skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a brute-force solution to the "extract text from a 'digital-native' image" problem that you can write in an afternoon:

1. Use an existing OCR library to give you the positions of the words, plus a first-cut guess of their content.

2. Take the first word from the OCRed guess, and loop through a set of {font, size, leading} tuples, rendering out the same word at that {font, size, leading} and overlaying it on the image, and measuring error-distance.

3. If your best match isn't within some minimum error-distance, then assume that the OCR misrecognized the first word, and try again with the second, third, etc.

Once you've got a font-settings match:

4. render the rest of the words onto their respective detected bounding boxes;

5. notice which words have a higher error-distance than the rest;

6. for each word, generate candidate mutations of the word (e.g. everything at a Levenstein distance of 1 from the OCRed guess), pick the one that lowers the error-distance, and repeat until the distance for that word won't go down any lower.

7. Return the error-minimized set of words.

You could call this a form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-excited_linear_prediction, with fonts as the pre-trained models.

---

Actually, come to think of it, it'd be a lot easier to detect and unify "identical" sub-regions of the image first (using e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2 on a lossless setting). Then you could, in parallel to the above, also try to do frequency-analysis to discover which of your image "tiles" would likely form a basic "alphabet" of character-glyphs—and then hill-climb toward aligning that "alphabet" by attempting to produce the most runs of character-glyphs that translate to known dictionary words in whatever language the OCR thinks the text is in.

The font-matching would still be necessary, though, for the rest of the image samples that don't fall into the easily-frequency-analyzed part. (And for languages that aren't alphabetic, like Chinese, where there are no super-common character-glyphs.)
A lot of the apparent ambiguity could be resolved by looking at the number of launches and their trajectories:

A) there are simultaneous launches against many different targets. Conventional or not, the enemy is trying to remove your ability to retaliate. The implication is clear.

B) Only a small number of weapons have been fired off at one or just a few targets. Even if the weapons inflict heavy casualties, your ability to retaliate remains intact.
Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70
For stereos, use an AM transmitter and send your neighbor dora-the-explorer theme music on repeat.
One can't understand this without first understanding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_debt-ceiling_cri...

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_Control_Act_of_2011
Exactly. Libertarianism and communism seem like perfect utopias but "If all men were angels, no government would be necessary."

Unfortunately, company insiders may see little difference in a "misbehaving" employee, regardless if it's in the public good and/or for personal gain, because limiting the threat of public exposure is often the paramount priority in the short-term, which may ultimately go against long-term business and customer relationships. And an "untrustworthy" bank is unlikely to survive on it's own for very long.
Locatr app on the roll
Same thing on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3bzHk_6yHM
For those who like to watch at 2x.
Nate Silver's writing quality this cycle has definitely been worse than last cycle. IMO, it has quite a bit to do with running his own website, instead of working as a blog under somebody else. There is much more pressure for fivethirtyeight.com to produce frequent updates than there was for fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com. I get that a major justification for branching out was to provide more sports coverage and some sparser statistical coverage of other topics. But there just isn't enough daily news on the presidential polls to justify the article publication rate he's running this cycle.
Anyone know what's nearby there at about (32.92669, -111.922201)[0]? It looks like some sort of strip mine a few hundred feet to the north, so I assume it's related, but was just curious what it is. It looks like a painting!

[0] http://maps.apple.com/maps?ll=32.926699,-111.822201&spn=0.00...
Could it be that nepotism exists in the (free) free market world? Shocking.
I was basing the cost on the last couple that were commissioned, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_George_H.W._Bush.

But agree with your point, the calculus only gets worse as more eggs are put in the basket.
Solidity is a terrible language for designing contracts in. It's not an effective counterexample as it seems to be such a poorly considered construct to begin with.
> The answer is that eventually it gets priced in.

There's really not a lot of data supporting this statement. For the most part, minimum wage has remained pretty static between $5-15 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

We do have a significant counterexample which disproves your thesis from the early 20th century - minimum wage was set at 25 cents (previously there was no minimum wage) and increased 5 cents per year until it reached 40 cents. So that's at least an 80% increase, and all of this during a big economic recovery. Obviously the WWII boom was also a factor, but the nation went from abject poverty to boom times in a scant 20 years, and I don't think you can say that the minimum wage was eroded. To the contrary, it set the standard of living that has prevailed to this day.

Frankly, a market crash precipitated by a minimum wage hike has never happened, and I don't think it would happen. The worst case scenario you posit is modest inflation. That sounds like a pretty tame worst-case scenario, and well worth the risk if we can do what FDR did again, and raise the minimum standard of living for the next century.
I wonder if you could easily force them to prove ownership of the mortgage. At least until 2008, these transactions were apparently so common and disorganized that in the mortgage meltdown many lenders had trouble finding the paperwork.

(though I have no idea how one would go about that and it's probably too risky)
How does one do this without looking like a heckler on the side of the road that nobody is going to pay attention to?
Slightly fancy cars have been pushing this with per key controlled limits, so you can let your kid drive with a max speed limit, a max volume limit, etc.
One Coin, Much Scam: OneCoin Exposed as Global MLM Ponzi Scheme (2015)
Cookie Matching
>primarily the low quality of Google's SDK for Android.

This has always been my biggest frustration with Android. I've written a few applications for the platform, and while their architecture leaves a lot to be desired I've never had any real problems with it. However, the immense disappoint and anger that comes from their SDK idiosyncrasies is astounding. Google really just hates stability and nice API's, in my opinion. Everything from GAE to Android, it's always just so terribly frustrating to keep track of any one-off decisions they make without any form of actual communication from the development team.

I've been writing Android code since the G1 days.
Been there, and even used the risky option of letting the VM access the disk in raw mode to run the "real" mac os.
Do you foresee large movements of population to cheaper geographies (Detroit, Mississippi, Alabama) given freedom from employment? Why are we not experiencing it with the population segments currently receiving a fixed monthly income (social security, disability, annuities)?
I haven't tasted Coffiest before. Does Coffiest taste like coffee + soymilk?
FYI, hobbyist licenses expire after a year. You'll have to get new ones. Still free.
Nate Silver has been criticized a lot by Mish (http://mishtalk.com/) and Mish was more often correct with his predictions than Nate. (What was Nate's prediction of Trump becoming the candidate? "Trump's chance of becoming the GOP nominee at 2 percent.")

Nate is strongly biased in favor of Hillary. That is fine but that is not scientific. Nassim Taleb said about Nate:

"55% "probability" for Trump then 20% 10 d later, not realizing their "probability" is too stochastic to be probability."

and

"So @FiveThirtyEight is showing us a textbook case on how to be totally clueless about probability yet make a business in it."

Proceed with caution.
Note that he's talking about a series of short stints, not just one or two. If every environment is lousy and warrants immediate exit, perhaps the problem is not entirely with the environments. Chronic complaining without a bias for action is not exactly a positive trait as far as interviewing is concerned.
Seeing that code I would not hire you.
You're going to have to break the Turing Test before you get good automated content curation. There will always be error.

People are worried about bias. I'm skeptical that humans have the ability to be politically unbiased on an individual level. Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide. So let's stop pretending to be unbiased. Information aggregators should have their members clearly spell out their positions on popular issues in their bios (an openness that should be a part of the responsibility of being an information aggregator) and there should be "block designed" hiring around these issues to maximize political diversity and reduce bias in aggregate. Otherwise network effects are just going to cluster people with similar opinions around each other.

Just a thought.
I like what Gandhi said about resources:

'The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.'
Some are on Oracle Linux, which on a few occasions does not have compatibility with how RHEL nor CentOS work despite the similarities and pitches. Patching OEL is more awkward in my experience mostly because of Oracle rather than for any technical reason.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12697967
Hmmm. Maybe it was 15A. A 16A ES40 plus other stuff plugged in to the same circuit would have happily blown 15A under load, I guess.
What makes Hacker News a bastion of professionalism and gravity?
Funnily enough, I learned about Arthur Andersen in the context of why it is not enforced.

Subsequent firms have committed far worse offenses.
We had very similar setups :-)
Bad engineering decisions? A long time to release 2.0, 2.1 in less than a month is definitely not a good pace.

Edit: maybe just some PR.
Uh, there are plenty of ways to get 400sqft or less living spaces in SF, just not as a freestanding structure (and tiny houses are kind of a waste when we could be building more tall stacks of several adjacent tiny apartments).
Amazon’s new Music Unlimited service is ready to take on Spotify and Apple Music
And you can just as easily run k8s in the cloud if needed with minimal transition costs. It truly is the ultimate definition of no lock-in!
This would be really cool! We would welcome a pull request and / or link to any downstream project working on this. In a similar vein, we've been considering adding the stroke width transform [0] as an optional preprocessing step.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/stroke-...
This seems like a bit of an unfair comparison. The 'decades ago' solution was a system, built by humans, that can solve this problem (and very closely related ones), whereas this solution is a system, built by humans, that can design a system to solve the problem.
Looks like the news media still has some power. With all the recommendations of not buying google pixel from verizon now they have come out saying google will control the updates and the devices will be carrier unlocked.
How do you prove that you believe something?
Too Faced Better Than False Lashes Extreme Mascara for RIDICULOUSLY LONG LASHES
Apparently it's also a popular name for developer tools. https://mesosphere.github.io/marathon/
> Why are we not experiencing it with the population segments currently receiving a fixed monthly income (social security, disability, annuities)?

We are. Moving to a cheaper locale is an extremely common part of retirement.
I hadn't heard that point about carriers being hard to track down before, do you have any good links for further reading?

If the point about China/Russia increasing their relative punching power vs. the US doesn't feel significantly to you, what about when they are sold on the open market to any country that wants one? Any country in the world being able to take out a carrier would change the way that power is projected in a very big way. Suddenly attack and defense are much more asymmetrical, which favours the small actors (this would work against Russia and China too, but they have less to lose than the US does in this regard).
> If every environment is lousy and warrants immediate exit, perhaps the problem is not entirely with the environments

Most are like that IME. This is compounded by the fact that these are the companies most frequently hiring.

You've probably seen comments along the lines of 90% of candidates failing fizzbuzz? Remember those candidates work somewhere.
[Podcast] Docker Based Framework for Scalability Testing
Don't get me started on their support for two-factor. Really, I have to sign up via obscure forms (at least at the time) for a Symantec VIP app that's incompatible with other such apps? And occasionally I'm asked to retype my password with the VIP digits appended to the end? https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Access-and-security/PayP...
>"astrology is not a useful starting point to understanding people."

I never said it was. My problem is with the prevailing philosophy of doing statistical tests on whether there is exactly zero effect/correlation, ie testing for deviation from noise/chance. It is the most destructive idea ever pushed by mathematicians.
Yes, see here:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~gerdes/2014_UZ224.html
> But ironically, for posting that, I was meant with censorship.

Not trying to put words in your mouth, but this comes across as "when my opinion is downvoted then it's censorship, but when views I don't agree with are downvoted it's because they are not at a high enough standard".
This will change as soon as researchers and repairers have more political money than media producers!
Watch Demuxed 16 online (conference for video engineers)
I suppose the "block third-party cookies and site data" must be why this is mostly broken at home (doesn't show logins to 5-6 sites that I'm logged in to), but works properly at work (didn't bother to set that option there). Never toyed with exactly what the "site data" part means, though.
Cohn is the Times's data journalist geek. He's, frankly, just as good at this stuff as Silver is. They seem to like each other, even.

It's a good article. And yeah, 538 got scooped on this one. But it's not because they weren't paying attention, they just had other stories to write.
Did a big project with Angular 1.0 and after it clicked it was alright. I really enjoyed it, everything made sense. I thought Angular would be my best friend.

Tried Angular 2.0 and it's a completely different beast it seems. A simple project cookie cutter has 6 different files, it is ridiculous.

I had to edit the /etc/sysctl.conf just to go through the tutorial using Papa John's configuration and fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288 else it would crash.

All this transpiling and whatnot just to get a javascript app to run is way too much. 6 files of boilerplate is just nonsense.

Lost all interest in Angular 2.x.

going to either stick with angular 1.x or try react/vue, which is a shame.
From the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Are reposts ok?

> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.

So, ignore the dupes unless the previous post has something like 20 votes or 20 comments, I think there are not official hard numbers.
No, it is not data-mining bias. There really is a correlation. It is real, but realizing that has no usefulness at all.
Because optimizing for engagement is the modern equivalent of pandering?
You shouldn't downvote based on disagreement, on top of the fact that that seems like an incredibly disingenuous sentiment, what is your point?
I wouldn't be surprised if we see some early submissions with a whole host of updates leading into the final contest hours. My fear is that there will be a number of last–minute submissions on the eve of the contest closing.

Either way, if you know OpenCL or CUDA, you can probably land some easy money here.
Conceptual stretching is my guess. More strategy than normal for me.
Ah, yes. I forgot we hide the sidebar for mobile. Will take this into account in the future.
We could have had Al Gore, but for Floridians, I mean the guy created the information superhighway --that's up there with the Tim Berners-Lee kind of stratum.

On the other hand, had he won, Obama would not have become president because we would not have had to "react" to the Bush years.
Big soda is buying off big health orgs to keep profits and Americans fat
Wondering if anyone here has run into the same issue as me: I've wanted to learn Physics properly (post college) but can't find time to balance it with a job/having a social life. I've had a few false starts where I try for a week or two and give up because the whole enterprise feels insurmountable. Anyone else experience this/figure out a good strategy?
The problem is wealth affects happiness more than it used to because of things like health care. Give yourself a nice middle class healthcare plan. Give me wealth. If we both get cancer I have a lot more options and more ways to guarantee the highest level of care. Wealth makes happiness if it enables you to stay alive.

Likewise with opportunities for raising children - there are lots of ways to help children thrive with wealth, but it's not what i would consider the classical "material need".
Perhaps it is just http://semver.org/ nothing wrong with semver.
That's from 1993. Needs an update.

Agriculture has been reducing their inputs in recent decades. With precision farming and a lot more data collection, farms use less of everything. Using lots of water and fertilizer is out.

It looks like we're not going to run out of energy. Solar and wind have now become Big Solar and Big Wind, and fight it out with Big Oil and Big Gas. (Big Coal went bust.[1]) Electric cars aren't a joke any more. We can still do nuclear if we have to. We're more likely to have metal shortages than energy shortages.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
Yes you are. Facebook's patent grant explicitly allows the entity they're suing to counter-claims without losing the right to use Facebook's code.
The real lesson here is that the industry is still really bad at AI. We're good enough at it to build useful tools for tasks where failure isn't too big of a problem but once it is, you want a human filter.
> Trying to turn around a failing technology company is almost always a futile task — just ask Marissa Mayer at Yahoo or whoever it is who now runs BlackBerry.

It's amazing how one can respect the difficulty of a job while simultaneously insulting "whoever it is" that does that job. It takes three seconds to google "BlackBerry" and see in the automatically generated card: CEO: John S. Chen (Nov 4, 2013–). Is this supposed to be some sort of journalistic negligence-cum-style?
The New Minimalism
Wire transfers may work well in Europe, but they do not work well for making transfers from Europe to most banks in the U.S. The reason why is because banks in the US do not use IBAN numbers, and very few have SWIFT codes.

To do an international wire transfer into the US, it must first be routed through one of the few large banks that have their own SWIFT code (e.g. Wells Fargo), then often through a second intermediary bank before the payment reaches the receiver's bank. All the routing in the US is done using ABA numbers, which is unique to the US.

Few European banks seem to be able to handle this convoluted process. More often then not, when we've attempted to receive an incoming wire transfer from from a European customer, the payment has gotten misrouted because the sending bank neglected to fill out the application form properly.

By contrast, we've had very few problems receiving international payments via PayPal.
whoa!!! this is some crazy stuff. I use gifs.com everyday
> Ambiguity is a feature of natural languages, it's not a bug. It's because of this ambiguity that you can pass a law and assume other laws will update their meaning accordingly.

Which is huge problem. It means that laws can be interpreted any which way we want, which essentially means that the law only retains its meaning for a certain period of time until, until people forget their meaning, or judges make enough exceptions to those laws to render them useless but "true in principle", or judges decide at whim to change the interpretation. Since laws can change, what reliance have we upon any of it? What guarantee do we have that we can keep our "rights"? It's an incredibly stupid system. Is there something better? - Not one we can implement, to say the least. So we're stuck with it. It's not a blessing, it's a curse.
Not fully sure what you mean here. I did not downvote your comment. I also have no idea what "seems like an incredibly disingenuous statement". I posted how your comment comes off to me, in case you were not aware it was coming off that way, or in case I was misinterpreting then perhaps you would clarify.
Ahh the Microsoft Bob failed experiment and comically-annoying Office Assistant "Clippy"... the good ol' days. IIRC you usually had to custom install Office without the Office Assistant, desktop Toolbar and remove some other optional component which always slowed down a computer to a crawl (the early multiuser text input IIRC on Windows NT/2k/95/98).

Interestingly, recently Apple and Google both missed out on acquiring Viv as Microsoft snapped them up... ostensibly, an assistant far more integrated into third-party services with better integration developer tools/support and smarter AI. Apple and Google gotta double down on either lifting up Siri/Google's equiv. to that playing field or acquire other talent/tech to keep up.

As an aside, Microsoft finally has Nadella at the helm, whom built Azure, whom seems a better/different engineer/businessman than perhaps even Gates (much needed after Balmer)... although you can't argue that Gates didn't break ground in lopsided EULA/SLSAs for extreme profiteering (which was "better" for stockholders but "worse" for users, probably unsustainably so).
Then you will like this YouTube channel https://m.youtube.com/user/jpkiwigeek?
Bayesian optimization with Scikit-Optimize
See, when a cancer patient dies from a non-cancer cause, we say "the patient won over cancer."

We won over the Windows desktop because mobile killed the desktop.
> The only thing worse than gradle is ANT, which it replaced.

What's wrong with ant? I liked it.. It was simple to understand for the most part.

It also made it easy to develop without an IDE, although I'll admit I don't know how easy it is now as I stopped doing Android a year ago
The trolley problem is just an extreme example, that people can easily understand and think about. Less extreme versions of it occur all the time.

For example, say you are driving along a road, passing a bicyclist. You'd like to give the cyclist more room, but there's an oncoming car in the lane next to you. How much room do you give? At exactly what threshold do you decide to wait to pass the cyclist? What if the cyclist is a kid?

All the time, the driver has to make decisions that trade off the safety of multiple parties, from the car's occupants to other drivers, to bicyclists and pedestrians. In reality, these will almost always be statistical tradeoffs, and usually comparing very small probabilities of accidents, but they are still real ethical decisions that have to be made.