skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 80-85% of seized assets go uncontested: ... I.e. nobody even files a claim to get back their thousands of dollars in cash.

From what I've read, that's often because contesting it costs more than it's worth. You need lawyers, etc. For $5K, for example, it's not worth it.

> I think it's improbable that more than a small minority of those assets are legitimate (especially in the $10,000 in the glove box scenarios).

I don't know. However, it seems like your reasoning is based on certain scenarios, such as $10K in the glovebox; I don't think that's valid unless we know how common those scenarios are. We need some data.

Also, while I may not have a reason to carry $10K, there could be many people who live very different lives than me who have perfectly legal reasons to do so. Maybe small retail stores take their money to the bank, or people without access to banking services, or goodness knows who and why ...
You're right. However in Germany environmental and anti nuclear groups are basically one and the same. The German Green Party has evolved out of the anti nuclear movement and forced all other parties to adopt environmental and anti nuclear policy.

Shutting down nuclear reactors, like the Energiewende, is a great example for the kind of power these groups have in German politics. That's why I mentioned it, to illustrate the power they have and that it's therefore not surprising that fracking would be banned.
I run my own so I can have control and have shorter URLs than available with public shorteners. I generally use it in presentations I do.
See my comment below. The sentencing guidelines ranges are pretty wide. On top of that, they're arbitrary. Instead of being based on one judge's "discretion and ad-hoc and unscientific consideration" it's just the U.S. Sentencing Commission's "discretion and ad-hoc and unscientific consideration."
One definition that I like to include in defining life, is something that uses energy to decrease (or maintain?) local entropy.
Is this all paid content?
Coding is Over
> But I think it's improbable that more than a small minority of those assets are legitimate

Yes, and only few people that are arrested that aren't guilty and only a few people the cops shoot don't deserve it.

However, each of these rare instances constitutes its own crime perpetuated against an innocent victim. If the justice system doesn't actually strive for justice, it's just another gang of thugs.
Not sure where it is going at all: evolutionary leaps often come from outliers and sometimes from serendipity. What about this reinforced confirmation bias?
My own attempt to deal with this issue (2013): http://thinkinghard.com/blog/UniqueFactorisation.html
I think it's pretty good evidence that Gowers' blog post fails miserably to either persuade or explain why the fundamental theorem of arithmetic isn't obviously true. Garbage in, garbage out, irrelevant of how good the machine is.
I'm on the controversial side that Gowers's overall argument is unfair to laymen, but this is indeed a circular argument.

It can be modified to make it more robust while keeping the structure of the argument fairly close to what you have here, but it requires a bit more sophistication. Specifically, suppose that n is the smallest integer with two different prime factorizations, and write these factorizations as p_1 * ... * p_n and q_1 * ... * q_m.

Now first you might imagine that these two factorizations could be different and yet share at least one prime in common. But this is impossible. If they shared a prime in common, we might as well assume it's the first, so that p_1 = q_1 (i.e., we're just reordering the indices). But then n / p_1 has the two different factorizations p_2 * ... * p_n and q_2 * ... * q_m, but since n / p_1 is smaller than n this is a contradiction.

So we can assume that these two factorizations share no primes in common. In particular, we can assume without loss of generality that p_1 < q_1. Consider now the quantity

n' = n - p_1 * q_2 * ... * q_m.

This is positive but smaller than n. Now we already know that p_1 divides n, so we can actually factor out p_1 here to obtain

n' = p_1 * (n / p_1 - q_2 * ... * q_m).

This gives us one factorization of n' < n in which p_1 occurs. Now here is the critical observation. Because n' is smaller than n, n' must have a unique factorization due to the choice of n as the smallest number which does not have a unique factorization. (This is the point where the proof will fail for many other more exotic rings which lack the intrinsic well-ordering principle enjoyed by the integers.)

But we can also write

n' = q_1 * q_2 * ... * q_m - p_1 * q_2 * ... * q_m = (q_1 - p_1) * q_2 * ... * q_m.

This is another factorization of n', and by uniqueness it must contain p_1. This is only possible if p_1 divides q_1 - p_1, which is only possible if p_1 divides q_1, which is not possible since q_1 is prime.

---

This highlights why I disagree with Gowers here. He's looking at other rings which violate the basic ordered structure of the integers, but this structure plays a critical role in our intuition about the integers, and I believe it's precisely why we feel something like unique factorization is "obvious" (or intuitive) for the positive integers, but it remains very elusive for, say, Z[sqrt(-n)] (where it's true if n = 1,2 and false if n >= 3).
It seems like there is enough evidence now for the FBI to recommend indictment. Why do you think they haven't yet?
Different stores would allow competition on store policies and inventory. Would a store that differentiates by disallowing certain in-app purchasing strategies by useful? It would to me, because I don't want to support companies that use certain sales strategies.
> Personally, I prefer to avoid becoming emotionally invested in something completely outside of me, and am happy to leave my synapses open-ended. Since there is very little practical relevance, there is very little consequence of my inaction, and I can get back to processing more important decisions.

This reminds me of Sherlock Holmes's view in A Study in Scarlet:

He was not studying medicine. He had himself, in reply to a question, confirmed Stamford's opinion upon that point. Neither did he appear to have pursued any course of reading which might fit him for a degree in science or any other recognized portal which would give him an entrance into the learned world. Yet his zeal for certain studies was remarkable, and within eccentric limits his knowledge was so extraordinarily ample and minute that his observations have fairly astounded me. Surely no man would work so hard or attain such precise information unless he had some definite end in view. Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning. No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
An Eve server can run locally in its own instance, separate and isolated from anything else. It would be no different than Java requiring the JVM.

But one of the nice things about Eve is that it effortlessly distributes to multiple nodes/users. So yes, we support the case where users are working cooperatively on the same document.

For example, that's the way the REPL works. Let's say my team is making a website about dinosaurs. On my machine, I add a stegosaurus entity to the database with several attributes: discovered, average length, average height, etc.

Now my colleagues have immediate access to this information. If one of them had a query open asking "What dinosaurs are in the system?" then their view would update with stegosaurus immediately.

In turn, I could use her list in another way e.g. to render it in a browser with links to each dinosaur's Wikipedia page.
I'm currently taking a course on this material in 2nd year undergrad.
Pardon my asking: Your profile says you are an appellate lawyer; do you handle criminal law?

I'm not an attorney so I don't have much more to say. I do happen to know a lawyer with expertise in criminal appeals, but probably an HN discussion isn't worth interrupting them for.
Last poll I saw, it was a dead heat in one and widely varied in others. It must be a bit worrisome since Pres. George W. Bush do a campaign stop for McCain.
A sort of Mpemba effect on a global scale? That's got to be the goofiest global warming thing I've heard yet, and I've been following the movement since 1992.
> The reason there's room for this is that our URL shortening function has no ads, no third party tracking, no bloat ... no dark patterns.

But it’s still a closed, proprietary database and there’s no way to decode an “Oh By Code” if the service goes down, which is the disadvantage number one you have with URL shorteners.

> The real utility are the easily recognizable codes, prefixed with "0x".

Why not using a prefix that helps differentiate your codes from hexadecimal numbers? How do you plan to get people to know your service if it’s not recognizable? Let’s say I put one of those codes on my business card, I still have to write somewhere that people should use 0x.co to access the content, which ruins the advantage of having just one code rather than a URL to my website (literally anyone knows how to open a URL in a browser).
That's great. Now if I could just read www.theonion.com on Firefox for Android without it crashing every time, that would be sweet.
True, but this tell you nothing about percentage of profitable companies versus the number of companies who make games full time. Most games are not made by fulltime mobile dev companies doing so as their sole income.

And my point with the top 200 was that that's way beyond profitability for a small studio. None of our apps are currently in the Top 1000 grossing (I don't think).
Okay, but then you're just moving the debate over a few feet rather than addressing the core point: can a human likewise be abstracted away to some substrate-independent program such that we lose nothing by deleting some running copies? Can we build a box that gives us the same answers Bill Gates would, and causes us to deem it "another Bill Gates" without confusion, modulo having a body and physical access to the world?
Dependent on what comes out of the DB, not what goes in.
I think in the future, I will be using dinosaurs in my examples :P
Why would one use this over archive.is?
Thanks for the extra explanation. It seems I assumed too much about these Deep Q networks, due to some prior knowledge of the neuroscience related to RL. Although I do remember having seen a video about Montezuma's Revenge a week ago or so, where they talked about this exact problem.

Anyway, it would seem to me that novelty functions that would allow the agent to ignore periodic changes in state such as timers going up, can be quite simple. A function that estimates novelty of individual bit values in the bitstring of the gamestate and then aggregates it, could quite easily account for timers, or generally elements changing periodically regardless of agent actions. A baseline novelty reward would seem relatively easy to predict by the agent and thus result in low prediction errors and low reinforcement of actions by agents. This function would have a linear space and time complexity to the length of the gamestate, and fairly naive & simple to use, but would get the job done I think?

P.S Just wanted to thank you for the work you've put into your website, it's very informative and always a great starting point to dive deeper into topics you cover!
I've not used this, but it looks like it would fit the bill: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13015

The datasheet says the control current is 7.5 mA at 12 V. It doesn't say what it would be at 3.3 V, so that would be the one thing I'd worry about. ESP8266 GPIO pins can source a maximum of 12 mA, so if you want to hook it up in a way that uses the GPIO pin as the current source there might be some issues.

I think to be safe, I'd just go ahead and add a transistor. That also can provide protection against a logical 1 being enough less than 3.3 V or a logical 0 being enough more than 0 V to cause problems.

You can find similar relays on Amazon for a bit less (search "solid state relay"), and even cheaper on AliExpress if you aren't in a hurry.
Strangely, half the time I try to use Google Now on my phone, it doesn't seem to understand basic queries that worked two years ago. And in the meanwhile, features and APIs that used to allow more reliable and explicit control (e.g. like in Picasa) are being shut down. I guess someone at Google figured that imitating Apple is worth sacrificing what remained of their power user appeal.
Source, so we can call her office and complain?
From inside a simulation, it's impossible to tell how fast the simulation is running because you have no external time reference. The visible universe as we know it could be running at a time dilation of of 10^100:1 and it would look exactly the same to us.
> The sentencing guidelines ranges are pretty wide.

That's a subjective description, but I don't think its true for what most people would consider "pretty wide". Once you've added up the scoring points to get to an entry on the sentencing table, the ranges for any given cell on the table on the low end are 6 months wide (centered on 3 months for the lowest categories), those near the high end (where there is a definite range) get up to just under 7 years wide centered around 30 years. (After that, there are 30 years to life bands, which may be fairly wide, and bands which have only a life option, which leave no wiggle room.)

And the actual ranges for a particular sentence may be narrower than the cell, since they are also constrained by any minimums or maximums specified for the particular offense.

> On top of that, they're arbitrary.

No more, or less, than the definitions of crimes themselves are arbitrary.
> I'm not sure I understand your position. The iOS platform has probably made more indie dev millionaires than any other platform in history.

I think the assertion is something along the lines of that being possible because more indie devs are on that platform than ever existed before. Sure, there's a lot that made it big, but so many are in the pool that it's still a relatively minuscule chance.
Reddit users help feds nab graffiti vandal who defaced US national parks
Nope! Everything is free except the first link!
> I've seen that on LessWrong too, really smart math/CS people talking about biology can get demolished by a second year biology student.

IMO, LessWrong and other communities based around critical thinking tend to either foster a sense of intellectual arrogance or attract people who already have that quality.

> Sometimes I even feel that math/CS education has damaged me in some ways, made me too arrogant, though obviously it gave me a huge advantage in other way.

A lot of education in science and engineering is based around teaching people to walk up to a problem they are completely unfamiliar with and make a reasonable attempt at solving it. That is an extremely useful skill in some cases, but very dangerous in others.
Apple needs to move the "standard price" from 0.99 one time download -> 0.99 per year

Delete app to unsubscribe

Remove 0.99 one time pricing

$5.00 minimum one time download price
When Apple dropped the optical drive, the internet was eating everything. The internet is a massive, global infrastructure project that was clearly not going to slow down. People were already downloading software, movies and music, and loved the ease of that experience. The writing was on the wall, they just jumped earlier.

So what's the up and coming thing that's just about to take over audio transmission, the "internet" that ate physical disk distribution? Is it Bluetooth?

> Bluetooth audio works perfectly fine, and it's how I play music on my headphones...

sample size of one. I can match that. I never use bluetooth and actively avoid it due to it's poor quality, connection fragility, and the time it takes to set up (repeatedly). Basically, the UX of bluetooth is terrible. The UX of a simple, universal, cheap, dependable, quick, robust and high fidelity cable and connector is great.

Whatever tech that will eventually replace the 3.5mm jack isn't here yet.
> From what I've read, that's often because contesting it costs more than it's worth. You need lawyers, etc. For $5K, for example, it's not worth it.

That's not true. To contest the forfeiture, you have to file an administrative claim, which is basically a sworn statement identifying your interest in the property. If the government still wants to go through with it, it needs to file a civil case in court, where they bear the burden of proof. If they do that, then you may retain a lawyer, but it's a more streamline process than an ordinary civil case so you don't really need one.

The 80-85% statistic isn't about people who are unsuccessful in getting their property back; it's people who don't even take the first step of filing that sworn statement.
I think it's even better evidence that people didn't read the entire article. I'd even suggest that those who did read it, didn't "read like math" but instead "read like a novel".
A Stark Nuclear Warning
That's not a warning. That's a runtime error.
>calculates the likelihood of someone committing another crime

_another_ ? Why not optimize further and just determine the likelihood of committing of the original crime and lock up based on that even before it happens?
> The 3-D organization of the genome can also be analyzed via eigendecomposition of the contact matrix.

Love it when linear algebra pops up in unexpected places!
> But also, aren't they huge on solar even though they get a fraction of the sun that the USA does?

Yes. Still have to move cars, heating, and plastics to alternatives.
Well, it might be a bit of problem for an Attorney General of the same party to issue an indictment[1]. Its one of those career ending moves, and at that level, "the end justifies the means" tends to be the guiding passion. I'm sure Senator Sanders fans would love it though.

1) frankly, it would probably also raise a ruckus if an Attorney General issued an indictment against the other party's presumptive nominee for President
This is the wrong way to think about it. It's not what you pay for because almost nobody is actually making a choice to pay for it.

It's what they think you want. They're all trying to sell what they believe has the broadest appeal which happens to be vapid, emotionally charged shit. The thing is, when everyone is selling the most broadly appealing product, the whole market consumes less.[1]

I personally consume very little because it has such little value to me. There are quite a few like me for various reasons.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauc...
Link:
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/clearboard/

I skype frequently. To feel connected, simply having the camera imbedded in the monitor itself is enough to convince the other person that I'm looking at them in the eye.
Interesting features. My GitHub student discount with free private repos expires tomorrow, so I'll be finally migrating all my private repos to GitLab tonight.
There are mechanisms for policing (certainly in the UK) this but:

- Containers are MASSIVE. Seriously. You can fit hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of plug-sized widgets in a container.

- Millions of containers leave China every day.

- People lie about certification, provenance, component specs. Even if you do test one, the next 999,999 are probably all using shitty capacitors.

- There are many ports that don't all share data.

The only stuff that gets refused are where you have repeat offenders coming into the same port with the same dangerous stuff.

And yes, MPAA and other trademark bandits with all the cash can pay to police this stuff. It isn't fair... But I'm not sure the world would have the appetite for absorbing the costs in import tax. A testing container of plugs would push the price up way beyond $30 a unit and that's testing 1/1000.

Demanding certified manufacturing might be an option but that's expensive for China so they'll resist (or do a job equally shitty as the plugs they'd be supposed to police).
Dark wisdom
That's the thing, it doesn't feel premature, it just feels ridiculous.

When Apple ditched optical discs, it was because networks did it better. Maybe people were upset because not everything was covered yet, but that was clearly where it was going.

What's the equivalent for the headphone jack? There's no better place where things are heading. It's not obsolete or even moving towards eventually becoming obsolete.
Are you now implying that Nadim is a monster, not merely someone with whom you have a personal beef?
That's a theoretical study by physicists; it's a bit of a misleading headline, and anyway it's for eukaryotes, not bacteria, which are much smaller.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=linkedin%20microsoft&sort=byPo...
Anyone happen to have a suggested self-teaching path for Machine Learning? I.e. books and courses. I know that Andrew Ng's course is a great resource, but I know that I'm not ready to start it yet. I'm actually way behind on the mathematical pre-requisites, so recommendations for that would be greatly appreciated as well. I've never taken a statistics course, and never received any formal education for mathematics past trig. I know that I'm looking at a good 6 months to a year just to get caught up on the math alone.
Long URLs make it crash. Really. Just try and put in a very long URL...

https://github.com/riolet/longs/blob/master/longs.c#L238 looks like an example of a buffer overflow.

Etc.
Stressful City Life Causes Some Birds to Age Faster