skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a jury consultant (AMA) I take issue with some things in this article, the most important of which are:

1. It is generally accepted as true that the number of trials per year in the U.S. is shrinking (both criminal and civil). However, the data are spotty at best. Most of the data come from the National Center for State Courts, and their data are admittedly incomplete-- to the tune of no data on a number of states at all. Nor are any of the data particularly recent. My crunching of their data puts the decline at a mere ~1.8% per year, although it may well have accelerated since their last report. How much is unknown.

2. The focus on judges lamenting the decline of trials is on one hand commendable and on the other disingenuous. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of judges across the country do not like trying cases and put tremendous amounts of pressure on the parties to settle. These tactics range from straightforward admonishments to forcing the parties into endless mediation meetings and mandatory settlement conferences.

I am sensitive to the "piling on" of charges in criminal cases, which strikes me as a patently unfair means of getting multiple bites at the apple. For example, I helped defend a case involving a tragic killing where we succeeded in dodging a first degree murder conviction only to find that during sentencing, the defendant got an extra 20 years simply because the murder was carried out using a gun.
> small overseas market

That depends really. While Australia is a relatively small market, everyone here pays using paywave (contactless payments via credit/debit cards, 69% owned and 43% used in 2013!), and if a shop has a card terminal they support it. If it could be enabled on iPhones, they would get instant adoption by lots of people.

I can't see any specific numbers to compare right now, but I'd be interested to see some contactless payment comparison between the US and Oz for 2015.
so many of remember the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casino_(film)

How can you maximize before you get kicked out....you always get kicked out.
No, it seems like they are in the same position as myself.

They (and myself) are not using PyPy because PyPy does not support Python 3.5
Since legalese needs to accompany ads, what's to prevent blockers from blocking certain elements that contain it? Just serving ads from the same domain can't possibly be the only "solution" FB is relying on.
Credit card with a temporary battery life just doesn't cut it for me. Also, I bring my credit card in my running shorts pockets when running. Phone doesn't even come close to fitting, and even if it did would awkwardly flap around
When machine learning matters
Why is it just in 3D? 1D things making knots in 3D seems like it would have immediate analogs for m-dimensional things in n dimensions. Is that not the case? Is it not as rich an area of study or something?
Table tennis ahead of dressage/equestrian!?
Did you ever anything back from the intel or nvidia guys?
To cycle through all 2^219 possible values in a 219-bit counter would take a huge amount of energy.
Also bumped up to Python 2.7
Investigating the Influence of “Clickbait” News Headlines
> Providing simple access to the NFC antenna by banking applications would fundamentally diminish the high level of security Apple aims to have on our devices.

This is what I hate about Apple. I am fairly certain that the customers bought these devices -- so isn't it their customers' devices?

Apple wants to sell iPhones, yet keep complete control over it. Simple things such as disabling updates is not possible -- because it is not in Apple's interest.

They completely redefine what ownership means -- you "own" it, but Apple "controls" it.
So what's your point? Cats are less destructive than humans? Are you suggesting that we ignore anything that is less destructive than humans? Or that people should live in smaller houses to lower their impact?

Sounds like a pointless statement to me.

We should do something about the low-hanging fruit of cat owners not being responsible for their "pets".

I put pets in quotes because if you have no control over it and just let it roam everywhere killing native fauna, can you really call it your pet? Just because it comes to eat your food sometimes?
so the US government says Bitcoin is legit? good.

Forfeiture is a scummy thing by the feds, but I'll take a 2017 vette with those bitcoins.
In fact, it only learns relationships that are a linear combination of "similar to X" and "not similar to Y".
They just got a bunch of funding and added the CEO of InteraXon (brain science / mind control company) to their advisory board.

http://www.naborly.co/press/naborly-closes-angel-round-expan...
From what I understand (which could well be wrong), it's not uncommon for Americans to get literal pay cheques either.

Here we've had direct bank transfers for my entire adult life (15+ years).
Remarkably, the most progressive state in terms of payment for jury duty is Arizona. On unusually long trials jurors are compensated up to several hundred dollars a day.
Good. That's what we want from asset seizure auctions.
I'm suffering from FOMO !
https://sigopt.com/pricing

- Individual: $1,000/month

- Enterprise: Custom pricing

I am not a multi-million $ company, so I guess it's useless for me.
Is this the angel round (Crunchable) from June or did they raise again?
Perhaps but it's far easier to imagine it's the result of knee jerk over classification which is well understood to be a terrible problem through the organs of the body politic.
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It's about the feasibility of breaking 256-bit encryption keys with a naive brute force attack. The simplest component of a computer that performs this attack would be a 256-bit counter that iterates through all possible key values, however Schneier is saying that according to our current understanding of physics, even if you built the most efficient computer possible and powered it with the energy output of a supernova, it would only have enough energy to iterate through all the values of a 219-bit counter.
Text analysis of Trump's tweets
She was blind and deaf, but she still had enormous amounts of tactile information and the ability to physically interact with her environment. Moreover, those sensory elements were critical for her to finally be able to start learning language--she finally caught on that the signs another person was making in one hand represented the water being run over her other hand. And she didn't make that breakthrough until she was 7 years old, and only then began to learn with the persistent help of an instructor.[0]

I would say that Helen Keller's life argues that a intelligent machine must be able to have experiences and the capacity to associate experiences with language. The machine probably doesn't need all of the perceptual modalities that we have, as Helen Keller demonstrated, but it should probably have some similarities with our own so that there would be common ground for initiating communication about experiences. A machine with just a text in / text out interface has nothing in common with us.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller#Early_childhood_a...
I still have to worry about my wallet because I need my driver license, I need an amount of cash, and I need my corporate swipe card. I would also need my physical credit cards for accessing ATMs and the small minority of merchants that don't have a contactless terminal. (A few places still only have chip+pin; one of my favourite coffee shops is cash only business.)

My wallet is very slim; it would be more hassle having to think about whether I needed it or not, than to just have it on me at all times.
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I found it fairly easy to get a live person on the phone, but nearly impossible to convince them of their error.

I booked a room. Within seconds of each other, I got a confirmation, and a message from the host saying it was not available. The host claimed it was a glitch in the system, so I cancelled. However, Airbnb kept their service fee. The customer service agent told me that the reservation system knows when a rental is unavailable, and it is impossible to double book. I responded that I had proof that that wasn't true, and invited them to read the message the host sent me. They had no interest in doing that, and said they would open a support ticket. Never heard back. It's not worth my time to chase $15.
AFAIK, the term "knot" is only used for 1D things, and those are not very interesting in higher dimensions because you can always unravel them.

The more general field is called (Geometric) Topology, and includes all your m-dimensional objects in n-dimensional spaces.
Soup too.
To grasp semantics of human language I would think that AI would have to an understanding of the world from a human experience. So we would need to simulate human experience for an AI. Anyone know of any work on this?
That is not what "our devices" means, and you know it.

You just hate Apple for ideological reasons, and reach (very hard) for reasons to support that ideology.

Just remember what you said here next time a car company talks about "our cars".
How Uber’s Failure in Japan Can Help Startups Everywhere
Banks just want to create a cartel and oligopoly:- http://registers.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/1197...

Canada also has large penetration of contactless payments, as does UK and Europe. Australia is not unique in this sense. Every major Canadian bank has rolled out Apple Pay. Australia lacks in this area massively with every bank rolling out a shitty app.
I guess phase noise could result in broadening of the laser line width, which would increase the averaging time needed to achieve the desired precision.
CensusFail is no stranger to Performance Testing
The following is hand-wavey, but only because I am not equipped to give an actual explanation :]

Essentially, knots (i.e. 1D things embedded into some other space without crossing itself) are trivial in dimensions lower than three because we don't have enough space to make it interesting. A 1D thing that doesn't cross itself in the plane must be a circle, warped in some way, but it can be unwarped without ripping the plane.

On the other hand, knots in dimension higher than three are trivial because we have too much space to work with. I don't know the details here, but this is what I've been told.

It's kinda miraculous that knots in three dimensions have such interesting and rich structure. Hopefully an expert will come by and give a more detailed explanation, but in the meantime, hope this helps :]
Which market, the shady one or the really shady one? At what price? Do Bitcoin exchanges support all-or-none orders? What if the size of the order is a significant fraction of the order book depth? etc.
One down side of this bundling approach is whenever there is a change in the static files you have to rebuild and restart app server.
Some context: Australia is different because they regulate interchange fees. Credit card interchange averages 0.5% / max 0.8% [1] whereas in the U.S. it's in the range of 1.4-2.4% + 5-10 cents.[2] So that's part of the reason banks are more aggressive with their negotiation. There's less of a pie to slice up.

Some more context.. This is a game with 3 main actors: banks, merchants and consumers. Apple's strategy was a smart one vis-a-vis Bitcoin and other "low fee" efforts. While many payment startups have attempted to woo merchants to adopt them with the promise of a lower-fee system, Apple focused on wooing consumers and banks by fully supporting the current, higher-fee interchange system. Banks get their higher fees and consumers get their rewards. Merchants get some security benefits (not as vulnerable to data breaches), but they mainly face pressure from consumers to support it as an amenity. That's much more successful than something that's price-friendly to merchants but offers little advantage to consumers or banks.

Problem is in Australia, thanks to regulation there is no "high fee" system to shore up for banks. So they are not as amenable to Apple Pay as in other countries. They want their own system in place so they can get the full 0.5% and, moreover, look for other ways to make money with it.

[1] http://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/review-of-...

[2] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/Visa-USA-In...
I held same opinion as you, but then Apple Pay rolled out in Canada and I did a complete 180 after using it. It gives you freedom, as you never leave your home without your phone even while running.
Ownership Is Theft: Experiences Building an Embedded OS in Rust (2015) [pdf]
Yep etags is on my list of things to implement
It's for posting your own cool thing, so it could be. Doesn't hurt anything without though.
I'm Australian but I live in the US now. I go back fairly often. Last year I tried out PayPass for the first time.

Contactless payments as implemented in Australia is (IMHO) a disaster. Here are the problems:

- No opt out. You couldn't get an ATM card without it. This led to various guides on drilling a hole in the RF antenna to disable it. Last I heard the ACCC was intervening to force the big banks to give consumers an opt out. Not sure if this has happened yet.

- Report your card stolen and the thief can still keep using PayPass. Why is this even possible in the modern age of the Internet?

- The burden of proof on unauthorized transactions is on the consumer. I seem to recall reading something from the T&Cs that claimed you could be charged a fee for a "false" (ie denied) claim and you could only claim unauthorized transactions once or twice a year.

- In the case of disputed transactions the merchant is on the hook for it leading some to not accept it.

Basically contactless payments in Australia are an effort by the big banks to not be responsible for fraud. There's no real benefit to consumers.
Makes me want to plant a dandelion garden.
Thank you so much, exactly what I was looking for!
Yeah, Hamilton really gets into world building. Often to the detriment of actual storytelling -- which on its day, is actually quite good.

I'd still recommend these books though.

Edit to add: Hamilton also wrote The Void Trilogy, set in the same universe as The Commonwealth Saga. They're interesting, but less so than the Commonwealth books.
Where brothers == inbred cousins
Why do you think people would use their iPhones over the cards they already use, though? That's going backwards in terms of efficiency for the user, and it's not like the majority of people care about security.
Telomere dynamics are sufficiently different between mice and humans to be cautious about extracting meaning from mouse studies.

Birds have very much more different telomere dynamics.

So aside from that, average telomere length is typically measured in immune cells from a blood sample. Telomere length shortens with each cell division, and stem cells delivery new cells with long telomeres. So in immune cells you are going to get a fuzzy metric that depends on everything known to influence immune function filtered through a combination of immune cell replication and replacement rates. So stress, injury, exertion, diet, infection, age, etc, etc.

What you end up with is a statistical measure that can support any number of theories, being fairly distant from underlying processes, and influenced by many processes. There's a lot of variation in the literature, and many contradictory datasets and interpretations.

That again is entirely distinct from the evolutionary background that leads to a species having telomeres that start at a given length, and there are wide variations in that metric across species - just look at mice and humans.
Ask HN: How could the Australian digital census be architected to work?
What ideas do you have for how to architect a digital census that succeeds?

I wonder if perhaps it might have worked better using editable Adobe PDF forms.
“The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to information” (1991)
It looks like they are not interested in maximum profit indeed. Maybe they'd like to be very sure about where they are going? Or maybe it is some legal constraint, like a country cannot subscribe to a consumer exchange?
It is beautiful, and even if it weren't harded to misrepresent video download speeds, it's a significant step up from speedtest.net. And now there's no need to leave the command line, which is even better. That said, perhaps "making it slightly harder... to misrepresent... video download speed" is more like it.
By the way I obviously meant "similar to FastMail", sorry for the typo
Don't need to tell me, I'm an Aussie. :-)

I posted a link with AUS vs US contactless payment statistics from 2015 elsewhere in this discussion.
You have to respect a scientist who did her own mining of radioactive materials. Talk about getting your hands dirty.
Ego is as fast as it gets for tenplating, as it compiles the template to Go code. It probably doesn't matter that much performance wise in this case, I would've used it either way.
On average you only need to iterate half the values.
As someone coming from Canada to Australia, and who held the same viewpoint; you just need to experience Apply Pay. Ozland seriously sucks now when compared to Canada for me regarding NFC payments. Idiots are trying to create a cartel here.
Infact someone has run word2vec on the Voynich manuscript: http://blog.christianperone.com/2016/01/voynich-manuscript-w... (web archive while it's down: http://web.archive.org/web/20160205003817/http://blog.christ...) Such methods could someday completely decode the thing, but for now they just show the relationships between words and different clusters of words, not their meaning.

Of course we have no idea how the Voynich manuscript is encrypted (which would make the assumptions of word2vec wrong), or if it even has any meaning at all. And it's an incredibly small dataset compared to modern text corpuses, so there is probably significant uncertainty and overfitting. And other problems like inconsistent spellings, many errors in transcriptions, etc. But in principle this is a good strategy.

>how would a person do if they were locked in a room with lots of books written in a language unknown to them?

If you spent all day reading them, for years, and you somehow didn't get bored and kept at it, eventually you would start to see the patterns. You would learn how "slithy toves" are related to "brillig", even if you have no idea how that would translate to English. Study it long enough, and you may even be able to produce text in that language, indistinguishable from the real text. You may be able to predict the next word in a sentence, and identify mistakes, etc. Perhaps carry out a conversation in that language.

And I think eventually you would understand what the words mean, by comparing the patterns to those found in English. Once you have guesses for translations of just a few words, you can translate the rest. Because you know the relationships between words, and so knowing one word constrains the possibilities of what the other words can be.

If the translation it produces is nonsense, the words you guessed must have been wrong, and you can try again with other words. Eventually you will find a translation that isn't nonsense, and there you go. This would be very difficult for humans, because the number of hypotheses to test is so large, and analyzing text takes forever. Computers can do it at lightspeed though.
I'm saying my coins were mined and only represent a solution to a vey specific problem.

For someone to claim that the numbers I hold represent something else, is an error.
List of all 27 seasons of How It's Made episodes
Most definitely, if you want the compiled template loaded for the life of the application, at least. The documentation for template.Must says it is intended to be used exactly like that. If you were in a regular code block, you would check the error and handle it more gracefully.
Yep, that was an awesome episode for what it was, and the novel that served as a sequel was great as well.

Unfortunately the version of a Dyson sphere depicted in both is completely untenable, according to Freeman Dyson himself. He reportedly enjoyed the episode as "a piece of cinema" but denounced the science involved as 100% fiction and not possible. As others have said, perhaps building something like that around a dwarf star would be within the realm of possibility, but you still have issues such as radiation, constant daylight, gravity, and drift (the sphere would eventually drift into the star since it's not actually orbiting and is much more massive than even a large planet).

Still, it's a really cool idea and a fun thought experiment.
I typically export mail regularly. In my case, I store them in a DEVONthink Pro Office database as that supports directly importing from Apple's Mail.app, has good search, and good cross-referencing support.

I really wish I followed this practice sooner as there's mail from the 90s I wish I still had. I've used e-mail continuously since 1991 so it would be a lot of mail. Disk space is the main reason why I didn't do it sooner.
If you can build a Dyson sphere, you can probably modify a star; reduce and sequester its mass, for instance, so that you can use its energy more efficiently over a longer term. And a star isn't necessarily the most efficient way to burn matter (think "heating your home with a forest fire" when you could have a nice well-designed furnace instead).
The banks are the ones that wear any fraud, all they're asking is to use the NFC to communicate.

It's the equivalent of apple charging you to browse the web, and forcing you to use their browser in the name of 'security'! This is rent-seeking at it's finest.
On a related note, is anyone familiar with the blank segments on ITAR? I have been puzzling over what they could be reserved for for a few years now.
By floating in it would seem.
I wonder if we live next to the same guy :)
Seriously though, I think it's just a hobby and a way to remain active and valuable. Definitely helps the property values...
GCP Preemptible VMs now up to 33% cheaper
Nice. I named our company after the Matrioshka brain in a roundabout way (http://1026labs.com, 10^26 being the wattage of our sun) but we haven't called anything computronium yet.

Edit: We're on the way... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/25/semiconductor_indust...
People are speculating about alien megastructures around Tabby's star. That's why.
Additionally, I'd be curious if it's 26% of users or traffic, because I expect the two figures are rather different.
when I say "positive statement" I mean in the positive/normative sense.
Are blind or deaf people not intelligent?

But if you must pretend to be sighted and hearing, there are many descriptions of green, of dogs barking, of motors, etc, scattered through the many books written in English (and other languages.)

Are these descriptions perfect? Maybe not. But they are sufficient to mimic or communicate with humans through text. It's sufficient to beat a Turing test, to answer questions intelligently, to write books and novels, and political arguments, etc. If that's not AGI, I don't know what is.
> Look at word2vec. By using simple dimensionality reduction on the frequency that words that occur near to each other in news articles, it can learn really interesting things about the meaning of words

doesn't that depend on the syntax of a language? my guess is that it would not work for a language that has a more flexible word order than English; so it wouldn't quite work for such languages as Russian, Turkish and Finnish (and other languages).
Fewer things to carry. It may not work for everyone, but it's one very practical reason.
This means that the semantics of the language is rooted in subjective states. Restated, this means humans "understand" language because of humans' emotions. Computers may "understand" language too, but it surely will not be due to the subjective states as it is with humans. If we define AI as a computer that must "understand" language the same way as humans do, then by definition, AI is not possible.