skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is evidence that language is fairly smooth though. For example, we can extract e.g. the gender vector from a word embedding space that is learned by a recurrent neural network. That seems to hint at the possibility that words, sentences and concepts live in smooth, high-dimensional manifold that makes them learnable for us in the first place (because in that case they can be learned by small local improvements which seems to be required for biological plausibility). That is also the reason why we have often many words for the same or similar meanings and, conversely, why formal grammars have failed at modeling language.

Arguing from the other direction, neural networks have also already proven to deal with very sharp features. For example the value and policy networks in AlphaGo are able to pick up on subtle changes in the game position. The changes from the placement of single stones can be vast in Go and by no means this is only solved by the Monte Carlo tree search. Without MCTS, AlphaGo still wins in ~80% of the time against the best hand-crafted Go program. The value and policy networks have pretty much evolved a bit of boolean logic, simply from the gradient from the smoothness that results from averaging over a lot of training data.

I have a pet theory that the discovery of sharp features and boolean programs might heavily rely on noise. If the error surface becomes too discrete, we basically need to backup to pure random optimization (i.e. trying any direction by random chance and keep it, if it is better). That allows us to skip down the energy surface even without the presence of a gradient. Of course, such noise can also lead to forgetting, but it just seems that elsewhere the gradient will be non-zero again, so any mistakes will be correct by more learning (or it simply leads to further improvement if the step was into the right direction). Surely, our episodic memory helps in the absence of gradient information as well. If we encounter a complex, previously unknown Go strategy, for example, it will likely not smoothly improve all our Go playing abilities by a small amount. Instead, we store a discrete chaining of states and actions as an episodic memory which allows us to reuse that knowledge simply by recalling it at a later point in time.
Part of the way the legal system deals with fraud is by recovering money (where possible). With bitcoin, unless the destination wallet can be obtained, that is not possible.

With cash, you seize the cash. Bank accounts can be frozen, Credit card transactions canceled, wire transfers flagged (http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/01/29/464859624/episo...).
FBI chief Comey: “We have never had absolute privacy”
Interestingly the example of the most offensive tweet (and the only specific tweet as far as I can tell) featured an avatar from a western cartoon. Could some sort of cognitive bias be at work here?
I don't totally understand this view. Government doesn't have a right to ephemeral conversations that happen in physical space between two people. We aren't required to record them in case some law enforcement officer might request them.

Why is online discourse different? Just because the bits still exist in some sense, why does that mean they need to be accessible?
Kinda. You can't do a regular double spend, where you spend the same currency twice (And thus get twice the value out of it, kinda). You could spend the coins in ETH, and then spend the coins in ETC, two different currencies worth different amounts.

The catch is that there is no guarantee you come out ahead, like there would normally be with a double spend. The fork resulted in a price drop (That has now somewhat recovered), and ETC is not worth nearly as much as ETH (About a 10:1 ratio). So ETC+ETH is really not worth much more then ETH was originally before the fork, if it is at all - even if you spend both, you probably didn't make any money on the fork itself.
Can imagine this will be impossible to force with the rise of decentralized exchanges for BTC and ETH like Bitsquare and EtherEx. But still...

"The bill would prohibit a person from engaging in the digital currency business without enrolling in the program and would prohibit the conduct of digital currency business through an unenrolled agent. The bill would require a person seeking enrollment to pay a nonrefundable fee of up to $5,000... The bill would also require the person to provide fingerprints and would authorize the commissioner to deliver the fingerprints to law enforcement agencies."

Fuck this.
Check this out - you miss out on the ambience until you actually see it in action - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DTpQ4Kk2wA
Agreed. "Somewhat underdocumented" for, in places, some very large values of somewhat.
Is this just a problem when subscribing to calendars published through Google? In other words, if I host an iCal calendar on my own server, will subscribers see changes immediately when they refresh their Google Calendar client?
> But here they down vote you for knowing real Statistics.

That is quite literally a No True Scotsman argument.

GP was likely downvoted since the Ctrl-F meme adds nothing to the discussion.
Any idea where I can find a copy of this?
3d printing is future of manufacturing but can it work in Afrika?
In Europe, you can try :
https://www.joylent.eu/
https://www.joylent.eu/products/wake-up-joylent
And they also sale bars now!

There are other competitor like Queal or Huel
With cash, unless the wallet in which it resides can be obtained, that is not possible. I fail to see the difference.
System Observability: How to Make Your Production Environment Great Again
Agree whole heartedly.

When I visit Chicago, I get the distinct sense that things were done deliberately, with beautiful architecture to boot.

I suspect it has to do with the fact that the city burned down and they got a redo - twice.
More like if, at a free event where donations were voluntary, the staff all complained loudly about people who didn't donate.
I had two experiences bouncing between Philadelphia and Delaware. In Philadelphia for some reason I got rather slow speeds, usually below 8Mbs. In addition I received a number of remarks about inability to hear me, poor quality etc. Delaware oddly was the opposite 15Mbs down, and no complaints about call quality. I had been a TMobile cusotmer for the past several years, and it's below that but the price was good.

The pay as you go usage was really good. I really only used my data in Delaware. I often ended up about 30$ a month or so. There were a couple of occasions where it would If it weren't for the call quality I would have stayed but...

I had heard some complaints about call reception for Nexus 5X. I didn't get to try it on another carrier. My phone was knocked out of my hand at a bus stop, and the screen cracked. I would say go for it. There are good promotions for the Nexus phones if you need one with project fi activation.
Rio Olympics 2016 – Live,
Good Words Gone Bad
Perhaps even inherently opposite goals. Google, Facebook, et al make it their business to peel away your privacy and know everything about you.
This seems to be the new strategy after Free Basics [0] failed?

[0] https://info.internet.org/en/story/free-basics-from-internet...
I see no mention of audio on your Kickstarter page or amongst these comments. Does the Superbook have audio support or does it use my phone for that?
I know that Node.js is the hype but the site was developed by consultants and has plenty of bugs in there that needs solving .. I thought with my JS knowledge that it would be easy to evolve but the reality is different,
it is one big mess of dependencies that is difficult to debug if you did not make it yourself ...

You will see that PHP (LAMP)projects are easier to sell than projects in more exotic stacks

I prefer to have all my projects in the same language -> PHP and i all move them to Google APP engine to keep maintenance to the lowest levels

It has nothing to do with performance
i prefer to build on technology that I master
This argument is like saying that if you build a castle to protect yourself from the attacker, you are responsible for the enemy's construction of trebuchets that siege the castle. Yeah, the castle builders are at fault. Nevermind that they protect so many innocent with their work.

Of course we need political involvement, but we also need encryption everywhere, literally everywhere.
But it's the cost of doing business for many businesses. Would you consider an air conditioned mall that throws people out if they don't shop in any of the stores "reasonable"?
The issue in my opinion is that the Ethereum maintainers actively helped create a hard fork to steal Ether from the so-called "hacker". This crosses a line.

Sadly, the DAO had major bugs and the time to do something about them was before it launched.

It's not the end of the world, though it does place Ethereum in the category of "easily corruptible human organizations" which makes it largely ineffective for the sorts of things that made it most exciting.

Ethereum may become more distributed which would make this sort of consensus more difficult to achieve, or it may be replaced by something that has a more corruption-resistant governance structure.

The basic idea underlying the holocaust, the Iraq war, and pretty much any human atrocity is that the ends justify the means. This is exactly the argument that hard forkers made. But, much like the Iraq war, the president should not have ever had the sole discretion to launch a war, nor should such a small number of interested people have the ability to launch a hard fork.

Apologies for the hyperbole, but I think it's helpful to illustrate the core issue.
P&G to Scale Back Targeted Facebook Ads
This is a good summary paper on the database internals and major architectural decisions: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/fntdb07-architecture.pdf
Just deactivate first and forget about it. Your life does not cease to exist because you are not on Facebook anymore. If there are people out there who genuinely care for you, they'll know how to get a hold of you. You can then share your life with them, if you care for them. The world has existed like this for thousands of years.
Nobody involved wants to admit that's the case. It's pretty ridiculous.
Did everybody just discover the TUI in 2016 or something?

Not being flippant, just wondering because there've been a ton of links about it lately.
While it's true that an auto insurance company doesn't profit off car crashes... if people _never_ had car crashes, we might not need auto insurance companies.
Why would you fire your Sales team?
Deep Compression: 3 Ways to Compress a Neural Network
Not anymore......now that utf-8 is spreading everywhere, APL is ready for a comeback! Most editors (Eclipse, Emacs, VI, etc) can handle the characters, and most OSes can handle different keymappings, so no need to buy a new keyboard.

Of course, you'll still have to learn confusing new characters.
Comments like the parent is why our teachers are undervalued. In my younger years, my roommate was a high school math teacher. And the soccer coach. He traveled a lot with the team and drove the bus, stayed late for practices, went in early to to supervise for safety...At nights when he comes home, he comes home tired, passes out, wakes up and grades papers.
Why limit your entropy like that? I just use pwgen:

> pwgen -s 64 1 | xsel -b

aepei5hooNu2Zaic6EQueeCiish7eighaibahwaejohchaizo0zei0eiwongaeza
If the blob of knowledge consists of the weights of some neural network and if this blob is public... Then an attacker could easily perform imperceptible perturbation to the input in order to make the network believe that the yogurt is an Eiffel tower or vice versa. (Can't find the related publications right now but it appeared several times on hn before).

So if you don't want the system to be gameable, such public blobs of weights may need to be avoided.
Inside the Fox News Bunker
The first problem is common to all languages.

Do you think C had any major meaning outside UNIX, before it got largely adopted in the industry?

It was just yet another language with dialects that had some kind of compatibility, with Small-C being the most used one.

For the second point, also not an issue unless the language doesn't support FFI.

The beauty of runtimes, instead of bare bones C, is that they can be tuned to make the best of each OS APIs, while keeping the code portable.

This is nothing new, it was quite common outside AT&T.
I think smooth running is easier on 2 legs vs 4. 2 legged animals don't have a gait per say. Gait is the way 4 legged animals coordinate their steps.... we just evenly alternate.
Getting sick of this argument. Just look around you. Tons of people do tons of things all the time even though they don't get paid or don't need the money, or could get by on less.

If a minimal UBI (say, $700/month, similar to today's SSI in the US) is enough in your view to deter people from seeking employment, then how on earth is it that so many people today make more than that, even though they didn't need that much? (You can change the amount around and rerun the thought experiment. Whatever the amount of UBI would be, the existence of many people currently willingly working for more than that amount is proof that people will still strive to make more than UBI)

Enough with this tired argument, think a little before repeating it or at least state a version that explains why somehow we have people today who willingly work for more than the bare minimum
Statisticians who hate probabilistic models might want to find another line of work. Like, say, philosophy.

You use the phrase "involving Gaussians and stuff" to "clarify," and you ask others for rigor? Physician, heal thyself! And please don't speak for statisticians, they are a peculiar bunch. Ask the same question of 2 statisticians and you may well end up with 3 answers.
Advanced CSS: Sass Maps to UI Components
Government doesn't have a right to meticulous transcriptions of every verbal conversation you've ever had. But, it does have a right to do its utmost to figure out what was said. It has a right to search your file cabinet, or tap your phone, or tail you with a detective, with a warrant of course.
Ironically, many of them used that same answer as a justification for why a hard fork of Ethereum was reasonable... But clearly if there had been many investments and some had gone well and others poorly, the idea that it was a "practice round" and should be reversed would have been met with laughter.
The Only Way That Uber Loses – how free transportation changes the game
A Comprehensive Study on the Energy Efficiency of Java Thread-Safe Collections [pdf]
Soylent explains all the missing over 40yo engineers
and there is a thing in Python called __future__ so you don't need to do this:

https://github.com/ariestiyansyah/django-secret-key/blob/mas...

Read more: https://docs.python.org/2/library/__future__.html
How to scrape Amazon.com
Have you tried leaner, less obtrusive, ads? Something like straight simple text?
How can filter tech still suck so bad? My kids can't even use their chat without looking they speak in hash tags.

Did they build this in house?
This is a fringe opinion, but I personally wish the U.S. would make all forms of hacking and digital surveillance totally legal. Yes, legal, with no "I".

I think this would drastically change the technology landscape, putting more impetus on vendors to provide (and prove) protections such as encryption, and an impetus on users to select the vendors who are the best at doing so.

Hacking laws are a crutch that attempt to patch insecure systems with law enforcement. And they risk being interpreted incorrectly--see interpretation of CFAA in the Aaron Swartz case, where downloading files could have meant 35 years in prison.

I say let the CPUs interpret the bits, not the politicians. They cannot keep up with changes in technology, will make many wrong decisions, and are susceptible to corruption.

In a world where hacking is legal, encrypting everything would be the right thing to do. It would be the only way to stop the government from spying on us, and the only way for them to stop us from spying on them.
I am getting the feeling this is not a real project but a joke/critique
> You're in fact advocating no private life. I strongly disagree that this position would be good for society.

No, I'm not advocating for anything per se, I'm just bringing up opposite points of view. I don't have an easy answer either.
Second, no privacy is what has been the standard since governments started. There has been no technology that has been able to make some aspect of reality 100% private, other than the decay of physical objects over time, essentially erasing the evidence.

The fact that we can have permanent 100% private aspects of life is a brand new thing, and thus must be discussed in that manner. That's why I brought up the extreme of anarcho-capitalism - not to speak against it but as a counterpoint to what we have now/what has been.
This sounds like "half of the code I see is below average".

Good code is rare because goodness of code is a relative measure against other code.
For starters, it's not even clear if this constitutes theft or just a clever hack in a system that originally claimed "code = law". IIRC, the DAO hacker anonymously published a statement claiming that all the ETH was rightfully his, and any attempts to do otherwise would be met with lawyers.
To be fair to joantune, I don't think they intended to imply that only "real life" uses were interesting. I think they were genuinely inquiring about if it had "real life" uses, or if it was an educational exercise.
At that point I'm really considering pulling my own feed and displaying in my own client.
How do all of these compare?
> “Facebook is ad-supported. Ads are a part of the Facebook experience; they’re not a tack on,” said Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of engineering for advertising and pages.

I get the point that Facebook is ad-supported. But to spin that as "ads are a part of the Facebook experience" is like saying that 'throwing up is part of a rollercoaster ride experience' (please make a better analogy if you will).

I don't use the FB apps because apps are more intrusive with respect to the information collected and don't give me adequate control. Instead, I use the FB site from a desktop browser with an ad blocker to have a cleaner experience. And I know it really is clean because I do try to turn off the ad blocker every once in a while to see how crappy it can be.

The FB experience on the desktop is terrible with ads. I don't want to see "earn so much in a day", "play poker and make money" and all kinds of nonsense on the right. These ads are in addition to the sponsored stories and stuff that get pushed into the news feed. I don't want to really tell Facebook what ads I like and what my interests are so that I can be fooled by some brand or seller into paying more, part of which would fuel Facebook ads even more.

For a long time, people who've been reading about the web and online advertisements have known about banner blindness. [1][2] For some strange reason, those who want to serve ads ignore this or don't want to acknowledge this.

Facebook's ads on the desktop are easily ignored by banner blindness, but I don't want to even get those downloaded and waste my bandwidth or Internet traffic limit. While Facebook claimed a big victory with "native ads" on mobile, I'd be willing to bet that many users on mobile have learned banner blindness to these too and just quickly scroll past these ads or sponsored stories inserted into news feeds. They're very easy to spot and take perhaps a few hundred milliseconds for the brain to recognize and act on. For the advertisers paying for impressions, this is a bad deal because it's not valuable at all. But of course, Facebook can make (false) claims that this is better than sidebar ads.

People generally do not like ads on any medium because they waste people's time and keep them from the content they're interested in. People do not want to get targeted ads if they know that all their actions are being tracked and be given the euphemism of "a better experience" with it. It doesn't matter how you spin it or what excuses you make for shoving ads into a user's experience. Given a chance, people will skip ads in every communication medium.

The only ads people enjoy are the ones that are really thoughtful or funny or move them in some way to make the world a better place. These are really few and far between, and even they have a limit to the number of times people will put up with or want to see and share. The rest of the ads are just examples in wasting money and human thought.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness

[2]: http://nngroup.com/articles/banner-blindness-old-and-new-fin...
ffwd said that you needed to be an anarcho-capitalist to want absolute privacy. To have a "proper society" (one where government can arrest murderers, say), you have to have some transparency. (Because if I'm a murderer, and I do the murder in the privacy of my own home, and there is absolute privacy, the government can't ever find out, much less prove, that I did it.)

For the proper functioning of government for the legitimate benefit of society, there is a balance between privacy and transparency. The government is going beyond that balance, seeking more transparency. The anarchists go the opposite direction, seeking more (preferably total) privacy. Neither is in the public interest.
I agree, the legal system doesn't do well when it comes to recovering cash from entities that can hide it. You can get a legal judgment against a company, but if it's fly-by-night, it winds up being a worthless piece of paper, and can become very difficult to recover.
I got inspired to make this hough transform visualizer from a few examples I saw online, check it out! https://liquiddandruff.github.io/hough-transform-visualizer/
> Before crypto, basically all guarantees where conditional on a judge's say so.

Sadly, they weren't.

> With crypto this changes.

Actually, with crypto it is much harder to claim that a judge's authorization isn't required to even try to subvert the privacy intent.

> There is no way to deal with fraud or mistaken tranfers in bitcoin.

There's no way because legally the system (for the most part) considers it outside the scope of fraud laws.

> That loss of intervention hurts, and we gotta think about it.

TLS doesn't create a real loss of intervention. It requires that the intervention be far more explicit and/or targeted.
> no belief in statistics required

Yes, but now you have a statistical assumption: that your structural model holds.

To make use of the Fritsch-Waugh-Lovell theorem, you must test that your orthogonality assumption holds using statistics :)
Companies won't give you the 20% pay bump if you approached them yourself.

Its a good deal for the company because they outsource the risk of hiring a recruiter fulltime and not finding a candidate.

Some recruiting agencies make a lot of money but many go under. Companies pay a recruiting agency only if the agency found them the candidate. With lots of agencies competing, the fee is not certain. The good sourcers/recruiters definitely find it more profitable to work on their own.
My son plays Roblox and this is definitely a big issue. I basically had to turn off his filter so he could play the game. Otherwise, the chat looks like this:

Player1: "Can you promote me?"
Player1: "Did you see that?"

Player2: "Yeah, just send me a message"
Player2: "Did you see that?"

Player1: "Thanks!"
Player1: "Did you see that?"

Pretty frustrating, even for a parent. Seems like their filtering technology is just a total piece of junk.
pfSense is good for this; OpenVPN is invariably inconvenient as hell to set up and use, but pfSense's implementation (along with the "client export" plugin that gives you what you need to set up devices, and unaccountably isn't part of the OOTB distribution) minimizes this inconvenience as well as anything I've ever seen - it's still inconvenient as hell, but somewhat less so than doing everything by hand.