skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Direct democracy's historical performance in this respect is abysmal

Is that true? It certainly has its critics, but in classical Greece it more than held its own in a highly competitive ecosystem for ~180 years. I'm sure at least that we need more experiments with different institutions.
More effective than any regulation would be a legal system that actually made it possible for the small guy to sue the big guy for damages.
I think it's one of those situations that is only going to be clear in some measure of hindsight. After all, any short-term benefit might be offset by the backlash when the media either evolves, or people (as they are now) gain access to foreign media sources. It seems to me that you'd utterly erode any sense of authority or trust you could build with your populace.

Shortsighted in other words, but what you'd expect from a gerontocracy.
Especially having looked at how thorough their test suite is.
To those who aren't knowledgeable about the subject, it sounds as bizarre and incomprehensible as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
Every State in the US has ID cards, but citizens aren't required to obtain one at any point. (Although a heck of a lot of basic things-- driving a car on a public road, boarding an airplane, buying alcohol-- are gated by them.) What we don't have is a Federal ID card.

The TSA tried to impose one, but a lot of States are pushing back against it. (Washington State called the TSA's bluff and obtained a 2-year "extension" of our horrible awful non-TSA-approved satancards.) Even if the Feds succeed at requiring all State cards to feed into the same database, they have no power to require that every citizen obtain one.

The SSN was never intended to be ID, it's an account number. Anybody using it for ID is doing it wrong, but unfortunately, that's a heck of a lot of people.
Interesting, that Microsoft sponsors such a research that I can't see being used by the business for visible future. I am not a shareholder so can't make a view of this is good or not.
Generally, (in the US) statements made in good faith and with reasonable belief that they are true are not going to be found slanderous.
I have a funny feeling your talk about chinese tourists and others from poorer countries. Ice in drinks is rarer due to concerns about tap water. Chinese also seemed to greatly prefer all drinks to be warm or hot....the concept of ice cold drinks seems to be no the norm.

A good many of these tourists are tours....some of them straight up rip offs so they take it out on locals. Imagine if you went to paris and found out your tour group was charging you 20% higher for everything....I'd be pissed off too.

I'm susprised about redwoods...

The tourist thing is a language barrier....When I lived abroad, I noticed americans did the same thing too including many expats.
"Something the government does I don't like"
I'm not sure that this argument is entirely sound, given how incredibly slowly humans move as a species to cope with anything new, and how quickly this particular kind of "new" would be likely to emerge. I don't know about you, but a few generations of ongoing discussion seems downright necessary to me, if we have a hope of not making some catastrophic mistakes.
Cloud 101: What is KVM?
> The reason I found it hard was because I had to learn Octave while also understanding the algorithms and general ml concepts.

I had the same experience, even after using Matlab some in grad school. I wish I had seen this before trying Ng's course (all of the exercises in Python):

http://www.johnwittenauer.net/machine-learning-exercises-in-...

So much quicker / easier to follow, at least for me.
I'm pretty skeptical of your claims that starch and simple sugars played an important part in human diets for the past 150,000 years. Here's why:

1) Throughout most of the world, fruit is generally only available during an extremely limited window in any given year. And it spoils in a matter of days.

2) The big agricultural revolution was the domestication of grains. Grains are important because they keep for a long time and can therefore provide a stable year-round supply of calories even if they can only be harvested once per year. According to this wikipedia page[1], grains weren't domesticated until 11,000 years ago.

Do you have a link that provides documentation for the importance of carbohydrates in the pre-agricultural human diet?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication
Yep, that's my project. Please use it and contact me if somenthing doesn't work!
Deliberately bad planning. Polling locations and times are determined by folks with a vested interest in choosing who votes for them, not in letting voters choose who holds office.
It's probably a tax write off. If it is then I'd almost prefer it to them paying taxes to be divided out to DOD
Exercises in Programming Style - Cristina Videira Lopes

The same simple programming problem (term frequency) solved using 33 different programming styles.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L2EAVAW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
It's just bad science journalism :/ Wikipedia indeed to the rescue.
Both of those problems might be something we need to solve, or it might emerge out of the complexity of a sufficiently advanced AI system. If the latter, we might not seeing coming for exactly the reasons you've outlined as making that emergence unlikely.
5,300 Wells Fargo employees fired after 2M fake accounts discovered
Same. I complained about the rates I was given by my auto insurance company and they said it was because I had no credit. I told them I could easily pay 12 months up front, didn't matter. I told them I could prove my income was more than enough, didn't matter. They told me I should get a credit card.

In order to get a service I'm required to have by the government, I had to have my name in a system run by private, for profit companies.
There's little notional difference between embedding one software tool within another, and calling one from another.

There's a considerably simpler architectural structure for the latter.

You still need the full multi-application support available. We're doing that today with browsers (the universal document reader) and plug-ins. Which are generally being considered a Bad Idea, and functionality (e.g., PDF readers, video) now being natively supplied.

I'm defining flexibility as a lack of arbitrarily-imposed constraints. Which is what the text on lock-in I referred to discusses at length.

I'm well aware that simple and expedient solutions often end up being long-term untenable. This doesn't mean that they're not simple and expedient in the first place. Though that simplicity often comes from the capacity to impose a single standard across an internally consistent (at least on a point-in-time basis) architecture.

Information technology vendors have long exploited the matter of standards to self-serving benefit. Microsoft were not consistent in either supporting or opposing standards. They were consistent in applying standards policies to their own benefit. Promotion of the IBM-PC compatibility standard increased the platform for Microsoft OS and applications sales. Hindering standards such as Ethernet, Internet, HTML, office application formats, Silverlight, OLE, AD, Exchange connectors (POP, IMAP), etc., was also strategically pursued.

You're focusing on the software specifics rather than the strategy. Yes, the trees are lovely, but there's a forest you might care to observe.
> What's the procedure for changing your name? A lot of people change their name after marriage or divorce. Those are usually handled by the states, so adding a federal government in there raises the net complexity.

To be clear, the federal government is already involved with name changes-- in fact, though my name change was issued by a state court, I had to get it changed with Social Security before I could get a new driver's license.

Similarly, passports do have a sex listed, so that's already something with federal jurisdiction. The passport system is also handled through post offices, solving the problem of needing more offices.
For instance: Time Warner Cable screwed up my cable package, charging me 220$ (a la carte) rather than 90$ (bundle). I contacted them, they admitted the mistake, and fixed the next month---I still ended up out 65$. I'd really like that money (moral imperative), but there's no legal way for me to seek relief for that small amount. If TWC messes up 1/50 accounts, once a year, for 50$, then they stand to make 500k--1mm$ a year just in my area. There's literally profit to be had between the legal cracks.
Probably with carefully written laws, same as why we are seeing bogus DMCA requests all the time. Most crime has to be committed "knowingly", but if you automate your DMCA takedowns they can't catch you for perjury because you don't know what your system does.
It's not like its a particularly complex puzzle. If you don't want spoilers, don't read it.
Why I’m dropping Rust
If a credit reporting agency has incorrectly linked my profile with unsavory data, I do believe I'd skip straight past FCRA violation and go straight to a defamation lawsuit. This is libel.
They are not overkill at all, rather they are tuned towards different set of performance characteristics. E.g. in the Boeing 777 example above, transatlantic journey.

In the article above, the data and results stay on the local disk, however in any organization, they need to be stored in a distributed manner, available to multiple users with varying levels of technical expertise. Typically in NFS or HDFS, preferably if they are records stored/indexed via Hive/Presto. At which point the real issue is how do you reduce the delay resulting from transferring data over the network. Which is what the original idea (moving computation closer to data) behind Hadoop/MapReduce.
Show HN: Contain Yourself: my debrief of Container.Camp as a speaker
Hey Hacker News,

Hopefully this is the right place for this.

I made an interactive visualization showing the colors used by the ten most popular sites. The page also explains different color models and how to convert between them using math and javascript.

In the future I plan to use the tools I built here to do more interesting comparisons of color trends over time and between different cultures.

Any feedback is welcome. Thanks for looking!

EDIT: Here's the github link by the way: https://github.com/Paul-Hebert/web_colors
Curious to what in the world this is in reply.
True, it changes back to the old number when you go back. But as you move from state to state your DL# will change as well.
Oh come on.. Nutrition is not that complicated. It only looks complicated because we are looking too closely at the details, resulting in myopia. We are overthinking it. For hundreds of thousands of years people didn't even know what a nutrient was, and yet they ate properly and never got any of these western problems.

Reminds me of how our western science has overcomplicated studies on meditation and we are only now learning the benefits of it because our tools are finally sharp enough to our liking (fMRI).

We are lazy. We don't want to actually meditate to learn if it works or not. We just want to strap somebody into a machine without having to do the hard work ourselves. Our nutritionists are lazy as well. Would rather fund all these ridiculous research studies than experiment on their own bodies. Pathetic example of over measuring. Reminds me of how if all you have is a hammer then everything will start to look like a nail.
So what’s our excuse for toxic founders?
A book of Garrison Keillor short stories from early in his career, called (I think) "Happy to Be Here". Pure hilarious americana, where everyone is fleecing everyone else all the time but they're always polite.
According to this [1] article the abstention rate is near 44% for Greek votes. It seems making it easier doesn't not necessarily make it more inclusive.

Here in the states I always vote absentee. I get my ballot, fill it out, and drop it in the mailbox. I'm not sure how they can make this process easier without it being online or making the postage free.

[1] http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/09/21/voter-turnout-in-...
Yes. It would appear that their main criteria are actually mental stability and reliability.
Well, the Tesla model might be more appropriate in this day and age. They have small showrooms just to meet the demand of people wanting to test-drive, and then everything else about the sales process is done online.

This is obviously a more efficient process than large showrooms, large local inventory, and a large amount of pushy car salespeople whose only job is to get you to overpay for your vehicle to cover the costs of said showrooms and inventory.
This assumes that company will be making rational choice, which is rarely the case. The choice is usually made based on "no one got fired by using X".
While this isn't quite what a "time crystal" is, imagine a two-dimensional universe that contains just one arrow in it. Now spin the arrow. Now plot the full state of the system, using the third dimension as time. You get a sort of spiral thing going along the dimension you used for time. This periodic structure is sort of like what they mean by "time crystal"; it's a periodic structure in the time dimension.

Now, there's more to it than that. I'm not proposing this as a full explanation of what it means, just trying to get the B-class sci-fi ideas out of the way to sketch out the complicated bit of what they mean. As a crystal is a periodic atomic structure in space, a time crystal is a periodic atomic structure in time. There's more to both, of course, but that should help get the woo-woo out of the way.
If you already know partial derivatives, gradient descent algorithms, and some linear algebra, it's easy. The assignments are not challenging either, even compared to other coursera classes. But for people that don't have this background, it can be hard.

I think the problem with Coursera is that they try to accommodate as many students as possible, which means the classes aren't very deep. I don't think this should be the role of a ML class to teach about partial derivatives or matrix factorization for instance. It's great that the class is accessible to many people, but sometimes you feel that you just scratch the surface, and that you're not at the level of university students that went through more challenging classes.

As a comparison, I did the labs of 6.828 and 6.824 (OS and distributed systems) on MIT opencourseware and it was much harder and much more rewarding than any coursera class. And I did only the labs, there is much more material to cover to do it seriously (quizzes, lot of articles to read...). Kudos to MIT students! (I wonder how many such classes they take during one semester). Too bad opencourseware classes aren't always properly set up for outside students. There may be some material missing, no forum to ask questions, video quality can be very bad and so on...
There is a known big problem of transporting big rocket stages from the place where they are manufactured to places where they are launched.

Saturn-5, one of the biggest rockets so far in the world, was manufactured near a river and transported by a big ship. This sidestepped the problem of roads.

Energiya, the Soviet heavy rocket which launched Buran, had its huge second stage flown by a plane to Baykonur.

In 1960-s, USSR was looking for a good solution to this problem. They considered building a huge canal to use ships; they were thinking about using an aircraft; they played with an idea of building an exceptional - biggest in the world, if I'm not mistaken - automobile to carry it over desert. Eventually they decided to build rocket near the launch complex - that's the reason N-1 has the unusual shape.

Today, SpaceX keeps lengthening Falcon-9 modules - but it can't make them wider, because existing roads won't allow it. Long stages have their share of problems - they could be less efficient by mass, they could have unwanted dynamic characteristics - imagine a long thin-walled container pushed from behind through the atmosphere, it way vibrate...

In short, just the rocket industry of the world alone - that's currently about under hundred launches per year - could provide the market for big planes. At least this is a possible option.
99% of misery is caused by humans.

Most people who commit suicide are not objectively in situations of extreme difficulty. Many wealthy, successful people commit prison. Surely, negative conditions are correlated with suicide, but it's not the driver. It's a psychological/spiritual issue.
This post was killed by user flags (when that happens, “[flagged]” appears in the title).
Does the soil eventually need to be replenished, and are there any limits on that?
No problem. To elaborate on _this_ slightly, today in stable Rust you can call libc's malloc/free directly. There's also the Rust alloc::heap module, but it's not yet stable, and so is only available on nightly Rust https://doc.rust-lang.org/alloc/heap/index.html
The building codes are about life safety of which fire safety is a component alongside more common hazards such as trip and fall; electrocution; cholera, bubonic plague and influenza; and plain old collapse.

From a practical standpoint, the biggest issue with wood construction is not fire but dimensional change due to moisture [both bulk water and humidity] in addition to dimensional changes due to temperature. The differentials with other materials make systems [such as HVAC, electrical, life safety] more complex mechanically.

In terms of steel, intumescent spray fire protection, masonry, and gypsum board are common alternatives to concrete for fire protection of steel. As a tangent to the issue of differential expansion, the reason reinforced concrete is practical is because steel and concrete have very similar coefficients of expansion as moisture and temperature vary.
Just their presence is threatening to Philippine and Vietnamese fishing boats and other vehicles. They patrolling around the area opens up for harassments against civil boats from these nearby countries.
So does Greece and their turnout in 2015 was only 66%.
If a bank in America gives a loan in your name that essentially is your problem until a sequence of things happen that require a fair amount of education to research and do yourself or the advice of a low end but real lawyer (which is dangerous to seek out among the ones that screw over the poor).

If you live in the US you should consider filing every block available to you so for the banks you don't use, you can start the discussions with asking why they were illegally pulling your credit record or giving credit without it.

In Europe, it looks like banks are petitioning to be allowed to verify identity over camera phones using an independent third party. That is still better than the US, since you can probably force them to retrieve that record of "you and your id" fairly early in a dispute.
Spawning barebones openresty applications using ancient witchcraft
Reasons why you can't use GNU/Linux dismissed
Most things in this world are about making money.

Credit reporting system works pretty well and it is evident by the fact that we have seen mortgage bubble burst (where government forced banks to ignore credit ratings) and student loan bubble building up (ditto as housing loans).

The marginal gain in making it more accurate is not very much so I am pretty sure banks will not put efforts in that direction. Also, banks don't care if 1 in 10000 get screwed up because of their mistake because there is plenty of more fish in the pond. But that is how the world works.
Is it the UofW course or Andrew ng's?
When I turned 18, I decided that it would be a good idea to get a credit report from all three agencies just to check what was on there. I found that there were multiple accounts tied to my credit score from before I was born. Two of the credit agencies removed them fairly easily, but to this day, one of them has refused to remove the accounts. Why? Because I can't prove that I did not live in the area the account was opened in. Not being born yet has so far not been good enough. It's just been a process of me mailing them, waiting 6 months for them to respond with some request for some more information, repeat.
I read it and understood nothing.
I wonder if you could use a chemoreceptor for this also.
I'm also doing this course right now. Having MSc degree in computer science helps a lot, although I got my diploma as long as 10 years ago, but still some math sticked with me.

My biggest regret is that my day job as developer does not leave me with much time for more Octave programming. Of course I do excercises, but that's not enough to be good ML developer.

However, I think that just having a lot of sample code would be helpfull if I ever make ML my full time job. Especially considering that the excercises themselves are pretty interesting (handwriting recognition, image compression, etc).
Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs
The efficient plots hypothesis
> Is an aircraft of this size economical

It's not just the size, it's also the shape of such airlifters that makes them non-economical for commercial use.

For example the USAF's own data shows that the C-17 burns more fuel per hour than the KC-10 but carries 20 tonnes less payload by weight, all because of the fat rear-loading-for-tanks fuselage ( that's seldom used for such ) and thick wing.

Both the C-17 and the C-5 were touted on the civil market but had zero uptake.
The nations of Africa that have the most intact colonial apparatuses, and the most people with European ancestry - are the most wealthy.

I'm not making a moral argument.
"People basically evolved without any sugar (fructose) except what they could get in fruit"

What about honey?

Edit: don't forget that sugar is in every plant that makes use of photosynthesis.
At Amazon the Flywheel Effect Drives Innovation
How is a "time crystal" different from a plain old [EDIT: quantum] harmonic oscillator?
You should sue them
>>You're discouraging people from even starting.

No, I'm discouraging people from starting unprepared. Big difference.

>>Awesome! how many times did you see one? How many times were you in danger of being bitten?

I personally saw one maybe a dozen times. Camping mate got bitten by one because he didn't see it. He woke up at night, got outside the tent to take a piss and in the dark stepped on one. Within 30 minutes he was vomiting and foaming at the mouth, and had started losing sensation in the leg he was bitten in. The only reason he's alive today is because we remained calm, applied first aid and were able to rush him to a nearby hospital.

This happens to people rarely. But the point is that it can be fatal for someone who isn't prepared to handle the situation. In general, thousands of people die every year in the USA because they underestimate nature, don't understand the risks of the adventures they undertake and don't prepare accordingly.

Besides, think about it this way: if someone starts out unprepared and has a shitty experience as a result (e.g. they forgot to bring extra clothing and couldn't sleep at night because it was cold), they are unlikely to try again. Being prepared helps them enjoy the activity more, which in turn makes it more likely that they will do it more.
Which diet do you mean? I looked and can only see evidence of their recommending 45-60 g of carbohydrates a meal. That's 180 g a day, some 60 g below my personal non-diabetic maintenance level.