skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even as a Christian, I am still open to the possibility that religion may be an artificial construct. One important purpose it may serve is to motivate individuals to advance social welfare (and be happy while doing so) when we would otherwise only have reason to be selfish. (Never mind for now that this presupposes that there is an objective "social good" that exists in the first place).

However, for religion to work, we can't be aware that it is artificial -- otherwise we'd stop following it. So we do have to believe wholeheartedly, aside from occasional philosophizing of existential questions.

Yet, the existence of an unmoved mover is still an alternative explanation. At this point, the line between artificial and supernatural is indeed blurred.
Munich is one of the richest German cities. You can dig into eg the Wikipedia article about economy of Bavaria if you are interested in background.
Facebook's reply: http://gizmodo.com/facebook-says-it-doesnt-try-to-influence-...
Probably accidentally copied the column from opentsdb, which is right below it
Autonomous Robot Surgeon Bests Humans
kairosDb which offers a time series data store uses cassandra. I had a very cursory evaluation of kairos and it was a while back. Don't remember the particulars though.
> As a Christian, my own answer (in short) is that true "good" requires that people can choose to either do good or evil. The only alternative is a pretty clockwork.

This doesn't really address the problem. If god is omnipotent and created the universe, he could have made things so that evil is simply physically impossible, with no contradiction of free will, in the same way that I am physically unable to flap my arms and fly to the moon, and yet I still have free will. The fact that he didn't means he's either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent (a contradiction for those who ascribe both properties to god). The onus would have to be on the theist to show how "no-evil" somehow logically contradicts free will; and it must be a truly logical contradiction if it is to be any constraint on omnipotence.
For what it's worth, one the algorithms they compare against, t-SNE, is open source: https://lvdmaaten.github.io/tsne/
Something probably not particularly important to the author (given that he's just using these essentially as a serial number), but worth mentioning for general use:

> Varints can represent negative numbers too, by casting them to unsigned numbers first.

But, assuming you're working with twos-complement numbers, it's going to be really inefficient, because small negative numbers are going to end up represented as extremely large positive numbers (e.g. -1 will map to MAX_INT - 1, where MAX_INT is the largest unsigned value representable in your underlying integer type).

You also lose the unlimited length property if you need to handle twos-complement integers, and your encoding is dependent on the underlying integer type you're serializing from/deserializing to (especially problematic in languages where types are architecture-dependent, like C/C++).

Protobuf handles this by doing what they call "ZigZag encoding" if you declare a value as a signed integer type. This maps small negative numbers to small positive numbers, alternating back and forth like so:

Original Encoded
0 0
-1 1
1 2
-2 3
2 4

and so on.

The catch is that you lose sortability if you do this... if you're going to have a bunch of negative numbers and need their encoded versions to sort correctly, you'll need to do something else. (Of course, you'll need to with twos-complement numbers, too, given that -1 will appear to be greater than 1).

Protobuf documentation on ZigZag encoding: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/encoding...
First Global Topographic Model of Mercury
I specifically looked up this podcast to show you guys because i find it relevant to this situation. I believe any parent will find it very interesting.

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/16/377517810/world-with-no-fear
Simply Secure report on low income NYC minorities views of cellphone privacy [pdf]
What aspects of your child's education would you feel should fall under this "two party" rule? Where does that professional trust break down?
De Lillo is a great writer, his novels are intelligent and thought-provoking. I've read White Noise many years ago; to this day, I consider it the best investigation that I've ever read about Death. We all have to die sooner or later and yet, interestingly, death is the great taboo of our modern society.
I should know better than to use words like "any" with programmers, it's true.

In response, I started compiling a list, but then I realised I can't think of a counterexample. "Any" might be just about right. Do you know of one?

I'm thinking of places like Indianapolis, Fairfax, Macon (GA), almost all college towns I've been to...
What made you leave the IDE world?
And computers will be much better at driving reckful all the time than humans who have their moments of inattention.
8 year olds and ten year olds use to walk all over the city in the 1970s and 80s
HPV isn't until the kids are 11 or 12. For all of the vaccinations that are currently required for their ages, they are fully vaccinated. I don't see how I can be considered "part of the anti-vaxx herd" if my kids and I are fully vaccinated as to what is appropriate for their age groups. As I mentioned, I disagree with the HPV vaccination, but that is 1 out of dozens. To call me an anti-vaxxer is laughable.
The solutions are not in question. Cost functions, reinforcement learning, etc. are decades old and well understood.

There's a big distinction between a roboticist and someone programming GPS route determination. When you build a robot and throw some sensors at it and ask "what was your last position, your last turn, your last accelerometer and your last shift sensor reading," well, you get it. That kind of data is readily available. If you ask a lot of people for that information today, they uncheck the "share with ..." button before continuing. Or even more commonly, there's only one data point. If there's not enough data to do anything intelligent with it, then for practical purposes there's no data.

I'm not saying we should share more, but I'm trying to highlight a key difference and one that can make solving this problem more complicated than just throwing a relatively simple and common algorithm at it.
Not in the TXR pattern language, I'm afraid! TXR Lisp has those interactive properties of just re-loading a module on-the-fly to redefine some functions without redefining the entire program, but the pattern language isn't interactive in that way.

This is from the ground up, pretty much, emanating from the way it is parsed in its entirety before being executed.

You can develop the logic in small pieces and test them in isolation on some sub-segment of the data, then integrate the pieces into a larger script with @(load ...).

Speaking of code refactorings, I also use it for that myself. When using it to interactively rewrite code, I invoke it in a pipeline out of vim. E.g. select some range of code visually with V, then "!txr script.txr -[Enter]" to filter it through. Vim deletes the original text and replaces it with the output. If the output is wrong, I hit u for undo to restore the original text. Then of course I have to fix script.txr and save it, and recall and repeat that filtering step just with ":[up arrow][Enter]".

To avoid refreshing the output file during development, don't have one; let it dump to standard output.

Something useful is that we can also monitor the first N lines of an output file that fit into the screen using the watch utility that is found in many GNU/Linux distros. Watch repeatedly executes some command that is given (once every 2.0 seconds by default) and splashes its output on a clear screen. If we "watch cat file", we can monitor the changing contents of file.
Yes, but it is annoying to get these mildly scolding articles about how I'm a terrible person for living in a suburb, when the only places in the city I could afford on my budget are classified as ghettos. They don't even have good transit access because the crushing poverty in that part of the city allowed the transit to crumble.
ThomPete's comment was about learning from other people.

If you look at eg lottery winners, you could try to put getting the winning ticket into their `locus of control'. But it wouldn't tell you how to replicate that success.
The one that sprang immediately to mind was Ann Arbor, Michigan, because I used to live there. But I can come up with more, if you like.

Your argument is that mid-sized US cities with densities comparable to European cities are rare, and that this causes pathology. That sounds intuitively defensible, because America definitely has more space to play with for its cities than Europe. But let's try to be specific.

What's a model European city, so we can compare its density to some set of American cities?
Well, more it would emphasize (and pretty much require) a better organized system. The lack of emphasis on proper addressing from everyone makes life pretty hard. :)
South Florida has quite a few round-a-abouts. There's a few in Hollywood and Lake Worth as well.
I think people are willing to trust the GPS precisely because because they don't understand that the routing is based on a cost function that was ultimately determined by humans with imperfect knowledge about the conditions on every road in the country (not to mention variable conditions that can't be known precisely in advance, like weather and traffic). When you understand that the route is simply the output of an algorithm whose input may or may not be accurate, you're a lot more willing to disregard the route if other information contradicts it than if you believe that the GPS is somehow telling you the "best" route.
I think the market has changed as Americans have more disposable income and attitudes towards fashion have changed.

In the past, our grandparents used to buy those jeans you could buy at the hardware store. Remember those?

But now, do you think anybody who is seeking to increase the number of likes in Facebook or Instagram is going to be caught dead on those jeans? No. You want the latest "trendy" jean. But trends are fleeting. So it is a risky proposition for the jean maker. A lot of the expenses are not on making the jeans, but on brand development and marketing. Also, [insert your favorite TV reality show starlet here] will command a few millions just to appear on the show wearing those jeans. Where do you think the money comes from?

So I think it is a combination of a) the market has more disposable income but b) refuses to spend it on things that don't benefit "me and my appearance" and c) the market became riskier due to the branding risk and therefore is pushed to cut costs to maintain a reasonable return. And if Americans don't TRULY care about perpetuating Slavery in China or killing the environment over there ("hey, I do, really, really, but I don't want to know about it while taking a sip of my latte;" - checks iPhone for messages just in case someone texted me while you took me to some horrible place where there are what slaves - "no they are not slaves, my $50 gives them jobs okay?" sips latte again), then why would a brand increase their risk by increasing the cost profile?

So we see the enemy every time we look at ourselves in the mirror.

(Back to sipping my own latte)
Can you give me some example of efficiency? I've always thought IDEs are more efficient, i.e. intellij IDEA indexes everything and provides superior auto-completion.
The lie would have to be comprehensive enough to justify conducting interviews in the neighborhood and everything that leads up to it, so even with the best of intentions (stop laughing) - it is very easy to unintentionally fabricate a lot of evidence. There isn't really any need to speculate though, the DEA proudly listed success stories for the "Hemisphere Project" - just look up the public information about those cases and see what lie they used for probable cause.
Typically you can treat the output value as a probability. This is supposed to be the case with a softmax output layer (as is currently recommended for multiclass classifiers) and I believe it should also work with multiple logistic outputs if you normalize the output vector to sum to 1.

In my experience sometimes both the decision and the confidence will be wildly wrong (ie. wrong answer with 99% probability) but most of the time this works reasonably well.
It turns out it was Alexander Ilyin-Zhenevsky, I thought as much but his Wikipedia page makes no mention of it.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=20026
Even if they did care, it's not easy to tell until the jeans start falling apart.
Assume all systems are compromised and act accordingly.

Remember when no one trusted the net and said it was foolish to put your credit card or anything important online ?
If you had written this comment at the beginning instead of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651110 , I would have had no reason to take exception. This comment makes perfect sense to me.

Can you see the difference between the two?
My thoughts exactly. Personally, that's why I can't justify spending all that time trying to figure out a text editor when I could be, I don't know, working.
Meh. "Luck" isn't something you can count on, sustainably, over a period of time. You can be "lucky" (whatever that means) at a point in time, but that only gets you so far. Was billg lucky that IBM hired MS to provide an OS for the PC, and that he was able to acquire QDOS from SCP for dirt cheap? Sure... but can you attribute everything since then to a continued, non-stop string of lucky events?

Now, you might ask, "well, what if the DOS thing didn't happen?" And the thing is, we'll never know, because it did happen. But if you believe that gates, ballmer, allen, etc. were smart, hard-working and talented, it seems likely they would still have ultimately been "successful" in some fashion, even if the story unfolded quite differently.

Luck and network are the single most defining factors of why some are successful

I don't know if we'll ever be able to actually quantify and measure that, but my suspicion is that grit/perserverance/will are at least as important as luck and/or network.

But keep in mind, there are many levels of "success". Life isn't as binary as "wound up homeless and sleeping in a gutter" vs. "wound up a billionaire CEO".
A supernatural God is inherently morally good if you subscribe to a monotheistic religion.

Somewhere on the internet, is a religion that asserts the only true god is in it for the lulz.
Interesting. Thanks for putting this together!
The Coolest Touchscreen Mirror
Very true. I was referring to the futility of trying to right past wrongs when said wrongs are essentially unrightable, but if awareness prevents future wrongs, it's straight up pragmatism.
God likes porn, but for some fetishistic reason, likes it better when naturally evolved sentients are making it.
That's only one side of the transaction.. The cash is also held as an asset as cash on the balance sheet -- likely restricted cash. My only point is that their cash position to build out their production line is probably overstated if you only look at the cash/marketable securities line item.
but not THE secret to success.

That's probably because there is no such thing as "THE secret to success". In the real world, people succeed or fail based on a complicated mixture of many different parameters. I doubt there is any one "thing" that we can actually prove is both necessary and sufficient for become "successful" (depending on how one defines "successful").
A Tesla factory in the desert could go up in smoke, but for most news outlets it would only merit a mention in the Economics section.

I rather think it would be front page news.
Apple seems to rely on a mixed bag of suppliers that are not Google for their map data. I'm not surprised it's TomTom and that may be why it's gotten so much better after release.
I mean "nowhere near" in the sense that the outliers -- the current and previous record holder for average speed -- haven't managed to crack your proposed 180mph criterion for "high speed", and the non-outliers definitely aren't coming close to that number. Common definitions of "high speed" rail kick in at 200kph or 250kph, which are 124mph and 155mph respectively.

Even if we go with the higher of those numbers, that's still around a 13% minimum difference in average speed between what's accepted and what you're proposing.

(for non-Americans, what I'm arguing with here is the idea that ~290kph would be the minimum average speed to call something "high speed rail")
Web Project Functional Specs: Performance Budget
Thank you for posting that, I have never read that before, it does seem to give a glimpse of the problems I see with FB.
I spent my middle and high school years in Athens, GA. It would not ordinarily be seen as a target for sprawl-bashing, given its ostensibly compact nature. And it's true, the downtown and campus are fused into something fairly livable.

However, as usual, 90% of the population doesn't live in that tiny core, but instead in the same kind of low-density layout one can find anywhere in America. While I haven't been to Ann Arbor since grade six or so, my recollection is that it's similar; wonderful UMich campus, nice downtown, but most of the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti area? Same old automobile folk traditions. Am I misremembering?

Re: comparing density --

Density is certainly not the only variable. In my article, I made the point about how proximity/adjacency != walking accessibility. That seems relevant, too. It's probably quite possible to build a place with a decently high density where a car is still required to go anywhere, or a relatively low-density but profoundly pedestrian-friendly hamlet.
Aiui you can have any checks you want.

Aiui, simplifying, every operation is a function call so you just write a function body that corresponds to what you want the operation to be with the checks you want.
The weakest link is the one that gets attacked. When the tech is good, the humans become the weakest link.
>I've been looking for that solution for years and the first time I've seen it simply and clearly done is the Real World example in the Redux source.

This is very heartwarming. Thank you for the feedback!
http://github.com/atomontage/xterm-color
More exploitation of the poor. Poorer people have less choice / options because those extra choices tend to cost money. It's a grave evil when organizations leverage this to take advantage of the poor and it happens all the time.
This goes against my religious beliefs - Christians are called to visit prisoners.

“I was in prison and you came to visit me … I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
Matthew 25:36, 40
almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm

If Facebook is doing it's job and utilizing their biggest talent acquisition of Yann LeCun, then this is exactly what they should be doing.

A critical part of the path towards AGI is using humans to teach it.
I would 100% lean towards to a more computational skill set while having some exposure to a wet-lab experimentation. I think having a data science skill set in biology is becoming extremely valuable. Moreover, if you choose to leave academia you have a set of skills that are in high demand across a range of industries.
Charlie Munger: Adding Mental Models to Your Mind’s Toolbox
Sounds like a post-hoc fallacy to me. Or maybe a "just so story". You can always unwind somebody's story and find some point in the story where something happened that they could not necessarily have predicted, and cry "see, this person only succeeded because of luck". But we can't evaluate all the branches in the tree of outcomes that didn't happen exactly because they didn't happen.

If you believe that people, to some extent "make their own luck" via their choices and actions, then you could just as easily speculate that if "lucky event A" didn't happen, then something else "lucky" would have happened anyway.
An idea: Try to get a London, Paris or whatever high paying job where you can go remote once you have proved yourself.
I know Athens solely from REM and Elephant 6 music. I've never been there.

Saline and Ypsi are suburbs of Ann Arbor.

Ann Arbor itself is mostly walkable, tree-lined, mixed-use, and connected by public transportation.

More than 90% of the population of Ann Arbor lives in Ann Arbor and not Ypsi or Saline. :)

What are the rest of the variables? I'd like to drive to specificity. If there's a set of US midsized cities that defies your characterizations, maybe there's something interesting that ties them together.

I'm certainly not going to deny that there are crappy cities!
I don't think I've seen a sheet on any sort of audio generator that has a sample file. Normally, you'll buy or request a couple samples to use in prototyping. There are way too many factors that affect what it'll sound like to make a sample file non-useful.
What's the backend?
It's already illegal by any sane interpretation of the law.

What does it even mean to make law enforcement behavior "illegal"? Who would enforce it? Obviously those in charge are either happy with it as it is or feel powerless to stop it.
Best Unsigned Artist of 2016
Oak Park, Evanston, Wilmette, pretty much all of north shore
I've just skimmed the paper, and this new algorithm looks very nice -- the authors call it "LargeVis."

According to the paper, LargeVis improves on Barnes-Hut t-SNE in two ways: first, it uses the idea that "the neighbors of my neighbors are likely my neighbors too" to construct an approximate graph of nearest neighbors in the high-dimensional space in a manner that is computationally much more efficiently than the method used by t-SNE. Second, the authors apparently have found a clever way to use SGD to map this graph to two (or three) dimensions with computational cost linear in the number of nodes.

If the authors release an open-source implementation, LargeVis looks likely to supplant t-SNE as the go-to algorithm for visualizing high-dimensional data.
This is great work for someone who's been dabbling with deep learning. I used to work on OCR systems for postal address recognition and for the most part this is how I would have approached the problem.

A couple of suggestions:

You will almost certainly get better accuracy with a broader array of input fonts. I'm not sure how well you can simulate all of the image conditions that might occur in a real system so adding some real images to the training set (if you can find them - but I suspect there are OCR type training sets available these days) would probably help.

For the speed problem I like the idea of using a simpler net, probably with a course scale image for pre-detection. You can set an appropriate detection threshold to avoid false negatives and thereby avoid running the full net on the vast majority of images which won't contain anything that looks like a plate number.
If anyone deserves a scolding, it's governments for their insane 50s-60s zoning laws and perverse incentives offered to developers of sprawl, and whoever else is responsible for the fact that suburbia is the only option you've got.