skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll modify my statement, since "good science" has two meanings. ISS has produced competently done science (one definition of "good"), but at a high prices. The same amount of money spent either on the ground, or on unmanned space science missions, would have given more science for the dollar.

But a lot of those experiments are "let's see what X does ... in space!", or rather, "in microgravity!." When all you have is a hammer, then you will do a lot of hammer science. But it's not that transferable, except in the most vague of terms - which that document does over and over.

To quantify it, that's 1052 pages of summaries across 11 years. And not all of them are science. Call it 95 pages of summaries per year. BTW, it's about 550 individual items, so 50 per year.

ISS cost, what, $100-$150 billion over 20 years, or 5-7 billion/year? The NIH budget is $32 billion/year, which goes to 50,000 grants. That's about 6x larger. In terms of science per dollar, I'm pretty sure an equivalent summary of the NIH-funded research would exceed 6x95 = ~600 pages.

The other definition of "good" is "better than average". For example, if microgravity gave a significantly better to make protein crystals for x-ray analysis, then that would be great science. But in practice, no, it isn't. There are only a handful of crystallization experiments in those 11 years of experiments, and one of the things we've found out is that ultra-centrifuges are more useful than microgravity. A lot cheaper too.

The quality of the science is about average for the fields I'm used to, and the cost is much higher. That's why I say "there hasn't been much good science" out of the ISS.
This is an interesting area and the most important recent change is the opening of the data. More and more municipalities provide web services where you can download high-quality imagery, e.g. have a look at https://www.wien.gv.at/ma41datenviewer/public/ in the left menu you can select "Luftaufnahmen" (aerial imagery) or DOM (Digitales Oberflaechenmodell == Digital Surface Model) and the resolution is quite high (unfortunately the imagery is watermark-raped, but most training methods are robust against that kind of errors). One might think aerial imagery is not a problem, as we have Google Maps, Bing, etc., but you reach there (free) API limits quite fast, if the goal is to get bulk data to train classifiers.

In particular laser data is a game changer and makes building footprint detection much simpler (you can make pretty training masks from the provided vector layers and train e.g. a NN for segmentation). Current state-of-the art in building and street detection from photos only is around 85% to 95%, which is quite high, but a bit too low for fully automatic usage in e.g. urban development or environmental engineering. In particular there are images where it is nearly impossible to distinguish the roof from the nearby place, if the roof is not enclosed by a green area or a garden.

At the moment classifications/segmentations are polished by humans (and providing accurate (satellite or aerial) imagery classification is a big business), but DSM data is so good, that it makes fully automatic approaches feasible and I would say one could reach ~99% there.
Adblock Plus and Facebook continue to square off, suggests FTC could even step in
I've wanted to do this, but haven't put in the work yet.
k_nucleotide.rs implements it's own hash table, and that is no longer accepted: k-nucleotide programs that do that have been removed.

Hence --

k-nucleotide

source	secs	KB	gz	cpu	cpu load
No program	contribute your program

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/rust.html
It's silly to say "hedge funds aren't working out so well right now" because this has always been the case.

Additionally, there are a lot of nuances of hedge funds that are being missed in the comments. Hedge funds can do things on a small scale with hundreds of millions of dollars that would never scale to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and therefore have opportunities to make money that an individual investing into a publicly available fund wouldn't.

Take parking lots in China, for example. A hedge fund can say "hey these are really under priced compared to what they might be in 10 years" and run lots of data to show the most under-priced lots. They can spend $50 million dollars on these lots and make ridiculous returns at relatively little risk. However, this same strategy wouldn't work with millions of investors cumulatively investing trillions of dollars. There aren't enough parking lots to go around.

Also, hedge funds are not black boxes. They communicate to their investors what their strategies are and their feedback on how strategies are progressing. Most investors can even say "Hey I want you to use my funds mostly on X" even if your returns are based on the entire fund's portfolio.
Cybergypsies by Inndra Sinha (a booker prize shortlisted author) is a good snapshot of the UK scene.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cybergypsies-Indra-Sinha/dp/1416525...

I even get a shout out under my handle in the dedication
Yeah, agreed. CoreOS + cloud-init could remove necessity to do OS-level setup.
A few years ago there was an online story about the US plans for Moscow - which apparently even Dick Cheney was shocked by, because the idea was to destroy it with hundreds of warheads.

I seem to remember 600 or so.

Obviously no one has any idea what that would do because it's never been tested. But I'd guess it would remove absolutely all trace of the city and leave only a glassy layer of bedrock, which might take a few centuries to cool.

US and Russian cities have significant missile defence systems, so I guess the rationale is to make sure that at least some warheads get through.

If that's the plan for the biggest capital cities on both sides, details become academic.
On their website is a banner: "Cancel netflix!". I click on it, and I'm told I should cancel netflix because they put DRM on their HTML5 delivery of movies.

Now look, Im a self-professed pirate. I say screw most DRM and I dont recognize IP law. However, I totally disagree that I should "cancel netflix". What are they supposed to do ? Deliver all their movies DRM-free and see them immediately get copied to torrent sites ? Or else, what , not use HTML5 and require STB/smart tv support to use their product (which ALL have DRM, btw ) ?

Netflix is the good guy, they are pioneers in electronic content delivery. They are fighting to break the monopoly of the movie industry while having to work with them to get content. And they are producing their own content. All for a very reasonable rate.

I will absolutely NOT cancel netflix because they support DRM. What a ridiculous thing to suggest.
Apple Stores Rebrand
A warrant grants the holder specific exceptions. In the case of not having a warrant I'm not aware of any police-specific exceptions - there are general exceptions ("lawful excuse"), and qualified immunity would also apply provided they didn't violate clearly established law. IANAL.
<China has the highest percentage of internet users (21.97%), followed by the U.S. (9.58%) and India (8.33%)>

This seems less than credible to me. Less than 10% for the U.S.?
I propose a new term: Consultancy Driven Development. It goes like this:

- If it's too easy to set up, nobody will hire us to make it work.

- Implement a kickass setup dirt cheap for some big-name company, so we can claim they use it in production. Yeah we tweaked it so it bears little resemblance to the original product, and only fits an incredibly narrow use case, but nobody stands to benefit from blogging about that.

- Better ship with a configuration file that isn't production ready.

- Did I say one? Better have three configuration files, each duplicated in distribution-dependent directories (in some cases), needing manual sync between servers to prevent catastrophic data loss.

- Remember not to publish the program that checks for errors in configuration; half of our income would disappear.

- Benchmark with a configuration file that nobody would use in production, but looks really impressive when taken out of context.

- People want transactions, remember to claim support (and if you must, explain somewhere in the fine print that a transaction can only span a single operation on exactly one document, and btw. is precisely none of A, C, I or D).

- Somewhere on the front page, it should say how we can support petabytes of data (and it performs very well, as long as you write all your data in one batch, never modify it, keep it all in memory, and turn off persistence).

- Never give away answers online. Answer every question about configuration with "it depends".

- Don't release a new version without renaming a few configuration options. Be "backwards compatible" by ignoring unknown, obsolete and misspelled options.
NW.js supports running Chrome Apps directly: https://nwjs.io﻿

We'll continue supporting it and Chrome App developers can redistribute their apps after packaging with NW.js
>how much QA should they do to verify the millions of different hardware and software combinations out there won't have some edge case behavior?

As much as they used to do. They cut down on QA after Windows 7 (see laying off test engineers and laying the burden onto the primary development engineers)
You're talking about markets in a different sense. You're talking about the 'force-of-nature' market: the stark fact that positive-sum transactions can be made.

stuaxos is talking about markets in situ, or reality. And in that sense of markets, there is no "free" market in the entire world. As Ha-Joon Chang points out, immigration control has a far bigger effect on wages than minimum wage, and if we (I'm in the USA) had a maximally free market we would also have open borders. There are many ways that "free" markets are not socially desirable.
Wow. Tough room (like I'm the only one who thought that...).
To be fair, the title wasn't "New study proves that..." or even "Scientists say...". It was very clear that this a blog post written by a dude sharing his own experiences and anecdotes. Not some "proof" that life is better with less hours.
"Level 4: The vehicle performs all safety-critical functions for the entire trip, with the driver not expected to control the vehicle at any time."

You can get on a bus that does that now in Helsinki. Admittedly they are slow and on set routes but even so they're there.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/18/technology/self-driving-bus-...
This is a great starting point. We're been running Kubernetes in production alongside an OpenStack for a while and charm'd up the deployment: https://jujucharms.com/kubernetes-core. The majority of the information here (and more) seems to already be encapsulated: `juju deploy kubernetes-core`. Since we need things like logging and monitoring, we bolted the elastic stack on the side and called it observable kubernetes: `juju deploy observable-kubernetes`.

While one-liners are typically pretty limited, the charms come with quite a few knobs to help tweak for deployments.

http://www.jorgecastro.org/2016/07/29/ubuntu-kubernetes-v1-d...

There's still room to improve, but we've been happy with the cluster so far. Considering Juju and charms are open source. Eitherway, great guide for those getting started.
> By socializing healthcare, we destroy its efficiency and drive up prices.

The US has one of the least socialized and least efficient healthcare systems in the OECD, so I'm quite skeptical about that.
Not so long ago Uber had never once successfully provided a taxi ride, but they figured that out.
BunsenLabs: lean and mean distro, continuation of CrunchBang
I know a LOT of people who prefer Uber to self-driving. Expect that to be an emergent behavior once the cost of the driver is subtracted.
Yeah, you did in arguing that just because some Murders happen doesn't negate the utility of a law, but you've conflated Copyright which is a Civil matter in trying to discuss freedoms in a grand philosophical sense. I see you and I view the practical implementation of Copyright in the modern era from different perspectives. As in, you work from the premise that Copyright is sufficient in and of itself without the DMCA & DRM, and I patently believe that they were a response to Copyright being exposed as insufficient when something like basic Blu-Ray encoding was broken in seven (7) days. Discounting the dark-side capabilities of technology is, apparently, inherent in your premise. On this we are not in agreement.
Easy, each transistor represents a tube. QED
I had nothing but problems with windows 10 and its privacy violations. So I disabled all of them I could learn about and figured I would live with it. Then patch Tuesday came around and it undid a bunch of it. Eventually Cortania couldn't be disabled, and my bluetooth mouse stopped working. So I booted into Fedora to see if my bluetooth hardware had failed - nope - everything worked fine; so I just installed it and never looked back. Linux isn't perfect, but it also isn't spyware.
If artificially low water costs (not to mention widespread use of illegal, sub-market rate labor) are deflating the costs, then that impacts the calculus to some degree, would you agree?
Nope. They all include (many, many) things which the copyright holders will actively fight over.
Have you tried to juju to set up things like hdfs and hadoop and the things that plug into it?
New law in Massachusetts attempts to raise IT pay for women
Granted, I've been out of the "warez scene" for going on 20 years but the "better clubs" didn't have ratios. For the "public" or your average person that was turned on to a site by their buddy or something, yeah. But once you were really "in", you didn't have to do anything. You just took what you wanted -- even better if you can turn around and upload it elsewhere.

I started out running BBS systems but, like everyone, eventually moved to the Internet where I ran several "semi-private" dedicated servers with lots of storage on "fast" (at the time) connections. Most of them were fully open to those in certain groups but there were a couple that were pretty easy to get an account on, albeit with a ratio requirement. A lot of those accounts tended to get banned pretty quickly, however, as the users would upload miscellaneous crap just so that they could download and nobody wanted to really "monitor" or "evaluate" the stuff in /incoming from the new users.

Thanks for taking me back to my younger days. :)
I doubt you'll get hired as a manager; you need to get promoted instead. So go get a job at a large company as an engineer and spend at least six months kicking ass. The ideal company is one with some disfunction and churn -- new hires and such. Then you need to go either out or up with a bang.

Find some major problems with the software development and complain about them strongly to upper management and offer a solution.

Learn to communicate with busy people. Use short emails. Lead with the most important point in verbal and written communication. Learn to tailor your communication to your audiance. Gain the trust and respect of everyone you can. People need to look at you and think, "this guy's/gal's got it." Some will like you and others will not. If you haven't been promoted after doing all this, then straight out ask to be a manager. If you don't get it, leave and do it over.

Also, read The Power Broker [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/039...
> Yeah, we humans are so good at making animals extinct.

Well, largely by crowding them out of food or space. While species we compete with get the short end of the stick, those that we have parasitical or symbiotic relationships with have quite a different experience.
As I point out in another post (currently above) the layers of Neural nets have nothing in common with those in the brain. Only confusion will be met in heading down that path.

What is had in common, and what was inspirational were (harsh) experiments on kittens, done in the 60s which provided hints as to what concepts were important in the primary visual cortex. These experiments lead to ideas of pooling and averaging as ways to calculate invariance, which made their way into the neurocognitron and then the convolutional net. The concepts of thresholding units and summation of inputs also played a part in the designs of Artificial Nets more generally. Most recently, new artificial NN designs have been loosely inspired by the importance of attention in biological networks.

Another similarity, but this is a general computational similarity, is the importance of hierarchical organization in easing learning difficulty. But unlike in the mostly feedforward networks we're used to in ANNs, brain's networks are also feedback, or with backward projections, across areas and up and down hiearchies and so on.

But there is more to vision than V1 and V4. The visual cortex has more arbitrary connections across layers and is not restricted to the bipartite structure common in MLPs and is more fine grained than the hidden layer summation across timesteps of RNNs.

Other things the visual cortex computes but not well captured in models: speed and directional selectivity, nontrivial color transformations, temporal frequency, global v local + foreground v background, optical flow, motion tracking, inhibitory neurons, higher level scene understanding, feedback connections, perceptual color constancy and contributions to memory formation.
Everything in engineering is a compromise, and ecological engineering is no different. We still do it anyway. We get to do it because we're humans, and the other species aren't.

It is not reasonable to demand assurances of complete safety, or freedom from all possible adverse consequences, before taking action in defense of our own species.
I agree. I think a barrier to distribution helps certain business models that are legit. Especially with the backdrop that most of the public don't care enough to change the situation. Ten years from now, overly-broad laws in copyright and big distributors owning rights will still exist. The work of groups like Netflix... even Redbox... are a nice compromise until something better comes along. I'm impressed Netflix got as far as they did.
I thought your grandparent post was being facetious, but are you being serious with this one?

Here's off the top of my head: Airbnb, Xiaomi, Flipkart, Pinterest, Snapchat (if you count instagram as a competitor), Zenefits, Didi until last week, Dropbox, Theranos, Snapdeal, Slack.

Now that I think about it, it's probably much harder to come up with unicorns that do have a monopoly.
This is one of the reasons why more telecommuting/remote work is "better". Since you've got no boss looking (literally) over your shoulder, you can't be judged on hours. Then things like output or project completion actually bubble to the top as most important.
I sure hope we did. "Plan" in the context of national militaries has a very different meaning from making a "plan" with your buddies. Any national military planners wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't have a plan for attacking any country they could conceivably reach. It's their job to have plans available and ready for the political leaders, and it's those leaders' jobs to decide which plans to actually execute and when.

Consider: If you're, say, the Secretary of Defense, at any meeting, the President might tell you "Country X just went nuts! We have to deal with this now! What can we do?". You don't wanna tell the President "Umm, I dunno, let us look into it". You wanna be able to say something more like "We could go with a nuclear strike, using units A, B, and C. Expected casualties in country X are Y military and Z civilian, and we estimate a possible retaliatory nuclear strike against at least 10 US cities, with casualty estimates as described. Or we could launch a conventional strike with Carrier Group D, attacking these government and infrastructure targets, optionally following up with a land invasion with these units or special forces attacks, with enemy and friendly casualty estimates."

Clearly, we want to have plans for every possible way of attacking every country we would be capable of attacking, all continuously updated to reflect our forces and their readiness, as well as estimated enemy forces and their readiness. We also want to be able to talk intelligently about possible force level changes. If the President wants to, say, dissolve one or more Army divisions, raise another one, buy or sell aircraft, retire nukes or build more, etc, we want to be able to describe how that would affect our ability to attack and defend against attacks from various countries.
I could see see something like Uber electric cars / golf carts where driving distances are small such as Sun City in AZ. Baby steps. Can't have a death in an accident though.
Indeed. But somebody had.
Sure hope so!
Neural networks are eating the world.
The "percentage of internet users" is (World Total Internet Users/Internet Users in <Nation>) not (<Nation> Population/Internet Users in <Nation>) -- that latter calculation would be the "internet penetration" (the figure Bermuda leads with 97.75% and the US is #25 with 86.75%.)
Tim Urban is a great writer, but read something like this - http://lukemuehlhauser.com/a-reply-to-wait-but-why-on-machin... - if you want more nuance. (Caveat: It's been some time since I read either article, or about superintelligence.)
I've read a handful of accounts of this episode, and my impression is that Ferrara was blindsided and was not a party to the negotiations that led to him being paid for rights - which, again, somebody, perhaps just lawyers, thought was appropriate. He never agreed to the making of a movie using his title.

But you ask a fair question.

Do you really think it's credible that, after having finished this movie, having worked with the producer of the original for over a year, that Herzog had never heard of Ferrara? I can believe that he'd never seen the original movie, but never heard the name of the filmmaker? Read the belittling language Herzog chose to use in the interviews about the incident. Everybody lies. But this lie was mean-sprited and spiteful. And that's what I think is wrong with Herzog.

On the other hand, Ferrara did say he wanted Herzog to die in a fire. So there is that.
I agree, that a lot of downvotes are caused by tone, writing style, or clarity. However there's also a lot of downvotes caused simply by being against the consensus. And while I feel like sometimes people are against the group-think just for the sake of it (or to ruffle feathers) there are also times when a healthy dose of alternative viewpoints can dampen the group-think getting too extreme.

For example, just yesterday there was a thread talking about the US turning root DNS over to the UN. This thread turned into a jingoistic nightmare talking about how awesome America is, how they're the only true bastion of freedom, and how the rest of the world is a savage freedom hating backwater. That thread desperately needed more counter-balance, but no doubt people like myself were concerned that the groupthink became so focused that counter-balance would have been met with swift and numerous down downvotes (and risk site privileges because of being downvoted too heavily).

This isn't a complaint about downvotes, this is pointing out that downvotes change posting behaviour both for good (i.e. stopping people being jerks) and for bad (i.e. stopping opinion counter to the "group think").
I've never understood this argument. We have been "playing god" since we settled down 10,000 years ago and started practicing agriculture. The ways in which we selectively cultivate/breed plants/animals have do doubt caused major changes in ecosystems. Yet, if we had not done those things, we probably would not be here today.

Furthermore, where do you draw the line? We are very close to eradicating the polio virus. Do we know ALL the consequences of doing so? No. Does that mean we should stop? No. We have, at some point, decided that it causes an immense amount of human suffering and decided to eradicate it. Same with certain species of mosquitoes.
Make everyone a criminal so you have an excuse to get rid of those you don't like.