skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
theses are great insights.

our first approach is the simplest: stochastic variational inference. consider a likelihood that factorizes over datapoints. stochastic variational inference then computes stochastic gradients of the variational objective function at each iteration by subsampling a "minibatch" of data at random.

i reckon the techniques you suggest would work as we move forward!
> The US Veterans' Administration health records software system is in the public domain

This was programmed by humans?

http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=blob_plain;f=...

http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=tree;f=Packag...

Was released after obfuscating?
https://consumerist.com/2016/07/15/analyst-chipotles-custome...

>a customer survey by Morgan Stanley showed that 25% of customers said that they’ve either stopped going to Chipotle, or still go but stop in less often. 13% of participants said that they will no longer go back to the restaurant, which is surprisingly close to the number of customers who said the same during the food-safety crisis.

>Another survey released this week showed that while 20% of adults surveyed were “very worried” about the chain’s food safety in January, the figure had fallen to 13% this month. 26% of people surveyed said that they had not visited Chipotle since the worst of the outbreak.
Going on a tangent, if you like to cook you should get a traditional gas burning stove. No fancy UI beats the simplicity pushing and turning knobs. Not to mention the heating control precision. I think that's much more important than fancy knives and other expensive tools of the trade.
The world makes much more sense when you pretend that every person is a child, regardless of how many candles on their cake or wrinkles on their face.
Agreed that micro is a big advantage that AIs have held in previous AI vs. Human StarCraft contests, but the OP stated that the SC2 research environment will limit the AI to (elite) human APM levels, so that edge will be somewhat blunted. It's probably fair to question whether all actions are counted equally; I could believe that an AI could allocate their action budget more widely than a human can, even while hitting the same total APM.

More importantly, in my opinion, I'm not aware of any other AIs that have been competitive at the StarCraft problem using a Neural-Net-based implementation; from talking to PhDs in the field (but not from direct technical experience, so take this with a pinch of salt), my impression is that state-of-the-art RNNs just don't have the ability to encode the history of the game-world in a way that would enable them to be competitive. So it will require significant advances to the theoretical models to be able to compete using the sort of implementation that DeepMind will build.
Why would it be safer to implement Vec as a "language feature" as opposed to implementing it in the library?

We actually used to implement Vec as a language feature, and it was a lot of work to write things like growth in raw LLVM IR (which is a miserable programming language) instead of just using a real programming language—Rust—to do it.
It's part of the fun, no? You read about five different wines, you select one after much consideration, you take it home and talk about the salient points -- good and bad -- of the reviews that you had read, and you uncork the bottle. Everyone takes a few sips to a concert of many "oohs," several "aahs," and a smattering of "this is really good" and "I like this pairing." Finally, after the guests have eaten and some are a little bit buzzed, they all go back to their boring realities. It's a more human form of dogs playing with a ball.

Personally I like it.
The situation is actually more complicated than your question suggests because a public university is a mashup of government, corporation, and parent.

So the simple answer to your question is that your relationship to government is not voluntary and is backed by the the use of force. If the government forbids something from being sold you have no legal recourse beyond leaving the jurisdiction.

If a company makes a change that is unwelcome, the market readily adapts to providing alternative solutions that are more welcomed by the market.

The relationship you have with a corporation can easily be replaced unlike the relationship you have with your government.

Lots of policy conundrums with public schools disappear when you consider the same situation at a private school: religious content, political philosophy, gender segregation, choice of beverages to provide, and so on. That isn't to say that policy choices don't have pros and cons, just that in a private entity the policy choices are un-complicated by constitutional concerns or by concerns about them being universally applied (to all public schools, for example).
Would you mind indulging the audience (or me specifically) and outlining what you're doing that uses 30Gb+ of RAM? Is this one application with huge data sets, or many applications that must be run at the same time? Genuinely interested...
"A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty." We are seeing the effects of society aiming for equality over liberty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKxCWheH5Vk
Or to put it more appropriately, you are not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of his guilt?
I enjoyed this, thanks for sharing. Pretty cool.
If there being such a back channel is a surprise to you, you should really reconsider whether you know anything about foreign policy at all.
39 of 50 US states select judges by election.

43 states elect "attorneys general" which are generally internal state counsel but sometimes also heads of the state judiciary.

Most states (counties therein) elect sheriffs, but the role of the sheriff's office varies greatly by state. Sometimes it's a purely administrative role.

My point being: there are some pockets of sanity in the US. But I agree -- law enforcement should not be a political office.

There might be some value to a putting candidates to a public vote though. If the alternative is an appointment by the state governor, the potential for less accountability exists.
This seems like a reduction in readability from either declaring properties in an order such that browsers which don't support the syntax will still have a fallback declaration:

.foobar {
background: red; /* fallback declaration */
background: poorly-supported; /* preferred declaration */
}

or using platform-specific property prefixes.

Personally, I'd rather see the entire definition block for a selector in one place than have to consult multiple conditional declarations.
This paragraph somewhere in the middle caught my eye:

„He also says some of his constituents suspect the sound is being generated on purpose by Greenpeace to scare wildlife away from the rich hunting ground. The organization has a tense past with Inuit stemming from its opposition to the seal hunt in the 1970s and 1980s.“
Almost every time the mainstream media covers a subject I have some level of expertise in, the coverage is laughably inaccurate or misleading, and almost everyone I've talked to about this says the same thing for their own field, and yet inexplicably it still takes a conscious effort to remind myself to bear this in mind when they cover subjects I'm ignorant of.
If you've ever been to a Pride parade and didn't protest against it you've been called/considered an ally, whether you really sought it out or not. At least that's my experience.
The idea is that by making the position directly elected, those who hold it will more closely reflect the views of the electorate.

If it were an appointed or civil service position, then the position would only indirectly reflect current public opinion.

Now more direct democracy will always marginalize minority stakeholders, and those with little resources, but if this trade off is worthwhile is debateable.
The rural white poverty and suicide rate is huge. This gets almost no attention since they don't matter to liberals. The black people complaining about discrimination of whites often do it themselves whenever in control to us, other minorities, and each other. This goes back to Africa as it's part of human nature that seems to happen everywhere. They sure don't have any black guilt for their historical or current contributions to the problem despite saying I should feel guilty.

Far as structural discrimination, whites face that constantly in terms of expected appearance, speech, schooling, political/sports affiliations, religion, property owned, location, mental illness, disability, and so on. So many go through stuff systematically where they have to play games in how they present themselves to reduce the impact or work 10x harder than luckier, white person. Many end up isolated with extra hits from government and poverty. Much like what minority posts often say. Yet, we don't have shit to worry about we're told by other unfortunate groups. Our problems don't matter but we need to stay on top of ending theirs.

Doesn't surprise me that some off themselves although I have no plans to do so. Others just seem to get lost in anger, depression, drugs, or mediocrity.
I have a similar view (although protestant work ethics would probably disagree), and while a basic income will not provide meaning (nor is it supposed to), “primum edere deinde philosophari” is still true. Any pursuit of meaning would be literally meaningless if we go hungry every day.
Actually, this has happened already: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/10/11...
Just finishing OCaml course at Paris Diderot

www.fun-mooc.fr/login?next=/courses/parisdiderot/56002S02

Really cool language and opened my eyes on how some constructs are being used.

Multicore is definitely must for functional languages.(sorry random thought)
you may bug me on this. i work too closely with alp :)

edward does not implement completely implement advi yet. the piece that is missing is the automated transformation of constrained latent variable spaces to the real coordinate space. however, edward offers much more flexibility in specifying the dependency structure of the posterior approximation. diagonal is, just like in stan, the fastest and easiest. however introducing structure (e.g. assigning a dense normal to some of the latent variables while assigning a diagonal to others) is much easier in edward.
Oral Histories of Scientific Computing – Maple Founder Gaston Gonnet
Justin Bieber can sing at least as well as Sinatra. They are about equal in prickishness. Bieber is still alive, so he wins.
Machine learning is currently being used all over the place, in almost every single of Google's products.

Projects like these may have a "fun" goal, but while reaching towards that objective, a lot of new techniques and theory is developed, which then gets used in real products.

Systems like this are much easier to use as a playground and test in than the real world. But as they mention, the messiness and stateful nature of games like SC2 will bring a lot of innovation which will be very relevant to the real world.
They are publicly working on medicine and energy problems. Games just happen to be a convenient place to do research.

https://deepmind.com/blog/putting-patients-heart-deepmind-he...
https://deepmind.com/blog/applying-machine-learning-radiothe...
https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-ce...
Indeed. I had to go to uni for 4+ years to earn a degree in engineering. Pretty scary that you can get one of these in 6 months, and then potentially be working on selfdriving cars (or so Udacity would have you believe).
Pardon me asking, but what is CIS? I'm assuming that's where you work.
Edit: ah never mind, variational inference, got it! I was thinking stochastic HMC!

---

Ok but that will get an unbiased estimate of the log-likelihood. MCMC or HMC do work with noisy estimators, but they require unbiased estimates of the likelihood.

At the very least, you need to do a convexity adjustment by measuring the variance inside your mini batch. Or you can use the Poisson technique which will get you unbiased estimates of exp(x) from unbiased estimates of x (albeit at the cost of introducing a lot of variance).
Know-how has to be maintained. Knowledge has to be passed down to the apprentices and juniors. Otherwise it is lost over time and has to be rediscovered/reinvented, often by failures like in the article. Technological progress is never guaranteed or a certainty. Progress is the result of incremental improvements and sustainable hard work.
I don't think this is a useful point, because by the same logic:

- Haskell doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when using unsafePerformIO (or Foreign.*Ptr, or inside the runtime, your choice),

- Python doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when using ctypes,

- JavaScript doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when calling into the C++ code of the browser,

- Java doesn't eliminate memory safety issues, they happen when using JNI.

All languages have some sort of escape hatch that can be used to drop to a lower level, in order to actually interface with the operating system (etc.), Rust is slightly unique in that it makes this escape hatch fairly explicit/prominent at the language level and also provides the power needed do that interfacing/implementation itself (additionally, one gets all the normal benefits of Rust inside `unsafe`, the feature just lets one do more, not change the semantics of existing code).
Yes, this is definitely necessary for it to be interesting. Even so the AI will have some significant advantages over a human, in terms of being able to perfectly time events like injects, chrono boosts, etc., and watching every visible area of the minimap at once, so never being unnecessarily surprised by an attack. There are plenty of other examples. Nothing that's technically impossible for a human, but the ai will be perfect at those aspects as a given. For the human player to win, even limiting the machine's APM, they will need considerably superior strategy to make up for these differences.

Also, I'm not sure how they plan to limit APM, but if it's done in the naive way - the AI simply isn't allowed to surpass an APM of X, there will be plenty of optimizing it can do in terms of spending those actions more optimally than a human could (in some cases by performing fewer but more difficult actions to accomplish a task), as well as by remaining at peak APM continuously throughout an entire match. (Something that is a hallmark of great players, but like map awareness and macro timing, no human is able to keep up their peak speed indefinitely without any lapses.)
I don't know exactly how to title this, but it's a fascinating look into the shrink-wrap software business just a few years ago; network effects and all that. Quote:

"Maple established itself as the leading commercial computer algebra system. However, during the mid-1990s the company ran into trouble and disagreements with his colleagues caused Gonnet to withdraw from managerial involvement. Since then, he feels that Maple has lost its battle with Mathematica. Gonnet also discusses Maple’s relation to Matlab and its creator, Cleve Moler."

(Please, if anyone can fix that title in order to be more informative/attractive).
Whereabouts in Europe? When I lived in Europe nobody had dryers at all.
That's easy to believe when you don't say what "qualified" means. For someone to be 'qualified' for a position, it only need be a good decision for that company to hire that person, which may well be a factor of how the company is perceived by the public.
> If you haven't taken 6.854, you must have a strong understanding of algorithms at the undergraduate level, such as receiving an A in 6.046, having had a relevant UROP, involvement in computer competitions, etc.

Quite the pre-reqs...
There seems to be a pretty consistent pattern of Chrome and apps built with Electron having large memory footprints. You should turn up here when an Atom article hits the front page and see how HN commenters' attitudes to memory consumption change then...
Personally, I think the reason for this is because a lot of it doesn't actually have anything to do with diversity, but is just the same old bullshit about control, power, and domination. I encourage everyone to give this theory a chance, because I want an egalitarian world as much as any die-hard Star Trek nerd possibly can. It just appears that much of the discourse is being steamrolled in order to create local centers of power and control. Like many things throughout human history.
Not OP but this is mine right now and I'm not even doing anything that intensive. http://i.imgur.com/xYlR8Nw.png

Programmers stopped caring about memory not too long ago and this is the result.
Hopefully not Commonwealth of Independent States :)
I think a better term would be FAAS (Functions as a service), since that's what it is. Lambda looks kinda neat as far as tech goes however.
Rust isn't a panacea, nor does it claim to be. It doesn't prevent bugs. It prevents memory safety bugs.
No one is a blank slate, large parts of personality are heritable.
Psychic who predicted presidential race accurately
I love the part where I type complex systems into existence. The part where I have to figure out the complex systems other people have typed into existence, not so much.
Is it really that visible? It seems to be rare in the wild. Tokenism is far more common: noticing that there are no women, so hiring a woman, or noticing that there are no non-whites, so hiring one.

What definitely has been more visible is complaints about affirmative action, because the advantaged majority were the ones complaining. As whites lose their majority in numbers (in the US), and women make professional gains, that has changed, though, which is an understandable trigger for white male rage and terror. The vast majority of the bosses are still white men, though; it's the advantage of the incumbent.
Not necessarily. That model completely removes the individual and community as actors in society. What you are saying is that all accomplishment of a person is due to society "acting on that person" to make that person successful. Everything that happens can be labeled as discrimination with that kind of model, making it a completely useless model.

Is society "discriminating" against communities and individuals when some individuals and communities value education and spend more time studying than others?
It can! That is exactly was Deepmind was started to be!
Wow. They're getting more blunt about it than they used to be. There's basically no consideration for the ally party in that piece. They're just tools. They can get punished for bad behavior & rewarded for good behavior but don't decide on their own. The comparison to pets is fair with Pavlov-like conditioning for participating parties.

Note: I was just saying on another forum that the liberals would often reject that whites in minority-dominated areas deserved any help for structural racism they face but then demand with straight face that same whites needed to fight racism minorities face every day. The feedback indicated people didn't buy that or care to respond. See last paragraphs of No 4 on this list.
Legitimate court systems, accountable political system, protection of labor rights, they are all examples of things not being corrupt. So the reason for less corruption can't be less corruption. You're talking in circles here.
Fancy in what way?
Diversity is code for "race" and "sex". It's not a very diverse set of axes to measure.

I won't argue they aren't important axes. They may even be the two single most important. But either way it's disappointing that they're the only two axes we're actively measuring and scoring.
ah ok. i agree. we're working on that. :)

give it a shot at let us know!
Can't find this, but just recently I asked what it's called when you see reporters getting basic facts wrong about your area of expertise, but continue to trust their reporting in all other areas.
Relevant Michael Crichton quote on "the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect":

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Rush is a bit risky, it has to be invested in before enough scouting & will go up against well micro'd workers

Meta is still pretty fast, here's a SC1 AI finals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjSXj4cb_Yo
My first reaction was to check for multi-core. I've been hearing its around the corner for years.
Ask HN: Do You OK Google or Hey Siri in Public?
It's a work of speculative fiction, so detailed analysis from outside of its own world context is doomed.

It's a great story though. The first chapter is a work of transformative art. I recommend it highly.

After you (the general you) read it, there will be time for debating forehead tattoos as criminal justice, personal nuclear devices, and the role of mafioso in fast food. :)

Just writing this comment has made me want to read it again.
Well, from the background articles it seems that people aren't so much as hearing it as they are noticing a lack of wildlife and associating the two.

Given the CP-140 is expressly designed for hunting things under the ocean that wish to stay hidden, I'm sure we'll learn the source soon enough. While the Air Force is saying it only searched for an hour and a half, the Aurora can search areas for upwards of 8 hours at a time, so I highly doubt that's all they are planning on doing up there.
Living in a house full of porn stars with different girls cycling through each week, photographing them, and hanging out with them. Not something most nerds like me get the chance to experience.
BWAPI asked in the past, I think, and got pointed to the game's EULA, which forbids it. It may be a different thing if Google asks. Especially with a somewhat more remarkable result (AlphaGo) than "just" a bunch of student AI experiments.
Jinja live parser
Schools, especially primary schools, are devoted to conformity, social acceptance, and political correctness

Bingo and well said! We condition our kids to accept everything they read in their textbooks as fact. Critical thinking is key and missing.

When I was in grade 3 on MLK day our teacher split our class into 'races' by eye color and gave blue eyes treats made the brown eyes do work, it's a known/controversial exercise meant to teach about discrimination, which it did, but also it made us question authority.

We should create exercises where teachers/staff purposely present incorrect or conflicting information to students, forcing them to regularly question the quality of the information and the motivations/agenda of the source.
Show HN: An Easy Library for GPGPU in JavaScript (Mobile and Web)
Isn't delegating democracy what we do when we elect someone to congress (or parliament) to draft, debate, and enact the law?
Thanks for the feedback! Sorry if I was unclear. The comparison with PNG is very intentional to illustrate the vast difference in the compression efficiencies involved. I do state the difference clearly here though:

> This concept of throwing away bits you don't need to save space is called lossy compression. H.264 is a lossy codec - it throws away less important bits and only keeps the important bits.

> PNG is a lossless codec. It means that nothing is thrown away. Bit for bit, the original source image can be recovered from a PNG encoded image.