researchers will hit a dead end.

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/350/6266/1332.full