skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But state transitions are pure! Deterministic state machines are nothing more than (obviously, "pure") functions from one program state to the next, and nondeterministic ones are binary relations!

Okay, yes, but 99% of mathematics isn't deterministic state machines. So again, pure functions can model a lot of things, but deterministic state machines are foreign to the way people think about mathematics in most instances.

> For example, look at the pure specification language (and proof assistant) TLA+. It is far simpler than Coq, just as pure, and requires no more than highschool math.

Okay, that's completely fine as an example. I just mentioned Coq because it's one of the better known ones.

> Coq and other PFP formalizations are built on the core idea of denotational semantics, an approximation which at times only complicates the very simple math of computation, requiring exotic math like category theory.

I'm not sure where CiC (or any of the other recent type theories, including HOTT) requires category theory (which is hardly exotic in 2016). People who are doing meta-mathematics on these systems are interested in categorical models and such, but implementing and using these systems requires no category theory.

Categories are not fundamental objects in these theories; you have to build them just like you do in material set theories, although some parts of that process are easier (especially in HOTT). But that is the reverse of the link that you're claiming.

> The manipulation of formulas and proofs fits very well with the imperative approach, only no category theory is required, and core concepts such as simulation/trace-inclusion arise naturally without need for complex embeddings.

Again, no category theory is required (though I'm still not sure why this is a bad thing?) to develop a prover like Coq or TLA+. If you're bringing simulation and trace-inclusion into this, then you're just saying the stateful, imperative approach is well adapted to working with stateful, imperative systems. I agree, but how exactly does that equate to that approach having any benefit whatsoever for formalizing the rest of mathematics?
The Web never forgets: Persistent tracking mechanisms in the wild [pdf]
How is this derived?
I come from a country where there are always plenty of open cashiers and no lines. If I saw a queue there I would leave and not go shopping because its either overloaded or some system was down. When I first came to Germany I kept seeing the queue and thinking "oh, I will come back later when it isn't so busy". But I have noticed the reverse occurs too. If there is an idle cashier no one goes to them. They assume, due to the absence of the queue that it isn't open yet or something, so they head straight for the queue.
This is not a moral judgment. It is simply the seller doing what is in their best interest, just like they would in a competitive market.

The difference is that in a competitive market, this self-interest happens to lead producers to do what is in the public interest, but in the monopoly case it generally leads to lower production and higher prices than would be optimal. For more explanation, here's a Wikipedia article that jibes with my college Intro to Econ class:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_price
I think it's impossible to disentangle the reality of common programming languages and how they work from what is inherently more "natural". The bottom line is programming is not natural, not in any way shape or form. It's hard to learn imperative programming, it's hard to learn functional programming, and it's really hard to learn object-oriented programming (well). If all languages were functional I don't think that would really be harder than learning BASIC, people would just accept that is what programming is and get on with their lives.

I acknowledge that imperative programming is more analogous to real world tasks, but then as soon as you try to write your first program you run headlong into the fact that programming is nothing like other tasks you have done before. The tricks you have to learn to make imperative programming work are not really any easier than the tricks for other paradigms, and in fact you can mix and match from various paradigms to great effect (see: ruby).
This is circular. You are saying that we should have policy B, partly because A is too expensive. Why is A too expensive? Because of policiy B!
Most CPU architectures have instructions to zero memory, but whether its a single instructions or a few in a loop doesn't make much of a difference [1], since the problem is that the underlying memory is dog slow in comparison.

If you want better hardware support, you need to keep the memory hierarchy in mind, and recall that there are multiple coherent masters in any modern system. If we teach DRAM to zero a block on command, the CPU can't just ask DRAM to do that - the L1, L2 and L3 caches need to be kept coherent, and the other CPUs have their own L1 caches too. We could teach DDR to accept "write zeros" commands from L3, and L3 to accept them from L2, and L2 to accept them from L1. L1 is already accepting them from the CPUs that have memory-zeroing instructions. In fact I'm aware of one CPU design where that already exists in the L1<->L2 interface [2].

One could also take a different approach - if you assume the kernel wants to keep the memory on the free-list zero'd, then you could have another coherent master in the memory system to do that work for the kernel. When a page is de-allocated, the kernel hands it to the memory zero-er, when the zero-er is done, it fires an interrupt and the kernel accepts the page onto the free list. I'll bet there are a lot of DMA controllers that could be made to do this already, although I don't know if any of them could do it fast enough to be a net win given the extra interrupt activity.

[1]: Except on some embedded CPUs, which can manage caches more efficiently when using memory-zeroing instructions.

[2]: http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.100511_0401...
Digging into the dev documentation for APFS, Apple’s new file system
Shazam for Seafood Hopes to Catch Fraudulent Fish
Good luck selling that to doctors. People who are trained to cut open a patient aren't receptive to hypothetical harms and imaginary "budgets". Consider the fact that cause of death records are public. The usual perception of privacy by theory and security researchers and norms practiced in healthcare differ enormously.
Back in the day, I carried an acoustic coupler with my laptop. Also a patch cable with alligator clips. And tools to disassemble stuff.
Parameters usually means number of features or independent variables. Hyperparameter values are the algorithm constants.

How you eliminate depends on your data and your algorithm choice.

You know when you are overfitting when you are doing really well on training data but poorly on validation data. However, you shouldn't overfit if you choose L1/L2 regularization hyperparameter based on best results in 5-fold nested x-validadation.

You generally still do worse on training set than on testing set with nested x-validation, but it doesn't matter because at the end once you choose the hyperparameters you train on the whole training set.
Intersting. That's a smart way to collect data while not having too much noise flood in the dataset. I need to watch this State of the Union.
Can not agree more. Losing data must be considered a same level of crime as losing money or life.
Right. In computational semantics there are two schools. The "school of Dijkstra" (now championed most vocally by Lamport) -- which has largely taken hold in the field of formal verification -- and the "school of Milner" (Backus?) -- which has largely taken hold in the field of programming language theory. The former reasons in concepts and abstract structures (computations, Kripke structures), and the latter reasons in languages ("calculi").

The interesting philosophical question is this: can programs be said to exist as concepts independent of the language in which they are coded (in which case the language is an artificial, useful construct) or not (in which case the concept is an artificial useful construct)?

Whatever your viewpoint, the "conceptual" state machine math is a lot simpler than the linguistic math offered by PFP.
Good Grief. For a lot less than an F-35 program, they could install a TSM rig, with off sight backup.

Ours (at a state university) deals with petabytes of data. We've had to escalate to IBM's Tier 3 support a couple of times over the past decade, but we have never lost a file.
Not in so many words--but then again, there is a lot of dog-whistling going on, intentionally or not.

I really hate to link to some of these, but Red State does a decent summation of the "loopholes" as they apply to the executive actions took in January of this year ( http://www.redstate.com/absentee/2016/01/05/obamas-executive... ).

It's not just the adoption of simple measures, though. There is a lot of resistance to wider-spread bans that are kinda just waiting in the wings ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_Trade_Treaty ) to remove the self-determination and ability to self-arm. Sure, a lot of kooks are the ones resisting, but there are legitimate concerns there. Those bans are made possible by slow harmonizing measures, as weapons are restricted bit by bit by bit.

The basic problem in all of this is that the lies have been pervasive on both sides, and have been egregiously so in the case of proponents of gun-control measures. The phrase "assault weapon" was adopted literally to ban weapons that looked scary or military irrespective of their functional abilities. The phrase "commonsense measures" is specifically done to make a massive erosion of freedoms seem noncontroversial.

The entire posturing of gun control has been to either fear-monger or to smear as ignorant people who appreciate the value of retaining their right to self-defense and to do with their property what they will.

EDIT:

Loathe as I am to mention them, Breitbart has a useful quote showing exactly the mainstream politician talking about seizing weapons:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/16/hillary-c...

Washington Post had an interesting bit here as well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/08/why-s...
Scripted migrations have their advantages too:

- they can be stored in a version control system

- your coworkers can run them at their dev environment

- they can be used for automatic deployment

- you can test it in a dev environment before running at a production server. With GUI tools you have to remember and repeat exact steps you did before

- You can review the script or ask someone to look at it

I think GUI tools might be good for browsing and exploring database but not for making changes.
Geological objects of no worth to anyone tend to stay where they are for long, long, times.
Even with a robot driving you're going to need gas / electricity and food every 4 hours.
Fuck De Beers.

I bought my fiancee a lab diamond last year, for ethical reasons (nice to read it is better for the environment too). The lower price allowed me to get a better stone, too.

I cannot understand the mindset that rejects lab grown diamonds. It is the pinacle of selfish, ignorant consumerism.
The point of differential privacy is to allow for aggregate analysis, without destroying the privacy of outliers. Researchers deal with noise all the time, so is it so odd that a field of researchers believe that adding enough noise to data released with studies will allow for conclusive analysis without ruining privacy for individuals?
I love Brilliant Earth. I purchased my fiancee's engagement ring from them. Excellent website and service.
I'm a huge fan for space-based games and these screenshots remind me of Freelancer (2003). Really neat.
The best way to reduce overfitting is with cross-validation. The general way is to set up a hold-out sample (or do n-fold cv if you don't have a lot of data) and then use this cross-validation hold-out sample to do feature, parameter, and model selection. With this technique however there is a risk of overfitting to your hold-out sample, so you want to use your domain expertise to consider what features and models to use, especially if you don't have a lot of data.

Overfitting is somewhat of an overloaded term. People often use it to describe the related process of creating models after you have looked at past results (e.g. models which can correctly "predict" the outcomes of all past presidential elections), and also in a more technical sense of fitting a parabola to 3 points. These are technically related, but I think it would be clearer to have two distinct terms for them.
Also missing from the article was any discussion of all the wasteful practices we have after crops are farmed. If we're to discuss how we are to feed an extra 2B+ new humans, that discussion should include things like how we can reduce the amount of food that's wasted and how we can vary diet to, for example, rely more on vegetables rather than meats since meat production is incredibly wasteful.

This article feels like a a discussion of weight loss that focuses solely on new trends in exercise while completely ignoring the role of diet. And, worse still, by ignoring that important facet of the problem, it seeks to create a moral justification for practices like GMO that many consider to be an unnecessary risk.

I can understand why the Economist would be biased towards increased production, since that increases GDP and fits into the capitalist notions of constant expansion, but optimization on the other side of the equation will be much better at helping us meet our needs for food in the upcoming century.
So your first argument is that we should refuse to learn from history?

The US has not had any ships stationed in the Philippines since the early 90s. In response to local demand the base there was closed.

Granted, parent misspoke of China as stationing ships in those places, but your argument is similarly absurd.
At some point, regardless of adding noise, you're definitely losing your privacy. I'd be happy with an "opt-out" feature that I know worked (as far as I can see, only if it was open-source). I didn't watch WWDC, perhaps they mentioned this.
Looking at the rest of the thread helped. Thanks!
..or building islands to make bogus UNCLOS claims.
Amazon faces fine for shipping corrosive drain cleaner
I imagine that we'll get automated convoy AI, with a single driver in the lead truck, well before truly autonomous trucks. That will put a lot of truckers out of work by itself.
Another traveler with a lot of VN female friends on Facebook checking in, those accounts don't look very odd for the region. It's not uncommon to have a girl have to remove friends to add you. I've never really asked them why they have so many friends ... sorry.
The majority of the article didn't really focus on the driverless truck issue - it just highlighted that that's the real tipping point.

I think this is a real issue, even if the driverless issue doesn't happen as soon as some think/fear it will. Technology is encroaching on a wide range of jobs, but this time it's to completely automate them, not simply to augment them.

I do agree with most of your analysis of the driverless car/truck issue though - I think we have a hell of a long way before that becomes commonplace.
Wow. He could probably make some good money off this as is (if that was his goal), but I imagine if he added VR support, he's probably get money from everyone that bought a headset.

Projects like this always ended up being more fun for me to play that the vast majority of released polished games. Part of that is probably seeing updates happen that actually change the game. There's something visceral about that feed of updates, and feeling like you're there as something is being made. You can do a lot to engage a user base that way.
Farbod: Open-Source Persian/Arabic Font
After a couple of decades, we no longer need Arial or Tahoma fonts for web. Because we now have Farbod.
A font designed by Mohammad Saleh Souzanchi.
the article says that researches found a description of this analog computer of antiquity. This makes it the first manual page in history (however the description does not quite tell you how to use this mechanism - even more similarities to man pages)

other links:
The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project : The http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/

tweets by the diver team: https://twitter.com/antikytheradive?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

a BBC documentary on the subject : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXjUqLMgxM
To expand on this suggestion: Scala isn't big on purity (AFAIK the language has no concept of pure functions out of the box) but it is big on immutable data types, and mostly-pure functions arise naturally when you're working with immutable types.

Immutable types happen to be something that is familiar and comfortable to Java developers. I would therefore expect to meet a lot less resistance to "syntactic sugar and immutable classes" than "functional programming with pure functions" even if the end result is 80 percent the same.
Is There a HN FAQ?
I have been looking for a FAQ, I haven't been able to find one. Some things are not obvious, like what is flagging, can I sort a HN thread by new comments etc.
This is great if you're buying a fish that's already cleaned and filleted. Though if you're buying a complete fish, be it on your head if you don't know what variety it is just by looking at the animal.
Professor's tend to have very narrow fields of study and often their views try to bend reality to fit through their particular field. In this case, it sounds like a somewhat standard (as in common place) form of Marxism -- wherein most all societal concerns are driven by classism (and ultimately economic concerns).

Hogwash. Now, Professor Stearns almost certainly has valid, well researched points which we could use to adjust certain policies, but humans are very much more than economic creatures , though it seems like we forget this readily nowadays in the US. This also means there are many more factors influencing American societal and mores than class divides. There's many strong cultural factors driving various network effects and topologies which require more complex analysis to understand. E.g. trying to use a first level "approximation" will fail to rationally understand our society. Besides in places like California even the idea of a white/Caucasian majority isn't even valid anymore.
Things I hate about Git
I love compiler errors - because I'm the only one who sees them.
So why ORE instead of headers validated with a signature?
It's never phrased that boldly. People aren't "fired", their contracts are not renewed, or they are declared redundant because of the new kid with an advanced degree... usually just after they've finished training the new kid.

The most common move is to cut the highest paid section of the workforce after they acquire the service contract from a competitor. All major defense firms do this, which leads to problems maintaining institutional continuity.
Because an open web means the freedom to choose which browser you want to use. Even if that choice happens to be proprietary. Please remember that with the Internet of things, more and more devices will be running closed or non-upgradable browsers, from games consoles and smart TVs through to portable gadgets.
Glossary of Terms Used in Employee Performance Review and Appraisal
I agree opt-out is definitely something that should be deployed alongside differential privacy, but what makes you so sure that it doesn't work "at some point"? If the noise means an specific query to one user's information has a significant chance of being wrong, how does this not equate to privacy? You can add a lot more noise than you might imagine if you know the kind of analysis you'll be doing with the data; for example, a lot of statistical techniques are constructed to be mostly immune to Gaussian noise since it's very common with some kinds of data.
There is a link in the footer, that says 'FAQ'
./install: 16: ./install: chkconfig: not found

install over, thanks !

Terrific - so Linux 64bit is actually only RedHat flavours - save your time if on a Debian distro
Id like to play it just because this guy is actually living in that world for 19 years and its facinating
> I think that it'd be amazing to have a stone (diamond, emerald, sapphire, amethyst — whatever) which was the result of long and slow processes operating over millions of years (in the case of diamonds, dating back to the Precambrian, before there were even plants). That's just incredibly cool!

There's nothing special about diamonds here. Go out and pick up some rocks.
They know it's one of the ways to differentiate from the other big companies, by offering privacy and marketing in such a way that it's impossible for the other big players to do the classic "me too" approach.
CHIP $9 Computer
Its quite refreshing to hear you say that last sentence. Being labelled a bigot, self righteous or any of several other generalisations, because I believe Jesus was who he said he was, is a little hard to understand at times.
I once worked for a company that was producing a (cutting-edge at the time) system to sniff MAC addresses of mobile phones in a building etc, and create heat maps of physical traffic. Combined with their other product, which was a crm-type of thing that also handled web analytics and so forth, it allowed us to see if a client's online marketing actually turned into real conversions. It was quite interesting, if a little bit on the legally-grey edge of things.

I don't know how far it's progressed in the several years since I was there, but the product is called Blix: https://www.getblix.com/
Its a complex process with a lot of terminology. Here is a guide to minimize confusion.
One good example is ray casting. In a GPU there is no temporal locality, each pixel is ideally independently determined. On a GPU you can cast a single ray and flood fill out from there. This is slightly similar to what Ken Silverman did in Voxlap with wave surfing, although IIRC that algorithm only fills along vertical scanlines.
That's a hard question to answer precisely, but one I think about often. I use snapchat and text and gchat extensively, and I often wonder what it is about snapchat that makes it more convenient. As best I can tell it's two things:

1. The ephemerality makes me feel less self-conscious about the quality of the picture. It's going away momentarily, never to be seen again, so all I care about is conveying what is happening in the moment, not getting the perfect shot.

2. It's fast. Snapchat sacrifices image quality for speed to some extent, and the interface is faster and more fluid, particularly for broadcasting a snap to multiple people.

These things combine to make sending snaps feel very conversational. When I think of sending an image by text it feels like a hassle, and i'll only do it if it's a picture I want someone to have for more than 10 seconds.

I'm not sure if this explanation totally conveys my meaning, but in using it, it is quite clear to me that there is indeed something categorically different between snapchat and MMS texting, though it is admittedly somewhat hard to pin down what that is.