skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are correct. I should have been more accurate and stated that the new power that the government is demanding is demanding in the Apple court case is the power to decrypt our records and communications with a warrant.

There are also government agents who are pushing for the right to decrypt everyone's communications and records without a warrant.

Interestingly, the government never "demanded" the right to search everyone's unencrypted communications. They just went out and did it.
This is super. Fwiw, Java and Scala aren't bad for numerical computing either: http://nd4j.org/ https://github.com/deeplearning4j/nd4j/
The "flag and footprints" demonstrations serve essentially as prototypes. They demonstrate that a certain tech level is possible. But as anyone who's built a prototype knows, when the prototype works you are maybe 5% of the way there.

We put a man on the moon in 1969, and we are just now getting privately-funded spaceflight and satellites. We made the first computers in 1945; we got them on every desk in the 1980s. The first steamboat was built in 1783; the transatlantic shipping industry didn't transition to steam until the 1840s & 1850s.

Probably some kid who's watching AlphaGo's game today is the person who, late in life, invents the first strong AI.
'Facebook turned me down': the rejection letter that turned into a $4 bn check
Probably 50% is too much. I'll just quote patio11.

From http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-o...

> (Here’s a replicatable strategy for making several hundred thousand dollars with a single email: start with a revenue base of $X million a year. Email all customers asking them to switch from monthly billing to annual billing, in return for some incentive you can offer, which can range from “a month free” to “15% discount” to “Hey, you can book the expense this calendar year, so that will save you money on taxes.” Feel free to try this with any client or day-job of yours if they’re already at scale — “We made so much money the accountant/bank called us to complain” will make for a great bullet point at your next contract/salary review.)
> ... a crutch that stifles people's success ...

I'm not sure how that's a "crutch."

Also, in the future utopia you're describing where no one has to work a shit job that "stifles [future] success"... who cleans the toilets? Who waits tables?
mmake, GNU make implemented in Matlab
What's the third one? I'm only aware of AWT and Swing. I though that JavaFX was already in its own modules. Is it really realistic to only use one toolkit when Swing is built on AWT and has AWT base classes?

What bothers me more is that things like Java Beans are in java.desktop.
The Secret of Our Evolutionary Success Is Faith
Thanks! Exactly what I was wondering.
Take for example most Germans.

We don’t have credit cards. At all. We use EC (the E in EMV), which is a completely independent payment system, but isn’t used at all outside of Europe.

So, no US websites accept it.

I’ve been trying for 3 years to find an actually free way to send Google money to get a Google Play Dev account, but the only way is to pay money to get a credit card.

Seriously, if companies in the US would just accept a fucking international wire transfer – globally standardized, free to send and accept, processes in a few minutes – I could use a lot more international services.

But the way it is, I can’t.
Also should significantly reduce the moment of inertia of the charger hanging on the wall, so that gravity doesn't pull the charger out of the socket.
I don't think that's the point of the story. In the story, Sussman says that because the initial state of his net was randomized, it will "have no preconceptions". But that's not true. It still has "preconceptions", but randomly chosen ones. Because Sussman didn't know what they were, that didn't mean they didn't exist, any more than closing your eyes means the room is empty.
Home-made Light-field Camera
For some reason that OS X recording command line (pasted in directly) won't work for me. I'm using ffmpeg 3.0, the latest from Homebrew. It seems to be OK until I try to open it in QuickTime and it says the file is broken. I wonder if OS X 10.11 is the problem -- what version are you on?
The novel _Man in the High Castle_ references this system, and was supposedly written with reference to it. [No idea about the tv series, doesn't seem possible to get it in the UK]

BSD 4.4 had a game in it that I'd guess simulated the yarrow generation. I wasn't able to get it to compile on a modern system. (https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/tree/master/games/chin...)
You are correct that the original statement was not accurate. Please see the more precise restatement above.
Did Lee Sedol have a reasonable idea of AlphaGo's recent strength? To put it more harshly, did DeepMind misrepresent the true strength of the program?

I find it very hard to find information about this online.
js2me: https://github.com/szatkus/js2me

It didn't get much traction because nobody really wants to program in Java on the client if there are alternatives.
A critical look at the birdbrain and the evidence that birds can 'read' minds
You are completely ignoring the singularly unique aspect of digital communications which enables unprecedented new powers, period:

Storage. History. Digital communications like email are stored, and can be stored FOREVER... with just a flip of a switch, a word, an order, a warrant...

One does not have a pile of previous analog telephone calls just waiting to be scooped up and analyzed retro-actively

Anyone can see that if I can run all your data backwards through retro-actively invented filters, I have a power that has no parallel in the analog world:
For example: they didn't stop the Boston Bombers, so they change the algorithms until when they run everything again, it lines up.

This is seriously scary stuff, and it's a double-edged sword. I feel that it goes too far in giving power to these wanna-be-omniscient agents.

I'm not comfortable having ANY human omniscient agents.
I don't give a rat's behind how "noble" or "sacred" their mission statement is... bad people will abuse such powers and they already are doing so...
Based on the information that's in there, this makes mutual authentication based on TLS certifictes (or some other public-key-scheme) mandatory, and uses it for addressing. The only information that this talk contains about how to solve the introducton,authentication problem is this (paraphrasing):

"I don't trust Verisign to prove someone's identity, but I trust google's search results"

(As in "I googled for ACME Bank, and this is the address/public key that was returned, I am going to trust it")

The whole thing feels like something someone would come up in an afternoon with lot's of handwaving potential problems away.
Excellent article.

Reads almost like a walk through.

Side note: Why is a .ee (Estonia) domain site hosted in Japan (Tokyo)?
Sure. But it probably doesn't give relief for more than 12 or so hours, right?

When I said "not get a lot of symptom relief", I meant regarding general life functioning, not short-term response. Obviously Adderall will provide quick relief for an ADHD sufferer; it just won't help them in the long-term unless they take it regularly.
Of course they can. Didn't you see The Beastmaster? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083630/
Gonna end up with three-assed monkeys.
A single book is enough to learn mathematics:

Riley, Hobson, Bence: Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering: A Comprehensive Guide

It has a whopping 1300 pages, but it has everything you need. And if that is not enough for you get

Cahill: Physical Mathematics

This will give you advanced topics like differential forms, path integrals, renormalization group, chaos and string theory.
Maths isn’t the problem – the way it’s taught is
But if you're an experienced programmer, why get a book at all? Effective Go and the Go language specification (which unlike most specifications is very readable) tell you what you need to get started.
Around here, the local payment system is inverted: the site generates a code for your order, and the user instructs their own bank to send money to that code.

That said, many banks - including in the US - can already generate single-use virtual CC numbers.
Large businesses routinely take advantage of smaller businesses. They pay later than average, they demand "extras" and so on.

Determine what you think is a reasonable deal for any customer who prepays. Write it up as your new policy. Notify theses guys you can give them X off. If they have a problem with that, they are free to go elsewhere.

I really need to start collecting links, because I have read too many stories and stats on exactly this kind of thing, but I never know how to find them when this type question comes up. Do not let a big company make you their bitch. Set boundaries. Let them go elsewhere if they do not like it.
They challenged a top player for $1M. Doesn't that imply they think it's stronger than any human player?
Holy crap. It's a total beatdown.
Only 19.95 ex shipping for a little plastic block! How cheap! I can't wait for them to release the improved Blockhead-S this fall, which will be so much better!
none of the regimes that you mention purport to be ruling by popular mandate: aka a modern bi-cameral elected body running the show (allegedly)

none of these regimes are "by the people, of the people, for the people"

so, I'm not really comfortable aping the examples you list...
Screenr.com used to be an amazing and awesome tool for cheap user testing/screen recording. I would embed their widget and then go to Mechancial Turk and pay each tester $1 to go through various steps they recorded using the Screenr widget. It worked like a charm and was inexpensive compared to say $50 a pop at usertesting.com.

Does anyone know of any Screenr.com alternatives?
I originally attempted to leave the downside of privacy invasion unsimplified, and thus different people would have different opinions based on their view of this- in other words start a discussion, not look for a "right" answer that I am pretending to know (because I don't). But this is the way I think about it. Perhaps it's still too hard of a problem, but your second paragraph what I was after.

A second, more poignant way of looking at the problem is this (I'll do this one in first person, because it flat-out sucks): My friend just lost his family in a terrorist attack on an airplane. It seems likely (via whatever channels) that the attack could have been averted with more intel that was unavailable due to encryption. My friend knows that I'm against back-doors and government invasion of privacy. What do I tell him in consolation?

I think that questions like this allow us to empathize with the people who are responsible for making the decision. (Of course a counter-example is also possible: Ronald Drump has just used warrantless wiretaps to identify all of the Muslim sympathizers and has started rounding them up...)
I don't understand how this is considered fair. AlphaGo has been trained on a database that includes every recorded game Sedol has ever played while Sedol is seeing AlphaGo's play style for the first time. Sedol should have been allowed to play against AlphaGo for a few months before the match so he could study its style.
At the end you say:

>Let me remind you that these are not the real equations of motion for the photon. The real equations of motion would have been achieved by calculating all of the geodesic equations from the Lagrangian. There are four of them instead of the three equations (in vector form) above. However, the three spatial equations will generate the exact same spatial curve as the real geodesic equations would, and they were relatively easily achieved.

What do you mean that these are not the real equations of motion for the photon, but that they give the exact same spatial curve as the real geodesic equations? Are there cases where these equations would not give the exact same curve as the real geodesic equations?
Fast and simple vectorized backtesting using Python
Personally I just bought a figure 8 cable for a pound.
Shame I didn't post this earlier, that TLD would have been awesome.
Move to a cheaper house, save up six months expenses. If the issue isn't important enough to sacrifice your comfort for it, it won't go your way. Your children will grow up as subjects, rather than citizens.
Oh, yeah, I read it as if the ">>" was outside.
You can only hold a mint block until right before another block arrives. Once another block is known your mint block is garbage.
The literal syntax that you'd think would make an array of arrays concatenates the arrays instead. Sometimes. It depends on types. (Or have they fixed that now?)

Also, although this is of course a preference, 1-based indexing. I would rather have compatibility with C and Python and I don't care one bit about compatibility with Matlab.

These decisions make it seem that Julia just aspires to be "open source Matlab" when that already exists. It could instead aspire to be the good programming language that Matlab isn't.
Async flow control with sonic speed series, parallel, map, filter, concurrency
Matt Levine at Bloomberg summed this up well: "It's not enough to get your machines to agree. You have to agree on what your machines should agree about."

You're exactly right. People forget money is a contract business for a reason. Even if it were feasible to remove government regulation, the enormous complexity of financial needs and marketplaces would require a huge amount of human oversight. When things go right, transactions are simple. The problem is they frequently go wrong, sometimes in unanticipated ways where liability gets fuzzy.
>I'm talking about the government's ability to collect information about conversations you had 10 years ago after a suspected crime which occurred, say, last week.

You know that people used to put a lot of their conversations onto paper, right?

If you kept your ten year old letters, and the government had cause to believe you'd committed a bunch of crimes (maybe you hadn't? you seem like an all right guy, the government probably just goofed, these things happen), it could go and search your ten year old conversations and see if they contained proof of you committing a bunch of crimes.

The fact that we uses electrons and binary math instead of paper and ink doesn't change anything at all.

>Here are detailed responses to Sam Harris [1] and President Obama [2]

I appreciate the effort but these read like the same doomsday scenarios where it's just treated as an inevitable given that providing a method of government access is directly equivalent to providing access to any and every hacker.

>there will be data breaches, people will be upset, they won't buy iPhones, and this industry will disappear from the US overnight

This is the kind of doomsaying I'm talking about. Most people don't buy iPhones for their disk encryption, they buy iPhones because they're shiny and have the apple logoand you can do facebook with them. The PSN breach didn't stop Sony from selling 35 million playstation 4s; an iPhone breach would inconvenience some people, be embarrassing for apple, and then everyone would continue on buying iPhones because the alternative is to not buy an iPhone, which most iPhone owners would consider about as acceptable as cutting off one of their own hands.
My complaint is that grey text is harder to read than black. People could have made text grey years ago if it were better; it doesn't require hardware or new protocols. It's just a trend. It'll die out, but until then - given browsers don't allow the user much in the way of control over how content is presented to the user - it's annoying.
Sort of a tangent from the thread: I get the point about "good enough" at the moment, but I wonder if car AI really does need to perform much safer than any human driver before truly autonomous vehicles should be allowed to see widespread adoption. I'm thinking about the difficult problems re: legal and moral responsibility for human written/guided/trained programs like car AI. As well as the fact that, unlike in Go, real people's very lives are at stake in the program's successful performance. We already seem to have met the requirements for a research project---which is still unbelievable to me!---and I wonder how long the last leg will take.
If some sort of official forum / web based community was built around Go it would be easier too (more organized than just Google Groups). I know some communities online that I append the name of at the end of some of my searches just to hunt down relevant data. Heck I do it with HN sometimes to find commentary on things I'm looking for, or just really old HN links. At least then new CS students could be linked to said community. There's also the IRC, but it's not always as approachable as typing in "www.goforums.net" into a browser.
Pen and Paper Online – Play Tabletop RPGs Online
Yes, they do that to make it harder to read.
Doesn't principle of optimality state that if a solution is optimal than any of its sub problem must be optimal as well?
I used it a couple of times. One time my ex-girlfriend asked me to use it on her, but she did not tell me what her question was. I am pretty sure the question was about our relationship. Anyways, the result was the worst I-ching hexagram you could possibly get. The one about the walls of the castle sinking into the mud and the enemy approaching. Well, that relationship ended but we are still friends.

I also consulted it about a possible career change I was contemplating. The result talked about revolution. It seemed a rather pertinent result for the question at least. I did not end up making that particular career change. Perhaps the I-ching poems persuaded me not to make the change, because they talked about how a revolution is a very grave matter that must be attempted only in dire circumstances.
The meaning was clear to me. It doesn't quench his thirst because he has chosen not to use it.
Honest question. Why not get a credit card? They don't cost anything and would open up a new market for you.
Nice work! Did you consider using an RK method with fewer stages but "better" properties? I'm thinking in particular of symplectic methods like velocity Verlet. Depending on the details, it could give you both speedup and improved accuracy.
Because the neurotransmitters are all we know enough to experiment with so far.

Like the joke about the drunk looking for his keys only right next to the door - "because that's where the light is".
>> " I wish we had laws in place that all voters had to at least 1) work some sort of job (it doesn't matter what it is) and 2) proof they paid income taxes."

Terrible, terrible idea. This is how people are discriminated against. Prevent enough people that don't agree with your politics from getting a job, they can no longer vote, and you can screw them.
Businesses that cannot find people to clean the toilets or wait the tables will not be able to sustain themselves.

This may lead to a family-centric economy, where businesses like the city corner-store flourish because the family owns and cares for the business. The economic benefit to the family in aggregate is greater than the basic incomes afforded to the individual family members.

(Also, edited my comment to remove the reference to crutch.)
I find Go to be a great language for writing cross-platform applications. Cross-compilation and static linking for pure Go programs can simplify distribution of binaries greatly. Tools like the Hugo project (similar to Jekyll) just compile for all os/arch combos and upload to github from a single machine.

https://github.com/spf13/hugo/releases

IMO static linking benefits software on a user's host machine more than it does a networked server, which is typically highly controlled, orchestrated and repeatable, or containerized these days.

Disclaimer: In the Go ecosystem's current state writing applications with GUI elements is not so simple. But, I typically only write command line utilities/apps. So I can't really say much to that end.
Excerpts from an interview with Philip K Dick[1]:

VERTEX: Do you use the I Ching as a plotting device in your work?

DICK: Once. I used it in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book. Like in the end when Juliana Frink is deciding whether or not to tell Hawthorne Abensen that he is the target of assassins, the answer indicated that she should. Now if it had said not to tell him, I would have had her not go there. But I would not do that in any other book.

VERTEX: What is the importance of the I Ching in your own life?

DICK: Well, the I Ching gives advice beyond the particular, advice that transcends the immediate situation. The answers have an universal quality. For instance: "The mighty are humbled and the humbled are raised." If you use the I Ching long enough and continually enough, it will begin to change and shape you as a person. It will make you into a Taoist, whether or not you have ever heard the word, whether or not you want to be.

...

DICK: I've been using the I Ching since 1961, and this is what I use it for, to show me a way of conduct in a certain situation. Now first of all it will analyze the situation for you more accurately than you have. It may be different than what you think. Then it will give you the advice. And through these lines a torturous, complicated path emerges through which the person escapes the tragedy of matrydom and the tragedy of selling out. He finds the great sense of Taoism, the middle way. I turn to it when I have that kind of conflict.

---

And from an interview two years later[2]:

Phil: I don't use the I Ching anymore. I'll tell ya, the I Ching told me more lies than anybody else I've ever known. The I Ching has a personality and it's very devious and very treacherous. And it feeds ya just what you want to hear. And it's really spaced out and burned out more people than I would care to name. Like a friend is somebody who doesn't tell you what you want to hear. A friend tells you what's true. A toady is the old word for somebody who told you what you wanted to hear. The Kings all had their toadies around them who told them what they wanted to hear. The King said, am I the greatest King in the world? Yeah, you're the greatest King in the world, yeah. Well, this is what the I Ching does. It tells you what you want to hear and it's not a true friend. One time I really zapped it. I asked it if it was the devil. And it said yes. And then I asked it if it spoke for God, and it said no. It said I am a complete liar. I mean that was the interpretation. In other words I set it up. I set it up. I asked two questions simultaneously and it said I speak with forked tongue, is what it said. And then it said, oops, I didn't mean to say that. But it had already –

[1] - http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/frank-view...

[2] - http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/interviews...
One member of the deepmind team responded to this very question during the interview at the beginning of part 3.

He said that the training data set size is much, much larger than the number of lee sedol games. It is like a drop in the ocean and not enough to significantly influence the resulting policy network.
Problems are always subjective. I personally think that Bitcoin will revolutionize certain types remittance and cross-border global transactions, but I think it will happen quite slowly.

What bitcoin isn't that useful for, is this kind of internet microtransactions that Microsoft was accepting. Which is quite funny in a way, because I myself use Bitcoin for this kind of transactions, steam games, humble bundle etc. But it isn't really that I want to use specifically bitcoin, it's just that I happen to have bitcoin lying around, and it is easier to spend btc on this kind of items than other payment methods. People aren't going to buy bitcoin to use them on steam games etc, but they might use them for steam games if they already have some bitcoin.