skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a pretty good article and it reflects my tiny bit of knowledge of forensic units and the people who've stayed in them.

> Guild Lodge is one of 60 medium-secure mental health hospitals in England and Wales that house people deemed to be a danger either to themselves or others on account of their mental illness. Most of the 149 patients have committed offences while mentally ill, or have been diagnosed with a mental illness while already in prison. Some have been in higher-security institutions; almost all are being held under the terms of the Mental Health Act.

This article doesn't do a good job of describing the difference between regular MH hospitals (where, if you're a danger to yourself or others you may be held against your will detained under section of the MH act) and forensic units ("secure hospitals") where if you pose a risk of harm to yourself or others you may be held against your will, detained under section of the MH Act.

The difference is in the involvement of criminal justice.

Other things to look out for in the article: in the images you can see the door handles are an anti-ligature design; there are windows everywhere for open sightlines everywhere;

> Service users (the preferred term for patient)

Some people who are detained under section hate this term, especially if they're subjected to restraint or forced treatment.

> As with all hospitals, the aim is that patients will one day be discharged from Guild Lodge with their illnesses under control. It is recovery-focused rather than punitive, and although the Ministry of Justice retains a controlling interest in the onward progression of many patients (some will go back to prison)

So, here's the thing. If you get a prison sentence you serve that term, and are let out. (Although if you murdered someone you're on licence - they can recall you to prison - for the rest of your life). If you're detained under the MH act you don't know how long you'e going to be there, and if they're risk averse you might spend a long time in there.

I've spoken to a small number of people detained in medium secure forensic units, and they said that this was the hardest part of it for them. They'd come from prison where they'd got into the mindset of serving their time.

Also, I tend to prefer the word "forensic unit" rather than "secure unit". Most regular MH hospitals have some locked wards, but they are not secure units. The word secure is a bit confusing.
serious question: do you know who made the exploding samsung batteries? can the same kind of thing happen to car or home batteries?
Well.. if you have a latent mental illness and you take psychoactive substances, you may have a bad time.

The issue is complicated: people often don't know about their illness and don't know that they respond differently to substances than other people do.

I'm looking forward to a future where genetic testing for these things is as common as testing your drugs for purity (which, i hope, will also be be more common!)
The farmer who built her own broadband
The story is a little different.

As far as I remember the Chinese battery makers started doing cheap copies of known brands but because they were constantly looking for new ways to improve profitability and weren't being regulated by more strict european or american labor laws, soon developed better and better production methods while increasing the quality of their products and soon found themselves selling to some of the larger European car manufactorer.

I will see if I can dig up the story it's been a while and was in some radio program.
Personal goal is to transition from basic C++ to either NVidia's CUDA framework, or move towards iOS/Android app programming.
My friend in med school mentioned a study that found a number of genes for which smoking cannabis increases risk of developing schizophrenia, and a small number for which smoking cannabis actually decreases it! If anyone has heard of this I'd love a link to the study
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8689377 seems to suggest increased paranoia with alcohol consumption as well. Probably makes the condition worse rather than being the root cause.
Nothingness
>> your kid would never play with a Spirograph today

That just represents AFK parenting. If your 5-8 year old is being babysat by the television or iPad, it is hardly their fault that they aren't experiencing anything hands-on.
Here's a 2016 celebrity death list...

Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Glen Fry, Natalie Cole...

http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/celebrity-...
My goal for 2017 is to get a _lot_ better at the fields of reverse engineering and vulnerability discovery (as well as showing PoC).

The plan of action: keep at it by attacking more wargames and CTF (capture the flag) contests. Also, I should probably try to consider bug bounties, to be able to orient the skills to real world problems as well.
The last link makes you wonder about the digital literacy of the intended audience of that web page:

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Blaming the younger generations for Brexit and Trump? That's some talented mental gymnastics.
The dark side of Google according to Googlers
The Argument Against Terraforming Mars
> (Incidentally, anyone mentioning purchasing power or worker costs doesn't know what they are talking about. Paris, Hong Kong, Spain and Singapore are all wealthy nations with costs far closer to India and China than to the US.)

You think Paris has worker costs closer to India than the US? I think you might be the one who doesn't know what you're talking about.

The minimum wage in France is $10.11 per hour (at the exchange rate right now), compared with $7.25 for the US. It is at at best 50% more than China or India (where minimum wage varies by location), and labour in France is highly unionized so workers are on more than the minimum as-is. The current Paris - Lyon HSR link in France is budgeted at $12.5 billion [1].

Your idea that a California HSR project could be done for $2-4 billion is simply unreasonable. It can't be done. You're off by an order of magnitude. Is $64 billion a lot of money? Yes. Is it too much? Probably. Can it be done for $2 billion? Absolutely not. Go look at comparable mega-projects in western Europe. Crossrail in London is about $18 billion. The Gotthard Base Tunnel was $12 billion. The Moscow-Kazan HSR railway is going to cost at least $29 billion, and that's being built with Chinese assistance.

[1] http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/single-view/view/snit-mak...
[2] https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/chinese-to-invest-10-bil...
I don't have the study readily at hand, but per-kilometer costs for rail infrastructure are 5-10 times higher in the US than in developed countries like Spain and Germany, and 20-40 times higher than in developing countries like China and India.

Labour costs do play a major role in the 4x cost differential between developing and developed countries -- as do higher land acquisition / right-of-way re-engineering costs, and greater safety regulations. That does not, explain the 5x-10x cost differential between the rest of the developed world and the US.

That difference is explained by the fact that in the US, corruption is legal.

Transport projects are always optimised for the value they will create for the greatest number of beneficiaries. In the rest of the world, "beneficiaries" means "people who will use the transport system, or benefit from its secondary effects such as economic uplift". In the US, "beneficiaries" means "campaign contributors".

Those campaign contributors are, primarily, unions and corporations. The more union jobs are created, the more political support a project will receive. The more money goes to corporations (eg., PFI often just ensures that 20%-30% of the cost of the project ends up being interest payments to private banks.), the more political support a project will receive. Union donations swing democratic and corporate donations swing republican, so if you want bipartisan support for a project, you need to ensure that both sides are feeding generously at the trough.

So you see, in this system, the cost is the benefit, and its correlation to actual beneficiaries (eg., the general public) is tenuous at best. It's insanely corrupt. This pattern of corruption is not unique to public transport infrastructure: it can be seen most egregiously in the defence sector. I honestly believe that, left unchecked, this will undermine both America's economic and military competitiveness to an ultimately fatal degree.

(FWIW: I was born in Silicon Valley, and 10 years ago when I decided that I wanted to work on real transport infrastructure innovation, I emigrated to the UK. The US political system is simply too broken to get anything done, and offers no hope of any change in the future.)
States Will Lead on Climate Change in the Trump Era
To add to that from someone who went into programming after math grad school, composition is actually much more natural in the way to think about functions. When putting together functions, and where they map to, it is more natural to think about functions the way Haskell thinks about them, but more natural when writing them to go the other way at first. This is because when one is working at the lower level of just writing code it becomes easier to move from one data state to another, but at the high level, you lose some flexibility in seeing the high level structure and it becomes more difficult to figure out how to move things around if it turns out you have to modify the code.

In math, the preferred way of writing functions is via composition, as then it enables tools of visualization such as commutative diagrams. One thing to note is that in general mathematicians have a history of picking the right choice in notations for thinking about abstractions at an intuitive level in the world of mathematics (when there is a choice and it matters), and IMO they were correct about how they chose to represent function composition, although it is not immediately obvious unless you start talking about function domains and ranges - the composition notation matches the flow of reading how functions map values from one set to another.

That Clojure version reads like a complete mess to me personally.
Distributed Systems and ML are probably two most interesting things that I have on the radar, that got me really scared to the point where I do not know from where to start, and most importantly for what?! Most of my free time (time I spent on personal projects) was writing physics simulation in Java, playing with Lisp and doing some backend development. Nothing amazing. Year and a half ago I got really interested into Operating systems (tried FreeBSD and blew my mind) and played with Docker. And at the end of this year, I am like:
"Ok Philip what shall I focus on for year to come?" And the thing is If I choose to go Ai route, I do not know from where to start (I consider my math background to be pretty good, I was studying EE before I dropped out after 2 years, and enrolled to CS, done all of the math courses which were pretty rough), Ai/ML looks interesting but it looks so high level to program and so abstract to understand. It's really looking like arcane magic to me. With Dist. Systems is that I have a feeling that is more "engineering" and "industrial" thing, where you can't do much by yourself at home, besides reading and writing some code in relevant languages about backend, sometimes lower level, and learning about systems and computer innards. And the third option was to go and play with Erlang/Elixir, which is most attractive since results will come pretty soon, and may be relevant form my interest in Distributed systems.
The economics of chatbots
Should we care how many blacks work at Slack or Dropbox?
GIMPshop
PrivateBin 1.1 released, Italian and Russian translations, fixes XSS and DB issue
Scientists plan to send greetings to other worlds
Similar APIs use the same terminology, concepts and words:

- Wit.ai: https://wit.ai/docs/recipes#categorize-the-user-intent

- API.ai: https://docs.api.ai/docs/key-concepts
From what attack scenario does it protect (there's a few, low possibility) providing real handicap in usability?

I believe pressing on a button not confirming any transaction details/message is quite a useless action
I'm not a troll, I have an article on this https://sakurity.com/blog/2015/07/18/2fa.html
> Otherwise learn vocabulary in context by reading.

I really enjoyed -- and benefited from -- "The Japanese Reader Collection". There's about 5 thin volumes available from Amazon. They're basically Japanese children's stories, written in Kanji with Furigana and lots of annotations. Every word and sentence is explained and translated to English.

I started off by simply reading the Furigana at normal reading speed, without caring about reading comprehension. This greatly helped with my kana reading. It especially helped me learn to cope with the lack of spaces in Japanese. Then I started to focus on the meaning. And now that I've memorized most the JLPT Level 5 Kanji, I'm starting to focus on recognizing them in the context of these stories.
I find it weird to derive ethics from fictional examples at all. The reason is “ex falso quod libet”, i.e. that one can derive any statement from a false (in this case, fictional) proposition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
Canada among the 'most expensive mobile data countries,' report says
Even after Oracle v. Google?
While youngsters did poll heavily towards "No" on Brexit, they neglected the need to actually go to the voting booth.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/young-remai...

The Trump election was way too close for a definitive cause to be definable. Anything can be assigned the position of straw that broke the camel's back. Anyhow, young voter turnout was much lower than for Obama, and that too can get the badge for cause, inasmuch as strong youngster presence at the voting booth would have prevented a Trump presidency.
The Old Republic seems to be totally cool with the idea of slavery, Anakin's mother as you say, droids seem to be self-aware with personalities etc but are mere property, and so on. The Jedi were intent on preserving the status quo and not rocking the boat. Overthrowing it was absolutely the right thing to do.
Have a look at IBM solution. It's named OpenWhisk and it's open source: https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk. Otherwise, you may look at Funktion which is using Docker: https://github.com/fabric8io/funktion
To anyone who hasn't seen Rogue One yet... I think it's the best Star Wars movie since Empire. Worth your time. Amazing fast-paced character development and arcs (compare Star Wars to Suicide Squad if you really want to be impressed or see how badly it could have turned out), wonderful little cameos, rich visuals that show what the prequels could have been, and paramount a superbly written and acted story.

(Spoilers)

The ambiguous ethics of sending an assassin to kill Galen because The Rebellion didn't believe how he could leak truthful information (and keep this mission secret from Jyn in order to get her help locating her father) was especially well done. The concept of sides, Empire or Rebellion, being unclear to people until they join one was also woven in nicely -- normal people just want to go about their lives free from conflict.

The most hotly debated topic between me and my friends though wasn't about ethics, it was about if Donnie Yen's character was using The Force or not. (Of course he was, and in prior movies plenty of characters used The Force before becoming Jedis.)

https://dorksideoftheforce.com/2016/04/08/rogue-one-a-star-w...

Rogue One's story certainly muddies the waters a bit, but the fact Star Wars is willing to embrace more complexity and a blurring of the lines is great for the franchise and mature fan base. Someone woke up and realized that the value of the Star Wars ins't just how many lunch boxes it can sell, they can make a buck telling compelling stories as well. #NoEwoks #NoGungan
My Wife and I Are (Both) Pregnant
Same. Pwn the world!
I just don't trust general, high level descriptions. People have been going at this goal for decades without much proveable success on general intelligence. So when I read generalities I think they're not any further, just still trying. But when someone gives you a gory technical breakdown of a subproblem, that's when you know you've got something and they're serious.
Elixir, and probably Phoenix. We have a large IO bound orchestration layer written in Scala that's been struggling with our traffic lately, and it's been a lot of work to optimise performance. Curious to see if Elixir can help us, and how.
> stepping on the toes of Amazon's copyright/trademark?

I would not be surprised if Microsoft would have a problem with the company name. They market themselves as an open source project, but I assume they are in it to sell hardware and make a profit (or exit).

The company name sounds like a contraction of Microsoft to me and initially I misread the title as being another Microsoft open source project.

I'm actually expecting some initiative from Microsoft in exactly this area, with open hardware instead of open software.
So You Want to Join MMM? Read This First
smoking never had a single positive effect
The key feature of an Echo is its wide microphone array. Those are somewhat expensive.
How can these neurons be placed at the location where they are needed?
I'm about moving out, bought my own flat. Looking forward to be independent. Learn cooking, cleaning and grow some healthy vegetables on my balcony.
On the other side i finished a climbing course recently, now i want to practice that further, so i can climb one of the three peaks of Lavaredo.
As a programmer i want to take a step back, spending less time in front of the computer and socialize more, though it costs me a lot of energy.
Reduce: Not Scary
> and function chaining with unnamed intermediary results actually reduces readability significantly

For me this is the reverse, having assignment (to verbose and often redundant named identifers) interrupting the flow adds a lot of visual noise compared to an expression using chaining functions (using say |> operator in F#).
I have used the SX1272 module with the multiprotocol radio shield.

https://www.cooking-hacks.com/documentation/tutorials/extrem...
Riding the Rails of the Underground Abortion Railroad from Texas to New Mexico
Nothing novel here, just going to strengthen my tech skills. Spent too much time chasing business in 2016 and need a refresh.
Software Engineering Daily and hansalmanminutes like daily while commute to work , gyming or anytime while walking. Lesser music more podcasts!
Fictional is not always "wrong" or "false" as you claim.

There are so many fictional books which have so much to teach.

You can think of Star Wars how you like, but condemning fictional stories as bad only because they are no "true" stories -- is very short-sighted in my eyes. (and in my opinion a totally wrong understanding of the principles of logic).

There are also so many "true" stories, where you can draw the wrong ethics from!! (newest events included!)
How the brain consolidates memory during deep sleep
Yeah, but is it web scale?
Yes, I think the biggest reason for that happening, as well as the obstructionism in general is the extreme partisanship that has come from the FPTP voting system.

Republicans say big government doesn't work, for which they are partly right, but they usually say it for the wrong reasons - wanting to cut some services so they can cut taxes for corporations or spend that money for Defense, not because they want to make the gov more efficient.

Then to oppose them in a partisan way, the Democrats come and say "you're wrong! big government does work! and the people need it!" So they just end up wasting a lot of money not trying to make things more efficient, because doing so would "prove the Republicans right" or something.

Same issue with electoral rigging. Republicans yell about it but mainly referring to "voter fraud" (probably a non-issue for the most part, but I haven't looked at the data), while real electoral fraud issues do exist, voter suppression being included in that. But for the most part Democrats don't call for audits and such either, because "voter fraud is not real" (even if other type of fraud is) and they think they might be helping Republicans by admitting it.

This toxic partisanship is what's ruining politics in the U.S. Everything has to be black or white, red or blue. This is why I said it before when I criticized Sam Altman here for "simply encouraging young people to vote" as an obvious political ploy to get the Democrats to win.

If Altman and others here are actually serious about democracy and fairness of the political process in the U.S., then they should be supporting stuff like removing electoral processes that don't work anymore and aren't democratic. Processes like the FPTP voting system for Congress as well as primaries and other elections (to proportional representation or RCV/approval voting for single-winner elections), as well as removing the electoral college, and the caucus system from primaries.

They should also fight to make the "money vote" equal, just like the real vote is, and fight to limit individual political campaign donations. A rich person shouldn't have a "1,000 times stronger voice" than a regular or poorer person that can donate to a campaign.

There are other real issues they can fix as well, such as fighting to eliminate electronic voting machines. Even when they aren't hacked to steal the elections have a ton of other issues like not working properly, and thus making a lot of people's vote not count, which should be a crime in itself.

Fix the fundamental problems in the U.S. electoral process and everything else take care of itself in time, including climate change, and all the other important issues. As Elon Musk says, go at the problem from a "first principles" angle, rather than try to fix the symptoms (get more young people to vote so the "bad" Republicans don't win - the point is to make it so there aren't any "bad" Republicans anymore, at least not any worse than the typical right-wing party in Europe).
Take Google Shopping to the Next Level:Power of Image Optimization in ECommerce
It blows my mind that accepted treatment for depression actually can make people more suicidal. But we can't give them anything that might make them feel good oh no, we can't have that
HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
There's a fundamentally different approach to rail safety in Europe. The US mandates rail cars built like a tank, but has tons of open grade crossings and simple signaling systems. Europe builds lighter (== faster, cheaper, less track-damaging, more fuel-efficient) cars and invests a ton of time and money making sure they don't crash in the first place.

Even given that, the survivability of a crash in a modern European train is very good. The Grayrigg derailment in the UK, for example, had an Italian-built express train jump the rails at 95mph and jackknife down an embankment. One death (she was 84).

UK railways carried 64.4 billion passenger kilometers last year. The Grayrigg derailment was the last accident involving the death of a passenger. It was in 2007. How many road traffic accidents avoided by rail travel since then?
Sounds like you could use a friendly advisor or mentor - ping me if you want to talk.
This story, and others, are enjoyably recounted in the WaPo Presidential Podcast, which hits the history of every president: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/presidentia...

I can't recommend it highly enough. As one of those people who only care about politics in 2016/2015, it was great seeing the sweep of history. They kind of dialed-in the Trump episode, but other than that they really did a great job each and every week.
We'll see this comment referenced in the next issue of Nature.
Αίσιο και ευτυχές το 2017 με SEO για να βγείτε στην πρώτη σελίδα της Google