skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't trying to convince you that it was part of such a campaign. Rather I was wondering which particular details swayed you, as a presumably impartial observer, to believe one side of the story rather than the other.

But since you ask, the main reason I feel like its part of a campaign is because the recently released emails have confirmed that there was indeed such a campaign. Before knowing that (which I think is a solid fact at this point) I probably would have thought that "intense media campaign" was too conspiratorial to be likely.

Separately, while I don't know the Guardian author's history and experience, I feel like the vehemence of her language and the viciousness of the chosen quotes is greater than that normally shown in a science story. Also, from previous exposure to Mann and Trenberth, I (rightly or wrongly) start with the assumption that they are more concerned with political message than presenting an unbiased scientific overview.

I liked that the first article you linked included a rebuttal from Pielke, and I found his links and counter-argument persuasive. But at this point I'm conscious of my bias toward his side of the story, and thus don't trust my assessment of this particular article. That's why I was asking you which parts you found convincing, so I could try to consider them specifically.

---

The quoting of Judith Curry in the second article you linked is interesting. In 2007 she argued against Pielke's conclusions, but since then she has swung to be one of his strongest defenders. With regard to a parallel 2014 piece at Climate Progress, she wrote:

RP Jr’s post at 538 has elicited what is probably the most reprehensible and contemptible smear job that I have ever seen of a scientist, at least from an organization that has any pretense of respectability

As a result of sticking up for Pielke (as well as for stating her own beliefs) her own reputation has been similarly damaged:

Well as recently as 5 years ago, I never thought I’d live to see the day when I am very grateful that I have tenure at a university, which provides my job with some protection against politically inconvenient scientific analyses.

https://judithcurry.com/2014/03/20/nate-silvers-538-inconven...

(As a disclaimer, I'll say that while (like Pielke) I find Curry's writings to be accurate and scientifically trustworthy, many of the reader comments on her site strike me as underinformed right-wing politically biased trolling. If you can, try to judge her by her own writings, rather than by the comments of others.)
Why that pdf in the title? The page is a long html article.
Well, logitech is very different in this case. Couple years ago my trackball got broken and i was a fan of trackballs, but they started to disappear from shops. Then i just emailed them that my device broken and they immediately send me a replacement, they even didn't ask about check or any warranty proof.
Curious. Could you explain this further? I build solutions the whole day and actually most i do is coding.
"Clearly define a functional happy path for the users' goal."

There is never just one functional happy path or goal.

Each user is uniq.

Even same user expectations and 'happy' path change with time.

Take the Airbnb example, yes, at one point you just want to book a new trip.

Maybe your looking for the invoice of a past trip?

Maybe you are looking for an old booking because a friend is going to that city and you want to recommend it.

The more users, the more goals.
Yeah, this analysis is a few years out now, talking about fictional plants and untranslatability.

Bax et al. fairly convincingly identified a couple of plants and made some inroads into identifying some of the sounds and symbols.
Model-Based Machine Learning
A lot of developers who use IDEs Ike Visual Studio also use VI style bindings with modal development styles within those IDEs.

When Visual Studio Code came out, the VIM extension was one of the most sought after.
True, but if I were of a sufficiently paranoid bent, I would appreciate having a toolkit full of exploits to use as news of other surveillance features spread.

Someone clever/subversive enough could feasibly create a samizdat Red Star distro which had most of the known surveillance features disabled, for instance.
> Chapter 7 : with 10,000 examples, you will have a good chance of detecting an improvement of 0.1%

That's not true. Accuracy based on assuming an underlying binomial distribution has standard deviation sqrt( p (1 - p) / n ). Unless your accuracy is very near to 0 or 1, you're going to need more like a million samples to have a good chance of detecting a difference of 0.001 and be able to reject the hypothesis that it was not caused by statistical noise.

If the assumption is not an underlying binomial, can you explain why? I was hoping for more a lot more hard maths in this text.
However, Julia is a dynamic language and Rust is a static one.
It's built into the type system and checked statically at compile time. In rust, there can only be one 'owner' of a stored value. Ownership can be transferred, borrowed by multiple readers, or borrowed by a single writer. This ensures (at compile time) that there at any given time there is only ever one single writer OR multiple readers. Rust programs are guaranteed to be free of race conditions at compile-time. The above covers the vast majority of situations, but for cases where this is too restrictive their are other language constructs such as reference-counted types.
Xkcd: Voynich Manuscript
"Its main tank could hold 300 gallons of fuel but it wouldn’t take off with more than 80 gallons on board"
They lose 6,6 shots at net-gain fusionpower per year.
Eh, I don't think it's unfair: this person is openly attacking me for giving attention to a form of untested science -- declaring it "crockpottery".

I honestly feel proud of myself for how much I held back on this lazy person's pathetic logic: "doesn't line up with my beliefs? then it can't be true!"

I'll happily edit my statement that can defend the scientific need to dismiss information with complete prejudice, but I doubt any such logic exists. Why do I have such confidence? Because people that dismiss information without thinking are pathetic.
Google, democracy and the truth about internet search
To be fair, you basically never need scale and precision at the same time. Debts from 400 years ago aren't known down to the nanosecond.
Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View
Such large. Very 128. Much bits. Wow.
Or more generally fixed point with big numbers and lots of decimals.
I've just used Leaflet to create a map for a music festival. It was a joy to use, works well on mobile devices easy to deploy and has been well recieved. Thanks to @mourner and the team for superb library. Small, neat, well documented and changes are improvements not bloat.
This touches on a problem our current product has. We're on the second iteration where the first iteration had almost no traction yet the design and features coming from the product side assume so much implicit knowledge of the business that there's no way a complete newbie can look at it and feel confident that they know what is going on.

Because we have no traction and thus no metrics we're in a vicious "I think it should work like this so let's do it that way because you can't prove people won't like it" cycle.
It seems the nature of this and VR that they come to boom for a while and then bust, having stagnated. They then wait for the next alignment of underpinning technology, knowledge and culture to emerge again. Last last one I'm aware of was mid-late 1990s, where VRML was gaining traction and new ways of thinking about AI were emerging.

IBM Watson or similar (if I recall IBM was still calling their business AI system Watson back then) seems to be promenant in these two booms and both times the results it gives haven't matches it's marketing hype.

The technology, having been significantly furthered fades into the day to day of computing somewhat until the next boom that drives more short burst innovation and awareness.

Conscious AI and realistic VR is some way off, if we ever see it. Culturally and ethically we are not ready to answer the questions it poses and the cyclical nature gives us more time to digest the latest raft of questions in light of the progress.
I can think of astronomical measures from a couple hundred years ago that are at least second-accurate. Do you want to have DurationSecondsOnly and Duration as types? =)
Same happened to me. I have an unreasonable loyalty to Logitech not just because their product are decent but because their customer service is great.

The only other company to come close is Sandisk, who once sent me an upgraded version of my mp3 player when my head phone jack broke
33 photos of Facebook's rise from a Harvard dorm room to world domination
Same here. I used it on a site that needed a map, and although I didn't try an alternatives it was well-documented and worked immediately.

I can't say how well it competes with alternatives, but for my use-case it was ideal and very easy to get started with.
I see this argument a lot, but Uber is spending a lot to effectively lower the barrier of entry/switching by eliminating legal restrictions and changing people's expectation of car services. If I were at Uber, I'd be very worried about customers and/or drivers switching allegiances en masse.
I have played around a tiny bit with par_iter over blocking IO tasks and seen some sched_yield() loops burning CPU time instead of backing off to futex_wait. That seems suboptimal and not exactly "the best ever" I'd expect from a parallelism library.
"Labor," huh? Uber's "laborers" also carry the capital cost, operating cost, and risk of the transportation service they provide. They own their vehicles and pay for fuel, maintenance, and insurance.

Who covers those costs when no drivers are in the mix?

Somebody has to pay for that stuff. It's still true that a big chunk of uber's success in big cities comes from dodging regulations and medallion costs. In other words, they are gypsy cabs with a slick app.
I guess it's technically open source but it's old (15 year old C++) and based heavily on the pseudo-code in the paper and also tied heavily into the interpreter I was working on. I didn't do a lot of performance testing either.

The interpreter I was working on was for a language which was image-based and persistent, I guess much like a Smalltalk, etc. Reference counting was handy for aiding in determining when objects should be pages to/from the disk image and what should be in cache.

I think performance would depend a lot on the usage pattern of the object graph. My system also used a lot of immutable data. The only mutable structures were the objects that properties and methods hung off of, and hash tables.
Depends on your hardware.
https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/804470167899996160
I guess the browser calls system(3) on the arbitrary URI instead of directly exec'ing /usr/bin/nnrurlshow? How amusing.
I've been doing a lot of research into ways to automate the assessment of website credibility (and thus the organization / company / information presented), even before 'fake news' started to get its 15 minutes...

It may be just a HTTP header issue, but someone's not on the ball. I'd be annoyed if my mobile bandwidth was getting eaten up by a obvious problem. But credibility judgements are always dependent on what the viewer deems to be relevant criteria. So both of you are correct. A simple problem with the website says something about the company, not the tech. It is a minor thing but perhaps means something.

One company I worked for had a website created by a 3rd party, a cookie cutter thing, which I wasn't too impressed by given my experience in websites. It also had some little glitch that I found and pointed out on my first day. And that turned out to be a difficult year and a half... some personal stuff on my side, but the company was also managed in a substandard way. Lots of people were frustrated, it turned out. A tech company with good front end dev/designers ought to have a spiffy website.

I'd be inclined to give ML most of a break, but a tech company that has problems with its marketing side, especially when marketing something like ML is so crucial... what percentage of their initial customers is going to be people in tech? Gamers? Who do notice these sorts of details?
CLUB DE REUSSITE FINANCIERE
1988 was pretty good but 1991 was pretty crappy. 1988 saw the premiere of Star Trek TNG. Of course, I was in 5th grade, so my perspective was child-like. 1991 saw mass layoffs at multiple companies, such as GE. There was also the Gulf War and the recession.
He isn't a nice guy at work according to many sources he's extremely demanding and that's to put it lightly.
I didn't say it is the best solution in all possible cases. Just that even if you choose not to write Lisp, using a data format that follows Lisp's approach is not a stupid thing to do.

> Undervaluing this realization (and worse, reacting smugly when interacting with people who don't share your undervaluing of this) is a big part of the gulf between Lispers and the rest of the world.

You are the one setting the tone with your exclusionary rhetoric.
Let's say driverless cars happen in the next five to ten years. I see two scenarios happening - neither do I need uber. First scenario is my local car at my house becomes driverless. I can simply call my car to pick me up from anywhere. It can return home and wait (or go and pick up others as it's own on demand taxi). I now don't need uber at all - even though I use them now. So that is not a good scenario.

Second scenario is I am traveling and need a car/taxi as my local car is at home. If so, why would not other people in that city simply allow for their cars to pick me up while they are not in use. Every driverless car is now a taxi.

Basically all that is needed is an app and some service where owners subscribe and let their cars be used as a taxi. Perhaps uber controls the app and service as the dominant leader. But I bet there will be a lot of competition in that area with car rental companies, manufacturers, local cab companies, individuals and uber all competing.

I suppose the third scenario is that many people do not own a car in the future and we just subscribe to a car service. Perhaps in that area uber is the choice. But perhaps the manuacturers roll their own service too that you subscribe for a time share of a car.
I have a Asus laptop here, that was bought with Linux support and Ubuntu had its share of issues with the wlan card.

To this day still doesn't take advantage of AMD GPU as it should.
Isn't it easier to remember 10 bits ~= 1000? 32 is about 310, or 1000 1000 * 1000.
Yes, Ansible supports conditionals and loops in its playbooks. Ansible 2.0 also introduced blocks, which are effectively a try-catch-finally in disguise.
Uber's drivers aren't just a labor cost, they are one of the company's main sources of capital since it is the drivers who must buy or lease the cars and make the payments. Here in Seattle there are around 9,000 drivers, presumably with roughly one car each costing about $25,000 apiece (avg. Prius), or over $200MM in capital equipment for just one city. Current estimates are that an Uber driver working full time nets <$40,000 per year not including the cost of the car, which is likely at least $6,000 in payments. There are over 160,000 Uber drivers in the US, collectively they're paying about $1BN a year to provide the cars for Uber. In a driverless model that cost is entirely shifted to Uber itself.
Somewhere maybe 40km south of Tamale towards Kintampo. We were on a bus headed south on the main road (Google Maps calls it N10).
There have also been a few cases where bells have fallen out of their frames, including at Kilmersdon in 2013 [1,2]. In Canada, this resulted in a fatal accident in 1999 [3].

[1]: http://treblesgoing.org.uk/kilmersdonaccident.html

[2]: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507951/Elderly-bell...

[3]: http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/bell-tower-death-pro...
If the business is large enough, you could combine drivers and AI. For example when hauling people to/from airports, the difficult situations usual arise on the city end. The airport and highway part could be "easily" covered by AI. Driver would jump to car closer to the city.

Or you could use different vehicles. AI driven minibus for long haul and current driver system for shorter distances. If the system runs smoothly (no extra waiting) and pricing is right, I could imagine using something like this.
More than Real Time (200 FPS) Optical Flow with Video++ (video)
I've noticed most of my facebook friends (who happen to be democrats/progressives) are absolutely furious with Trump accepting the call. I would hope they would be celebrating, as this article suggests.
Or Practical NonLisp,
or Nonpractical Common Lisp.
I've been a lifetime Windows user and I just recently switched to Linux Mint. It's really come a long way since I last tried it 1-2 years ago.

Actually, I've been having far more problems with Windows 10 than with Linux (just today it decided to make my speakers sound awful and nothing seems to fix it). And for some reason, Windows problems seem a lot more difficult to solve, even though I've been using it for 20 years.
Graphical Models – Christopher Bishop – MLSS 2013 Tübingen (3 lectures)
I'm sure this information is quite verifiable on google and all..(just google from Tamale to Kintampo and bingo!!) but you're saying that an armed robber in Ghana points a gun at you, takes your cash and leaves your visa on the floor. Walks away.
You're not adding addresses together, that doesn't make sense. You're adding ints to addresses, it's a completely different property, even if the representation happens to fit into the same amount of bits. Nothing more than a convenient coincidence.
Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods
It's drivel because the individual sentences of the 'theory' are just .. meaningless. Here's an absolutely trivial exercise to demonstrate it: let's find a paper he wrote and see if it makes any sense. (Turns out these are hard to find, because most of his work is apparently creating websites about how great he is.)

Take a random paper I found: http://vixra.org/pdf/0910.0006v1.pdf

"It
conceives subatomic particles to be Turing wave patterns that self-organize within a subquantum
medium that functions as an open reaction-diffusion system."

This is meaningless. But maybe if I read on I'll find out that it's just extremely poorly written?

"Under the right conditions, the concentrations of the
variable reactants of these reaction systems spontaneously self-organize into stationary reactiondiffusion
wave patterns called Turing patterns, so named in recognition of Alan Turing who in
1952 was the first to point out their importance for biological morphogenesis. "

Also meaningless.

"In a three-dimensional volume we would
expect that a supercritical Brusselator reaction-diffusion system would give rise to a periodic
structure having a Gaussian central core surrounded by a pattern of concentric spherical shells of
declining amplitude"

Gibberish.

"Etherons in this reaction system play a morphogenetic role similar to Turing's morphogens."

Gibberish

Etc.

This paper says nothing meaningful. It's not precise enough to be parsed into predictions about the universe. He'll tell you that it predicts stuff, but the words and equations don't. They don't say anything that can be unambiguously mapped to predictions, equations, or statements of any sort. I could throw all these words - etherons, Brusselators, Turing waves, etc into a random text generator, and the result would be as meaningful as his actual writing.

That or, it has content but it's so obfuscated under meaningless jargon with no meaningful explanations, no simple sentences, no ability to explain a single point lucidly, that it effectively says nothing.

Either way, there is no reason to take it seriously if it can't formulate meaningful and communicative English sentences.

Also, it's extremely weird to accuse me of depending on a government to think for me when I've generated like a dozen carefully argued rational thoughts here, including all sorts of scientific explanation. You're just.. ignoring them, and attacking me. You have to stop that.
Or could you actually get rid of your own car and ride only on Uber? Due to it's scale, Uber might be able to offer competitive pricing.

If there is no driver involved the cost structure for you and Uber is pretty much the same. Except Uber can probably negotiate better deals on new cars and service (due to volume) and also achieve higher utilization. On the other hand, Uber of course needs to make a profit.
I recommend having a look though the Codex Seraphinianus which is an artwork inspired by the manuscript. It has an incredibly alien feel.
While the original formula for damascus is lost, we still have access to resulting products, ie there are original damascus swords that survive into present.
I like the core Scheme language, but I never could get used to its macro syntax. I prefer Common Lisp macro syntax for that, and Clojure's macro system being very similar to that of Common Lisp is an added advantage!
Something involving femtosecond lasers maybe?
I also hoped for an update on this one. He is quite convincing.
http://ciphermysteries.com/2014/02/21/stephen-bax-voynich-ma... is critical of the approach taken by Stehen Bax.
Good read. It is instructive to see how a business on a slow ramp can get off-rails by forcing strategic growth decisions prematurely and without sufficient reflection

> We searched frantically for a head of sales. It took three months to find someone, and she only took the job on the condition we open a second office in North Carolina. We opened that office. Grew it to 14 people. Then, when it was quickly clear spreading a sales team across two locations so early was crazy, we shut it down. All within 12 weeks. There’s $500k eviscerated.

So there was a LA based sales team that was working and the customers I assume are media companies. The sales model working was individuals making direct sales. Then in NC ramping up another team so big and so fast? Another model in another place? Where was the board providing a check here? The problem here was not too senior too early but getting someone senior that was not properly aligned and letting that person dictate the sales strategy.

Enterprise sales is hard. Cycles are typically long. Some sales people are gifted and some come with well established connections. Initial success can be a factor of the latter - then comes the chasm. Judging velocity and scaling up can be non-trivial.
>> That's why reading old occult texts is hard.

Hard, and it also costs Sanity, let's not forget.
That's a pretty tough thing to ask.
with flying cars #UberElevate

https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf
Flag and all, i wouldn't call it a "Fake US Embassy". With the high rate of Visa denials in countries like Nigeria,(and some other francophone West African countries) Ghana is a go to haven for all your visa issues. I'm quite sure most of these "victims" knew the kind of documentation they were going to get, just as long as it gets you through immigration. Scam might not be the word here, more like illegal travel facilitation.
Caution: Grossly inaccurate and click bait title. They've tested with only 7,500 simultaneous users load and calling it billion user load test because they've added rows for a billion users in the database.
This simple mathematical logic can account for brain computation across the entire evolutionary spectrum, ranging from the simplest neural networks to the most complex.

That is, further research will investigate how e.g. a mouse turns in a particular direction in a maze before investigating how high-performing humans perform amazing mental feats. It may all be the same at some level, but we have to walk before we can run.
Are these genetically engineered cows the future of medicine?