skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read somewhere recently that there are now so many requests for authorisation to do various things in connection with probably very nasty people that the Home Secretary can spend 5-6 hours on a typical day just reading them and granting the authorisations that require their personal approval.

Assuming that's reasonably accurate, it is hard to imagine how spending half your day every day just reading about people who are probably the worst of the worst in many cases could not have a profound effect on how you view the world.

Whether anyone so deeply immersed in such a biased view should be expected to serve in such a position for more than a short period of time, and whether they should be responsible for making judgements about much of anything else during that period, are entirely different questions.
I'm not aware of any ideology where "doctrinaire" belief does not require some level of self imposed blindness. Here's a few more, and I'll be equal opportunity:

- There is little evidence that free markets can drive serious innovation. Nearly all the high tech of the 20th century is a product of state research labs, state funding, or state enforced monopolies like Bell. This is true up to today e.g. Tesla and SpaceX are heavily state supported.

- There is a ton of evidence that IQ and temperament are heritable and that parenting styles (excluding extreme abuse) don't matter that much.

- Infinite exponential growth on a finite planet is impossible. Space migration may be possible but will not change this since e.g. Mars is too far from Earth and travel is too costly for fundamental physical reasons. Eventually supply side (ecological) or demand side (declining birth rates, diminishing marginal utility) will end the growth era. (Personally I think we are almost there as evidenced by near zero interest rates.)

- The entire war on drugs is built on very bad science, or no science, and evidence from cases like Portugal's heroin decriminalization show that harm reduction works better even for hard drugs.

- Most "alternative" medicine fares no better than placebo.

... and so on.

Evidence is not why people believe things. For the most part, Ideologies (tm) are social/tribal membership signals not attempts to actually and honestly understand the world.

Unfortunately we then proceed to reason from these shibboleths; to make decisions based on things that amount to little more than intellectual football t-shirts and special handshakes.

For a very long time I've seen this as humanity's greatest weakness.
I think this article is spot on. But. I think the root cause here is that many of the tools are build by the community. Great tools cost a lot of money to build, and you need to build the right thing at the right time, the cost needs to be spread across the comminuty. The community is growing and tools are improving. The first generation tools with all their rough edges are being replaced by simpler tools that have incorporated lessons of the first gen. Improvement is accelerating. So when the core team focuses on new features like CLJC, Spec, Transit, Transducers, Datomic, ClojureScript, they are doing things that only the core team can do. There are other more opinionated things (like frameworks) that the core team isn't suited to do, everyone's app is too different.

The thing i love most about clojure is that all the pieces seem to fit together and be working towards a grander architectural vision much larger than just a language or just a database. I use Clojure not because it lets me code my java/javascript stuff a little better, but because this grander vision makes impossible things possible. The thing I am trying to build is not possible in any other ecosystem today.

So I am willing to eat the many little pains described in the article, pains I feel every day, because the grand vision is so powerful, and hope that one day the little stuff will be better.
Russia captured eastern Moldova? When did they lose it in the first place? I thought the region was locked between Moldova and Russia since the former declared independence.
Human intelligence is basically the ability to solve a large collection of sub-problems. As models learn how to solve more and more sub-problems they become closer and closer to human intelligence. Right now the focus is on solving important specific sub-problems better humans, rather than the ability to solve a much wider variety of sub-problems.

Machine learning and human learning happen in much the same way. We have a dataset of memories, and we have a training dataset of results. We then classify things based on pattern matching. The current human advantage is an ability to store, acquire and access certain kinds of data more efficiently, which helps in solving a wider variety of problems. For problems in which machines have found out how to store, acquire and access data more efficiently (such as chess) machines are far superior to humans.
It's not that "she's not a criminal" (the argument if this CNN report) that they don't autocorrect, it's that Google doesn't autocomplete "cri" to anyone- even Charles Manson or Al Capone- to "avoid disparaging a person's name". This is actually what they quote Google as saying in the next sentence. CNN is taking their argument one assumption too far, which is not what Google said. Typical media bias and spin. I'm actually more disappointed in CNN than Google's response, which seems quite reasonable. See below:

"The examples that SourceFed chose are factually incorrect. Hillary Clinton has not been charged with a crime. She has not been indicted. Google (GOOGL, Tech30) knows this, and its algorithm actually filters out inaccurate information in autocomplete.

"Our autocomplete algorithm will not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person's name," a Google spokeswoman said. "Google autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause. Claims to the contrary simply misunderstand how autocomplete works."
There was a great article about the corruption in snow removal in Quebec. People getting beat up for bidding on the wrong contracts. Wouldn't surprise me if that extended to the taxi business!

Not quite organized crime, but not far from it!

https://www.vice.com/read/of-course-there-is-a-snow-removal-...
Does it seem to anyone else that the person behind these billboards is likely to have mental health issues? I worry that this sort of media attention will have a spectacularly negative effect on them.
In fact, reducing jams results in faster typing when using a device susceptible to jamming. Now that our keyboards don't jam, we can move on from that local maximum.
There are for sure a handful of cons, like not being able to use someone elses computer without some painful layout switching time. But as someone who works on a keyboard all day it really saves my wrists. If I was ever able to not type I would be out of a job.
A recent TechCrunch article reported that the functionality that you use is going away.

It's a hamfisted move. They abuse these apps to do something -- my wife tried the messenger app and discovered a noticeable loss of battery life. I think she uninstalled it within 24 hours.
AI is very fragmented. Biomimicry has always been the way forward in every industry and Stephen Pinker made good head way from my vantage.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Saira Mian, Micheal I. Jordan (Andrew Ng was a pupil of his) and David Blei were not mentioned in this video so they are off the mark a bit. Vector space is the place.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

AI has become the most competitive academic and industry sector I've seen. Firms like Andreessen are trying to understand the impact during this AI summer and they should be applauded for this.

One of the keys to AI is found here: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Deep learning has very little to do with how the brain and mind work together.
In the video the highlight on ensemble (combinatorial) techniques are a big part of the solution.
Hang on a minute.

Placebo effect does not explain regaining sensation, nor regaining ability walking.
Definitely interested - email is in profile.
Is it a weird thing to use potatoes in sweet dishes? My mom/grandma/aunts always made needhams[1] with the bulk of the filling being mashed potatoes. Boiled potatoes without anything added to them are about as close to tasteless as you can get.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2012/08/26/159998395/maines-needhams-a-sw...
I think you misread the author's complaint. He's complaining that the `union` abstraction is leaky - it exposes its own ad-hoc implementation choices.
Hey guys "the other friend" here. Feel free to submit the projects. Or if you would like projects focussing on something else do let us know here :)
Yes, I did. As others have pointed out, that tends to go poorly if you plan to actually develop, test, and publish OSX or iOS apps for a few reasons. I've read reports of some people getting it to work, but it's generally a hugely painful process and tends to break whenever there's an update.
Bringing Back GitHub Contributions and Longest Streak
This is often called "physics envy" in the sciences.
It's all incremental improvement in different areas that sum up to a better overall experience. Sites are like 5 megs now.
Data protection is already regulated by the EU (only by means of a Directive rather than a Regulation) so the same principles apply across the EU/EEA, if not the exact rules.
> In addition, the "curl | sh" type of installation has a bad reputation among developers, for security reasons. Which is especially critical when payment is involved. And which is even more critical when it is about automatic payment.

It's through HTTPS, so it's secure.
The night sky is vanishing: 80% of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way
Thanks! These numbers look reasonable to me. Can you provide a link to source (s)? I'd like to read some more...
You can get laptops/tablets without bloatware if you buy them directly from MSFT store as "Microsoft Experience" ones don't come with crap.

If you consider windows as bloatware to begin with then buying a Linux laptop (ubuntu usually) from companies like Dell is always an option.
Well, I've compressed pi into a much smaller space.
Yep - also we have a large tendency to use feedforward NNs right now, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the future lies in something closer to recurrent NNs. Or probably something more complex, like automata-ish properties (IIRC there is also some NN that uses Turing-like devices).
We've visited for a few hours, this is about putting a colony on it. That's orders of magnitude more difficult. Why do something orders of magnitude more difficult on a planet orders of magnitude more difficult to reach?

As I said, the other answers seemed to give credible suggestions.
A quick Google search shows that there's also some similar activity on the internet, and the campaign is not just the billboards:

https://www.google.com/search?q=kate+of+gaia&tbm=isch

Lots of low budget Youtube video stills in there.

Watching the videos, seems to reveal a clean-shaven man with long hair, in a dress, named Kate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtvJRGYS684
Take a look at WeRe bank. They sell promissory notes and information about those notes.

People use them to "pay" their taxes; car loans; utility bills; etc.

http://www.quatloos.com/Q-Forum/viewtopic.php?t=10879

http://www.getoutofdebtfree.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=9...

(There's a BBC programme about this, I'm trying to find it now)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0783lmy

See also Guy Taylor at Bodenham Manor - these people can rack up huge amounts of debt before the system catches up.

Also: Someone can become rich before they become mentally ill. (If we're assuming these billboards are a result of mental illness).
Why I renounced my US citizenship (Hint: it’s not because I’m avoiding taxes)
Free advertizing for whoever hacks up a game (and domain) first.
> Only at such a high level of abstraction as to be meaningless.

I'm not sure what this means or how the abstractions are meaningless? From Gabor filters to concepts like "dog", the abstractions are quite meaningful (in that they function well), even if not to us.

> They are not. Hundreds of man years worth of engineering time go into each of those systems, and none of those systems generalizes to anything other than the task it was created for. That's nothing like human intelligence.

This isn't strictly true if we look at the ability to generalize as a sliding scale. The level of generalization has actually increased significantly from expert systems to machine learning to deep learning. We have not reached human levels of generalization but we are approaching.

Consider that DL can identify objects, people, animals in unique photos never seen before and that more generally the success of modern machine learning is it's ability generalize from training to test time rather than hand engineering for each new case. Newer work is even able to learn from just a few examples[0] and then generalize beyond that. Or the Atari work from DeepMind that can generalize to dozens/hundreds of games. None of those networks are created specifically for Break Out or Pong.

It's also not entirely fair to discount the hundreds of years of engineering considering most of these systems are trained from scratch (randomness). Humans, however, benefit from the preceding evolution which has a time scale that far exceeds any human engineering effort. :)

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06065
H-Day
What you're describing sounds credible, but the problem I have with accepting it is that I have seen absolutely no evidence in the wild that there is actually a market for this. It is counter to the entire methodology of pricing vulnerabilities.

You don't need a vulnerability to spread spam on Facebook, so that's out. Page likes and video views can be done with botnets. Spreading malware doesn't make sense - it would be far superior to buy a vulnerability allowing direct desktop access, not one that will be patched quickly.

The other examples require me to believe that companies which would be interested in photos or email addresses are the same ones willing to pay four or five figures for a one-time use vulnerability. This is an extraordinary claim. There is no real-world Venn diagram of companies interested in harvesting emails or photos and companies willing to pay for Facebook vulnerabilities. Those companies are either TMZ or the NSA. You're asking me to believe that TMZ is willing to purchase security vulnerabilities and competently use them, or that the NSA is willing to purchase Facebook vulnerabilities for one-time use (if anything, I'd believe in them developing them in-house).

What actually happens is vulnerabilities in iOS, PHP, WordPress, OpenSSH, etc. are use for wide-reaching effect, not for a single website.
That's nice. What about the millions of non-techies who are about to have their stuff deleted because Facebook decided, on a whim, to railroad them into the Moments app?

Everyone on HN knows not to trust Facebook with anything of of value, but as technical people our collective response to a corporation deleting the stuff of people who don't should not be "I'm okay, I have backups".
Can we quantitatively measure how in love with itself a given field is? Design seems to be way up there.
If you are talking about human health, it might be that any gravity bellow 0.8g is almost as bad for human health as microgravity. It could be that any gravity above 0.1g is as good as 1g for human health. We simply don't know the format of that curve. We have no data on it even on rodents (the ISS module for that was scrapped). We only know that 1g is good and microgravity is bad. And that very high g is bad too.
>union and intersect not doing the same thing as in common lisp

Clojure is a different language.
Wow, your response is in no way meaningful. Your response adds exactly nothing to the discussion. Nobody "demanded" anything.
What does document.domain = document.domain do?
Probably pretty easy, I'd bet.
Podcast: Episode 082 – A Podcast About Podcasts
19 Must-Know Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts – Part 1
It is easy to see a speeding car, snag the license plate, and inform the police of flagrant violators.

Detecting and tracing wireless interference is much more difficult, requiring specialized equipment and a lot of FCC filings. All of the major carriers tend to bump shoulders in one market or another and the issue is often difficult to resolve due to the need for a lot of evidence.

So in short, it's harder to identify and confront violators. Like figuring out who peed in a crowded pool.
just go to the local university library and look at the math section. :P

to give a personal anecdote, i often commented with my fellow graduate students that our first two years in graduate school were spent merely getting to the 1950s in terms of mathematical technology. most people who graduate with a bachelor's in math only know math up until the late 1800s and early 1900s at best.

mathematics is the hardest intellectual activity i have done, and it has made my job as an engineer and software developer much, much easier. the ability to abstract yet get down and diry with details is something math beats out of you.
Thanks for the good link. TJI seems to give quite nice increase in efficiency, up from the already impressive 40% or so they had in 2014.

I don't remember anyone struggling with fuel loads in a long time like they did early on with the new engines.
You're actually in the industry, as I am, so I'm willing to suspend more disbelief to verify what you're saying. You probably wouldn't be willing to show evidence of these claims here on HN, but would you be willing to do so privately? That might actually be sufficient to change my stance on Facebook vulnerability value.
That's nice, I like it, but I really want to understand the use case.
Yeah, I'm not willing to give up easy access to numbers for symbols.

Maybe an an extra row above the numbers would work (Get rid of the current F1-F12 keys).

I'd also like to have ABCDEF and x keys next to the number pad, to make typing hexadecimal numbers easier. Maybe comma and space keys would be useful over there too.
How Does BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) Work?
I hear that all biggies (MS, IBM, Amazon etc) are jumping in with their own BaaS offerings. But I'm puzzled - if these providers each maintain their own blockchain, how can a transaction involving entities which exist in different blockchains, succeed?
Yes. Reading the associated site (http://legalnamefraud.com/) I'm confident whoever is behind the billboards is mentally ill, or certainly very deluded. I feel sorry for them.

I'd be very interested in learning who funded this.
It's really the worst combination of features from the online and offline worlds: the strict synchrony of offline classes combined with the lack of in-person contact.
A stock trader can be successful one year and make up for losses the next, so long as he is successful more often than not

If you don't get good returns your first couple of years, you'll likely be out permanently. A couple of bad years on a 20 year trading record, you might be fine.
Then again, Alex's sources all note that VAM stabilizes after a number of years (between 3 and 5). So long term teachers should be fine too.

Similarly for salespeople. Like it or not, getting a professional evaluation based on a noisy objective measurement is nothing special. It happens in many professions - why should teachers be protected?

Also, I didn't realize 38.5 hours/week, 9 months/year was "unconscionable".

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

Also, teaching is not "thankless". Teachers are given a high degree of respect - #2 below nurses, in terms of ethics/honesty.

http://www.gallup.com/file/poll/166364/Honesty_and_Ethics_of...

In terms of competence and warmth teachers also rank near the top on both axes.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/Supplement_4/13593.abstract?...

Or just note the typical language used to describe them, e.g. "dedicated public servants".

What makes you think teaching is "thankless"?

I've never heard of anyone denying the pigeon hole principle in that context (or any context), but straw men are a very effective rhetorical device.

Go listen to discussions of housing in SF.
Facebook chat. They're disabling it on the mobile website to push people towards Messenger. It's only a problem if people you know use that to chat.
Why was it held back? The only legislation passed was around gov't funding of new embyonic stem cell lines. Private money has no restrictions.
I think the author is right in his assessment that it's a community problem: the Clojure core team does not want outsiders to participate in the future of the language, but does not clearly communicate this up front. I absolutely support the right for them to do this (I'm a happy user of the non-open C# language, after all), but they should clearly state that Clojure is defined by Cognitect, not the community.

Even one of the most prolific Clojure users with a tremendous track record of extremely well engineered and practically useful libraries, Zach Tellman, has been bitten by Rich Hickey's / the core team's NIH syndrome[0]. That's no way to treat the people who love your language.

[0] http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-1517
I have to blame my procrastination and never having the habit to complete or start any of the courses I had 'enrolled' in. Now coursera shutting down, I'm leaving all my hopes to the knight of the internet to archive these. Will download and hopefully get back.
This is basically strong AI vs weak AI. I don't know what the ultimate solution is - it could be exactly as you describe. :) My theory is just that it will need to be generally applicable, on domains it is not trained on, if it is to reach human-level intelligence.
If you find you have trouble remembering two layouts then I would suggest using a specialized ergonomic keyboard with a non-QWERTY layout for most of your typing and leave all the normal slab keyboards and laptops as QWERTY. For much the same reasons you don't get confused between a piano and a computer keyboard, using a keyboard which is physically significantly different helps separate the two layouts in your muscle memory.

For example, I use Colemak on a Kinesis Advantage and QWERTY on all flat keyboards. Since the physicality of they keyboards are so different I don't have any confusion while typing, though sometimes I'll mix up single character presses. That is, if I type a sentence I never have troubles, but if I want to hit just the 't' key I may mistype the first time. Other than that I can seamlessly switch between the two and my speeds are comparable across both layouts.
Wouldn't an optimized layout depend on what you do for work? A C programmer will likely type '*', '->' much more than a JavaScript programmer. Do you move those shifted characters too? How about numbers? I type `0` and `1` a lot more than other numbers.

Maybe one way to generate an optimal layout for work is to run the algorithm through the top projects on Github for a specific language (assuming your work is coding).

I have tried alternative keyboard layouts with little success. I'm a Vim user. I can't even tell you what half the hotkeys are! When someone asks me what the hotkeys are for something, I have to mimic typing the keyboard in air then mentally map my finger movements to keyboard characters. It's a double whammy for me to move to another layout.
Hey, I found my best evolved layout:

K,UYP WLMFC
OAEID RNTHS
Q.';Z XVGBJ

Some things to note:
1) E and T just have to be under the middle fingers on the home row in any comfortable layout.
2) T and H need to be adjacent.
3) Vowels on one side, consonants on the other side of the home row. Keep the home row's Scrabble score to a minimum.

Honestly, I think that's all that really matters. Dvorak isn't perfect for me (I/U need to be switched, and maybe L/-) but those are minor bugs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4nlhih/my_incr...