skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems like a really hard problem to tackle. The article kind of nails the problem in that none of what the children are doing on the videos actually violates any rules nor would it be classified as sexual in any way. There's no nudity, they aren't doing anything sexual, they aren't even truly saying anything sexual.

In a way this is the flip side of the "it isn't porn, it's art" argument. Not all nudity is porn, and not all porn involves nudity or sex. Trying to figure out where to draw the line is very much non-trivial, and is made even more so by the fact that exactly where that line falls varies quite wildly from person to person. As someone with no attraction to either of the fetishes (or is it three fetishes, are we counting pedophilia as one of them in this case?) mentioned in the article or as the focus of the videos I'd be hard pressed to classify any of the videos they're talking about as pornographic or erotic, but apparently there's a subset of the population that that isn't true of. Aside from banning any interaction between adults and someone under age I'm not sure it's going to be possible to prevent something like this from happening.

There's also the question of if we should be trying to prevent something like this. I know everyone's gut reaction is "BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!" and "OMG! PEDOPHILES!!!", but honestly if the children aren't being creeped out or feeling intimidated and threatened, aren't being stalked, and aren't doing anything sexual, how much effort should we be wasting worrying about some weirdo getting turned on by someone talking about stepping on bugs or whatever?

Edit: I'd also like to point out the best way to help prevent something like this is for the parents to be monitoring what their children are doing online. It wouldn't stop all of it, after all as pointed out the contents of most if not all these videos seems rather harmless (which is kind of the point I guess) so many parents might not have issue with it, but they should still be aware of what's going on in case it doesn't stop with something relatively harmless like this. E.G. the guy mentioned in the article asking the kids to Skype with him.
Also, if you can prove German language skills at B1 level, you can apply for permanent residence at 21 months instead of 33 months with the Blue Card.
Who chose the 1,856 source images?
Administrators suck up a huge amount of money these days as well. That's the real scam, considering they only seem to make my life harder.

My institution has the added administerial tax of those offices inhabiting all the nicest buildings on the quad. Really drives home the totem pole of who's most important on campus.
> The basis of the Intel MIC architecture is to leverage x86 legacy by creating a x86-compatible multiprocessor architecture that can utilize existing parallelization software tools. Programming tools include OpenMP, OpenCL, Cilk/Cilk Plus and specialised versions of Intel's Fortran, C++ and math libraries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi

It's not threads, it's driver and compiler support for existing multiprocessing frameworks.
>No bank is going to give money for degrees without a realistic change of getting paid back.

Then they shouldn't. A big part of the problem is that the negative externalities of loans are all but eliminated from the issuer and completely placed on the borrower, only that these borrowers almost always unaware or don't fully appreciate the risk. If we allowed student loans to be shed through bankruptcy then companies would stop giving out $100k loans for art degrees and history degrees. This is the sort of risk/reward calculation that most incoming students aren't equipped to make, but actuaries are great at. Why don't we let them?
Environments (dev, prod etc) support would be great, currently need to use apex to simulate.
Thanks - I've just started watching cs50 and he is great.

I've been doing professional software development for 10 years but his explanations finally made some very basic things click like they haven't ever before.
Turing takes my vote.
I disagree - once you have used a minor for your own gratification you have passed a point that society really does care about - frotting for example is illegal, because of the state of mind of the perpetrator not the victim.
They've been saying that since the dawn of the US Military. I genuinely don't buy it. It is just like Trump's alarmism over the size of our military (the navy specifically) shrinking under Obama post-GW Bush surge. The technology has gotten so much better and automation in specific allows us to do more with less people. This is by design and I'd almost argue if the tech wasn't getting better and needing less humans, our R&D is clearly failing. The current Order of Battle of the entire US Military calls for us to be able to fight two large scale wars simultaneously. We've done that arguably well/poorly with Iraq and Afghanistan. They're coming to grips that with unconventional warfare, you simply need a LOT more boots on the ground trudging around.

Our technology advantage alone allows us to realistically probably coast for 6-8 years and still be matched only realistically by China. Russia has a few things that can match current US kit (their new tanks are excellent and they have some of the best anti-air kit in the world), but the Kremlin simply far and above lacks the cash to be in a position to afford to pay for a serious modernization. Obama's sanctions along with the massive drop in oil have put a dent in Russia's economy regardless of Putin's posturing. Sure they have very nice new jets, but they have precious few of them. We have nice new jets, better radars, and all of our older jets can spank the pants off of their older jets, etc, etc.

This is really just my anecdotal experience as a US Army veteran who was in OIF II 2003-2004.
Yes, his twisting simple facts, which are counter-evidence to his claim, into a Kafkatrap against me is quite some mental gymnastics.

Or would you care to refute the logical fallacies I pointed out in his claims?

I guess probably not. After all, I'm just one of "these people" who are "pretty nuts."

It still hasn't sunk in: this hubris of yours is why Clinton lost the election. Be careful looking down your nose all the time--you might walk into something.
> They see through it. They just know they have no other option.

To add to this, administrators know if they don't hire extensively they are likely to be replaced by someone who will. There is no control mechanism. Giving students a small periodic vote in respect of their top administration would go a long way towards ameliorating such corruption.

The "Dictator's Handbook" covers such topics https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
Hmm, yes, at some point, opportunity cost is a thing. I think there's a risk that that line of thinking can be very reductio ad absurdum where only the most gruesome of offences deserve investigative resources and all others are dismissed out of hand.

OK, I'll take a new tack and try to quantify it better. People who are grooming hundreds of children for sexual exploitation (in the open, no less) merit real concern. That the children don't know it's happening now is not, in my opinion, the standard we should use to decide how bad it is.

Rather, we can ask: what will happen if no intervention is done? The evidence suggests that they are being exploited; the network of children being exploited is growing; their exploitation leaves breadcrumbs for others to follow and potentially expand upon; and in the future, it is likely that some of the hundreds of children involved in this will realize that they were used as a sexual plaything.

Where does it stop? I dunno--I'll agree that this it's hard to find the right balance. As long as the bad guys are self-curating playlists with hundreds of victim videos whose comments include easily searched terms, I think the effort/reward here is likely pretty good.
The thing that worries me most is the delinquency rate. It is at 11%[1]. For comparison the housing market delinquency rate went from 1.6% in 2006 and went to 11.26% in 2010 (height, 2008 went from 3% to 8%[2]). That's where I see the real bubble indicator. I really wonder how much more it can expand. And I don't hear serious talk about what to do WHEN it bursts. Because it is really a matter of when and not if.

[1] https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRSFRMACBS
In the United States the vast majority of student loans are from the government.
A few years ago I ported some efficient perlin noise generation into javascript to play with it. Here's a really simple visualisation of what perlin noise actually looks like:

http://josephg.github.io/noisejs/demo3d.html

(This is actually a 3d simplex noise function, where the z axis is mapped to time. Simplex noise is a variant on perlin noise. Perlin noise is also in the repo but I don't have a demo of it online.)

Repo: https://github.com/josephg/noisejs
The US has a very complicated system of multiple, income-based, student loan repayment schemes[1]. 20 to 25 years of repayment based on many factors. It is so complicated the government has created a "Repayment Estimator"[2] to help people choose the best plan. At a glance it looks similar to the New Zealand 8%. Seems like most systems evolve to where they are impossible for a human understand. See tax code, social security, Obamacare, etc.

[1] https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans
[2] https://studentloans.gov/myDirectLoan/mobile/repayment/repay...
I seem to recall that when IRC first started, there was only one "network" and that it was a Big Thing when a second IRC network started up.
For the ‘new yellow journalists,’ opportunity comes in clicks and bucks
The NASA Administrator, Charlie Bolden, was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the United States Senate. NASA is not part of any department but rather reports directly to the President of the United States.

https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/hqlibrary/ic/faqs.html

DARPA is part of a department, the United States Department of Defense.

http://www.darpa.mil/

Both NASA and DARPA are as Federal as Federal gets and as govmint as govmint gets.

Full disclosure: my daddy worked for NASA on Mercury thru Apollo. He worked for the govmint.
A lot of consumer hardware is assembled in China, but modern technology is "made" from globally sourced components and talking about a country of origin is disingenuous. And the software for Western brands is made in Western countries, not in China.
Because an employed engineer is such a higher form of existence
Mobly – Test framework for integration tests with complex test bed setup
"Why are interest free student loans never floated as an option?"

Imagine what would happen if the US government made student loans interest free. Who would gain, and who would lose?

(1) Students could afford to take out larger loans (as the repayments would be more affordable with 0% interest vs. 4.66% interest)

(2) As a result of (1) colleges could charge higher tuition fees, without reducing the number of students would could afford to pay

(3) The government would pay interest to the banks (interest that's paid by students under the current system).

Based on what we've seen in the past, increasing access to credit for students mostly benefits colleges. Students end up paying the same monthly payments. Just like how lower interest rates make house prices go up.

This is indeed a sad situation. I'm generally in favour of free-market solutions, but most 18-year-olds don't have sufficient information or ability to act as a rational market participant. So the situation in the UK, where undergraduate education is mostly funded by the government, and prices are centrally capped, seems much better for students.
This reminds me of something Laurence on Project Runway recently said, "Either I'm going to be rich or I'm going to be poor, but I'm not gonna be in between."

Why work so hard when your discretionary income is barely higher than those on welfare?
you need to scroll up...

----

In 1997 I received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for work I had done on procedural texture. For example, the NYU Torch on the right is made entirely from procedural textures (except for the text along the bottom). The flame, background, and metal and marble handle are not actually 3D models - they are all entirely faked with textures. A hi-res image of a marble vase I made using this technique can be found here. A bunch of other texture images I created can be found here.

I then improved it, and wrote a paper about that. You can play with interactive demos of the improved version here.

You can play with designing noise-based textures yourself with a really nice interactive Java Applet created by Justin Legakis. Also, the interactive fractal planet demo on my home page is made using these techniques.

It seems that my techniques found their way into the various software packages, such as Autodesk Maya, SoftImage, 3D Studio Max, Dynamation, RenderMan, etc., that folks use to make the effects for feature films, which is way cool. Movies look better now, and I guess that makes me a good American.

Here's what the award actually says:

To Ken Perlin for the development of Perlin Noise, a technique used to produce natural appearing textures on computer generated surfaces for motion picture visual effects.
The development of Perlin Noise has allowed computer graphics artists to better represent the complexity of natural phenomena in visual effects for the motion picture industry.

Needless to say, my Mom was very happy.
When it can, detecting thoughtcrime might not be far off ...

AI could soon filter some of this stuff or screen it to alert humans, which will obviously be a good thing.

But I think it's up to us to adapt to new technological environments. Parents shouldn't be allowing their young children to post videos of themselves on youtube for a variety of reasons. And kids should be warned not to do things strangers on the internet ask them to do, just as we warn them about strangers on the street.
If you use KNL as an accelerator you got same problem as GPU.

If you're using it in standalone mode then keep in mind that every part of code that is not using AVX runs on slow Atom-like CPU. You have to vectorize code yourself or find a library that did that for you.

Neither of above is close to "recompile good old X86 and run".
What's the motivation fo recipients of such funds (universities, faculty, staff, facility builders) to reduce their prices? They operate in a quasi-monopolistic environment where system adjusts to absorb larger budgets thrown at them.
As it's true for all media in general,
never leave your kids alone with youtube, especially if only clicking on recommendations, even with toy videos. Things get really weird, really fast after some iterations.

Every small, in itself harmless, subculture apparently draws in some outright creepy to exploitive people after a given time.
NASA's Administrator reports directly to the White House: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/hqlibrary/ic/faqs.html

The CIA reports to the DNI which is also selected by the Whitehouse and confirmed by the Senate. For independent, they sure have an awful lot of Executive and Legislative branch interaction for their top leadership.

Civilians or military, they're all Federal employees. Your analogies are simply wrong.
If twitter let you filter tweets and easily build lists around users, it would be most of the way towards being a more functional platform that let you easily finds signal amidst noise.
Sorry if I sounded grand there, that wasn't the intention though. I sincerely think, what I wrote reflects some part of the reality about these things called "learn x in y minutes". I may not doubt their intentions and even grant that some of them have very good intentions. But what worries me is the negative attitude about learning such titles (and some such tutorials/articles) end up promoting.

No doubt, the internet has made many things easier to learn. Myself has been very much a beneficiary of the internet.

Take Erlang [1] from that site for example: The site doesn't say anything about how many minutes should I spend to learn Erlang. How many minutes does the author(s) thinks one should spend to learn Erlang? Not mentioned. Even at best such things can be misleading to many newcomers.

[1] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/erlang/
Nice try. Yiwu is still HUGE, and a great place to find products to sell, or a place for a product you need.
> Where is the collateral? You buy a house, don't pay... you lose the house.

And what happens when the bubble bursts and the house is now worth 200k less than what it was originally purchased for? The bank writes it off.

So I propose we give everyone a paperclip with their degree and then if they file for bankruptcy they can give the paperclip, which depreciated 50-100k, back to the bank. It works for boomers so I think it'll work for millennials.

...I'm only half kidding with this comment.
Outlook MSG Conversion to MIME Message and Enhanced Export of OST to PST File
Postpone, it will never be defeated on the scale of the universe.
Was there anything particular that jumped out? I skimmed over the first three weeks but nothing caught my eye and my ADD kicked in. Going to check out CS75 now.
How should we teach children about technology?
At this point it is still "worth it" though. Might be in huge debt but you can get a job that you can afford that debt though. Now I personally don't think this is a good environment for a healthy economy, but for many it is still "worth it". It'll crash when it isn't, and I think we're getting close to that.
This isn't a bubble. There is no stock of assets that are suddenly going to fall in market value. You can see education as an investment, but it's not a tradeable asset. If I buy an apartment, there's a market that (i) tells me the value of the apartment at any time, (ii) let's me (or the bank) liquidate the apartment and turn it into cash.

University degrees aren't like that. Someone holding a degree doesn't suffer additionally when people stop realising that this type of degree isn't worth the sticker price. He's not selling his degree to new students. Whatever his experience is in the job market is not affected by the price new students pay for their degrees.
I can also look at the 6 pictures and accurately guess who the bad guys are. The 3 who are frowning like they're being photographed against their will for a mug shot are bad. The 3 guys earnestly smiling and wearing suits are good.

I dunno if the sample from that page is representative of their test set, but if so, it's pretty weak.
Have hope! Given enough time, perhaps we can figure out how to hop on over to the next one.
Lake Peigneur sinkhole Engineering disaster
Yes, Netflix is really very addictive. And sometimes peer pressure puts on you an expectation to be always 'on'/watching something or the other.
The best solution is, of course, to read the Wikipedia plotline of the series in 5 minutes and save yourself tens of hours in the future.
There's also the fact that youtube comments are an absolute cesspool. I don't even bother reading them anymore because it's almost exclusively trolls and the scum of the internet that dominate there for some reason. Whatever the most deplorable, offensive, ignorant, or disgusting thing you can think of, someone has probably said it in the comments to a youtube video, most likely to a video of someones grandmother knitting a sweater or something equally inoffensive.
I have a 7 week old and a 22 month old and am convinced that - outside of certain fields - college will be entirely optional to them. Even now, there are many things that can/should be learned through apprenticeship or online or via other means and that is only going to increase in the next 15+ years.

Please note: I said "college" not education. I believe education will always be vital, no matter what. A piece of paper "proving" it may not be.
There's arguably a distinction to be made between what self identified conservatives believe and the PR campaigns which seek to align themselves with conservatives and attempt to hoodwink those people into supporting.

For instance, if a beer commercial was jingoistic and patriotic, we'd probably agree that it was a marketing tactic and not necessarily the drinking choice of nationalists.
Debate isn't ironic, and it's not productive to laugh at people who want to reason with you.

I'm not sure what you mean by "trust and human nature". These seem to be self-evident (read: mostly rhetorical), and not directly in conflict with what I've said.

I'm also not sure what details I've nitpicked. I pointed out a case that I thought you might consider a hit piece, and explained why dulling it down to just that has a chilling effect on journalism as a whole and operates against the public interest.

The articles you linked portray Trump in a negative light. Is the conclusion supposed to be that HRC must be portrayed in an equally negative light? It's odd to have to say this, seeing how I'm not a particular fan of hers, but the media cannot treat circumstances as equals when they are definitively not equal. There is no modern analog to what either candidate has in their closets, but to equivocate between them via this fact alone is, bluntly, bewildering.

I appreciate your thoughts on the matter, and I hope you revisit this conversation (or perhaps the thoughts behind it) at a later point without immediately defaulting to a defense against "ideology".
Cornell scientists convert carbon dioxide, create electricity
Many students pay way more than they have to. I graduated from a top-10 public school (in-state) after transferring from community college and my total bill was about $35k. That's not nothing, but also not a ball-and-chain six-figure mark that some people accrue.

There are better options than a lot of people have taken. To me the solution has to involve better financial and career counseling for high school graduates.
The misattribution doesn't make the observation any less pertinent.
False dichotomy. Just because an article has some facts buried in it does not mean it's not a hit piece. A hit piece is simply something crafted to create a strong negative impression of a person.

With that in mind, let's go to the NYT front page:

Donald Trump’s Swamp Gets Murkier
A disturbing number of lobbyists and special interest players
are joining the transition team.

The interaction does not appear to violate federal laws or
ethics rules, three lawyers said, but it did create the appearance
that Mr. Trump and his partners are using his status as a way to
profit.

Cabinet Selection Turns Into Spectacle That’s Made for TV

Do we now live in some kind of alternate reality where stuff like this is considered normal, unbiased journalism?
>Not the professors, let's get real. They have probably gotten sweet raises, but nowhere near the growth rate of tuition.

Actually, at most institutions, professors' raises barely match the rate of inflation, and the majority of teaching has been moved onto adjunct faculty who have no job security.
Raspberry Pi 2 Gets Upgrade to 64-Bit Broadcom BCM2837 Processor With PCB v1.2
Maybe you're just using the wrong heuristic for Twitter? I never follow more than 100 people and periodically cull my list down to that if I go over. My goal is primarily to follow interesting people, especially other local programmers, people who are working on cool research topics I would otherwise miss, and friends who make me laugh. I remove anyone who is too noisy for too long, even if they are interesting. Twitter is by far my favorite social network and is generally high-signal for me.

Popularity seems like an anti-goal unless you're selling something.
Tetris heap spraying: spraying the heap on a budget
Every giant stands on the shoulder of other giants. Basically, the idea of "Father of so and so" doesn't make any sense.