skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>but what about from a public records perspective? It still feels like the precedents that have been established inside the US legal system should be publicly available without restrictions.

Yes, I agree with that. And in many cases (but not all), they are - court documents are generally available for nominal processing fees, though there's a long way to go before I'd say this is all truly "publicly available without [unnecessary] restrictions".

With some notable exceptions like FISA, I don't think most of the secrecy is out of a desire to conceal law from citizens. It's largely the fact that our legal system is shockingly low-tech and hasn't yet caught up to what technology now allows.
The restrictive style can be very liberating because the convention minimizes unintended side effects. C++ has a ton of unintended side effects that come from interactions between language features.

Copy and move semantics combined with heap allocations and STL container copy/move behaviors can get you into weird places and behaviors if you use them too liberally.
On a 2004 phone with a tiny screen?
Appropriate that this subject makes an appearance on HN so close to the anniversary of Aaron Swartz's suicide under duress and attack from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Making court documents more publicly accessible was one of Aaron's projects (circa 2008). He and project collaborators downloaded more than a million documents from the government's PACER electronic access system using public library terminals and attracted the attention of the FBI.[1] Part of the goal at the time was to uncover privacy violations in filed court documents that were legally a matter of public record but behind a lucrative, government administrated pay wall.[2]

There is something important to be said for the social and moral importance of keeping the public record publicly accessible. The justification for these intermediaries to exist and extract rent from the cataloging of public information grows slimmer and slimmer, but cataloging and indexing everything in a common law (precedent based) system is tremendously expensive. I suspect that developing of an algorithm to usefully search the dense and interweaving web of judicial opinions, case history, written legislation, and jurisdictions in which all those elements apply/overlap/supersede each other is also a massive capital investment.

It all does have to be paid for somehow, and I don't think how to fund is a settled question. Pay walls clearly have pernicious externalities (privacy violations go unnoticed; access to law is practically limited to professionals for whom the costs are a business expense). But I don't trust the state to properly fund or develop such a service through general tax either.

Consider supporting the individuals in this thread who are working to make that sort of open information access in law a reality, and consider also who will seek rent from the finished service who will not.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#PACER

[2]: https://public.resource.org/crime/
Ah, the "Repugnant Conclusion" guy. I last read his writing decades ago, and remember finding it pedantic and less than inspiring, though better than the "infinite variations on the trolley problem" moral-intuition-diddling. Still, I'm glad to hear he was a good teacher, and sad to learn of his passing.

PS -- If you want some truly excellent philosophical writing, give Thomas Nagel a read.
> They don't just do it for fun though. They do it because publications are directly tied to salary, grants, and prestige.

I'd argue far more don't recognize their own work as the problem. Something like "Everyone is a bad driver, but I'm the best!"

Either through poor training or cockiness, they slipped in the method and let assumptions leak into their study. Or, more often, we just haven't figured out all the ways to get the assumptions out. Occasionally, we stumble onto something like Cognitive Anchoring that makes us rethink everything.

Stuffs hard. And it gets frustrating to see sloppy work muddying everything else. But stuffs hard.
The entire 90% is not so poor that they can't save 10% of their income. It may be true at certain levels but not the entire 90%. It's about choices and so many people choose to pay for frivolous things like a cable or cell phone bill instead of saving.

I'm convinced so many people have fooled themselves into believing the government will cover their retirement shortfall. The problem is ultimately they are probably right but government doesn't have capital to cover the shortfall (not even actual social security obligations it seems)... so they are likely going to take it from the ones that have managed to save for their retirement, wait and see.
TF is still single-thread, massive problem for real concurrency.

What TF can do is take one graph and distribute the work among many GPU's or CPU's.

Massive Scaling problems, I think over 5 Cpu's TF begins to degrade

https://arimo.com/machine-learning/deep-learning/2016/arimo-...

*

Problem is TF was not written for distributed systems, it would need to be rewritten from scratch. One rumor is google made TF public, because its obsolete, in house they have rewritten a new product, but their not going to share it.

*

It's google and people like google, TF is a wrapper, there is even a wrapper for the wrapper called "TFLearn" that is much easier to use than TF.

What is best? Depends upon what you like Lua, python, C++, amd or nvidia, intel or amd, once you tie yourself to language and hardware you only have a few choices.

Not much of anything is new we weren't doing in Mathematica 8 years ago. Then it was free to download via piratebay, and worked just fine with nvidia hw, now its 2017 and you can get it for free from google, and it supports the same nvidia hw.

*

Learn them all, they all have pluses & minuses, sadly I would say 90% of the code examples on github for ML are broken, or don't work, thus you need to spend months learning which works. Another good reason for 'tflearn' it all works, and the stuff from Montreal works.
hey eelliot. I'd love to get in touch. I'm a dev/lawyer to get more of my state's local laws/cases/templates on Github here in Vegas. Best way to contact you?
Golo [1][2] caught my eye given its French provenance -- they usually have a fresh/interesting perspective in engineering.

[1]: http://golo-lang.org/

[2]: https://www.eclipse.org/community/eclipse_newsletter/2016/oc...
If you start from the assumption that the law is whatever lawyers and judges tend to think it is, then access to lawyers is more important. If you take the egalitarian perspective that the law is the law and a lawyer is just someone particularly skilled in applying it, then a person of average eduction should be able to handle a routine legal dispute without paying a specialist. This is what people have in mind when they want to make the law more available online.

If there are laws out there that are currently applied or interpreted differently than their plain meaning as written down, that's a failure of government. Either legislators should have fixed a stupid law, or judges should have thrown it out for vagueness.
When I first learned about and took a look at haxe, there was no good documentation.

Granted, this was six years ago, so it's probably better now.
That's not how the calculation works at all. If you're saving 50% then your expenses are half of your income, so you need half your salary in retirement. Ignoring investment gains is ignore the entire point of this exercise.
Why do mathematicians use phrases such as "relatively little mathematical background" or "introduction to.." when they assume previous knowledge? I find that really annoying and a turn off from reading most math textbooks that are suppose to be "introductions". Is there an actual good book on category theory for someone that didn't complete a math degree?

Additionally, what are applications of category theory to computer programming, or computer science in general? I find this really interesting from an outsiders view and want to learn it. I'm looking for a truly basic and gentle approach to learning category theory, without removing the rigor.
check http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1 it touches on this :)
hey what's the best way to get in touch? the info email on the website?
My business goes where I go, so all I need is a stable internet connection.

The really difficult problem for us Americans is staying in the EU for an extended period of time (90 of every 180 days only).

Other options I'm inclined to try: Santiago in Chile, and maybe one or two of the smaller tiny towns dotting the Chilean coast as you head south to Patagonia.
Kaggle | San Francisco | Full Time | ONSITE or REMOTE | Software Engineering

Technologies: C#; ASP.NET MVC; React; TypeScript; Docker; Azure.

You can read the job req and apply here:
http://kaggle.applytojob.com/apply/GjSjOi/FullStack-Engineer...

Kaggle is best known as a platform for machine learning competitions. We have a community of over 770K data scientists. We're on track to grow past 1MM in the coming months. Now also building a sharing-and-collaboration platform (closest analogy is Github for data science: https://www.kaggle.com/kernels)

Three of our engineers have come via HN posts, so we take HN referrals very seriously.
Pensions are funded. There is a national pension insurance fund. They are completely sustainable, as long as they are funded. A pension is an annuity. The pension money comes from money that is withheld from wages.

Now, if some company engages in wage theft (raids its pension fund), that's fraud just as any Madoff-esque pyramid scheme.
This article [0] says its capped at 90% for 30 years of service, which is not the same as 100% for 25 years.

But I'm still genuinely interested in finding an example like koolba mentioned.

[0]http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/in-calif...
>You can use the saved funds for health care, housing, education, and a limited number of other needs until retirement

A lot of people earn very little and use CPF all up on housing and healthcare (especially if they have a health problem) and are left working menial jobs mopping floors practically until death.

It's pretty heart-rending to see elderly hunchbacked men and women cleaning up empty dishes (or selling tissues) underneath glittery multimillion dollar condos built by Bangladeshi migrant workers, but that's Singapore.
The point is that they're not designing their product from any sort of first-principles, it's more a style of design whereby they are using a single hardware widget augmented with a phone. They didn't tailor their product to the problem, which Tesla did.
With respect to contributing code, the short answer is that we're not sure yet. There is certainly no shortage of code to write, but we want to make sure that we work with volunteers in the right way. For anyone that's interested in please reach out here or through the contact form on our website. I will personally respond to everyone.

Other than writing code, we need advocates in and out of government who understand and believe in the value of free (as in freedom) and accessible laws. Contact your local, state, federal representative and let them know that free and accessible laws are important to you. Let them know that a system exists that can not only make this a possibility, but that it will also make their lives a lot easier.

We would also love to hear about what you would want to build on top of computer-readable, always up-to-date laws that could programmatically alert you when something changed and let you diff against old versions of the law. E.g. a) internal annotations for civil servants that wouldn't immediately be obsolete once the legal code changed; and b) legal alert system for the part of the law you care about.

We'll put together a form that makes it easier to collect this information!
Wow. Thanks for surfacing this!
>for a large AAA game with an idtech legacy.

Yep. That would explain it. From your description, sounds like an idtech 3 lineage (CoD, perhaps? I'd keep guessing, but idtech 3 was so heavily licensed that it honestly could be anything).

It certainly wasn't idtech 4, which I think used a bit more C++ than you describe inside the engine itself.
Comments like these are literally what keeps me coming back to Hacker News. Thank you.
Video related to library...

Nando de Freitas - Learning to Learn, to Program, to Explore and to Seek Knowledge (NIPS 2016)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPWGGwmgwG0
HP 141T. Not a 'bit' of digital in that one.
It would probably be good to ask Rachel Greenstadt, the head of the lab that produced this project and does lots of stylometry research. She'll know about everything going on in the field; you can find her e-mail address on the page you linked to!
The contact form goes straight to my email. Also try vchuang at the domain.
Hacker Finances: Adopting a Saving Lifestyle
You could say the same thing about social security too though I don't think I'll get back >= 100% of what I put in. Between "means testing" (which is stupid because it disincentives saving) and raising the retirement age for non-boomers, it's not looking probable so don't consider your 401k untouchable either.
It's only in the NSA's interest so long as having open access to criminal communications is more valuable than allowing all of their flock to walk around unprotected.

Eventually the balance will flip, and our protectors will come to the rescue! Just in time, I'm sure.
I see many people over 40. I have co-workers with children my age.

Perhaps if you move, you'll find a more respectful and receptive environment for those who are seasoned.
haha dynamically typed language with no log trail!
I like that you guys are being open about this, but the way you calculate compensation leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth. I very much dislike the idea that you, as an employer, are deciding what proportion of their income your employees should be spending on rent. You're also effectively saying that work done by someone who lives in a cheaper location is less valuable to the company than the same work done by someone who lives in a more expensive location. Maybe all employers do this and the only difference is that you guys are being honest about it, but still... yuck.
First time I saw one of these I was amazed. Accurate as a lab standard in measuring signal levels. All the way to 18GHZ via a single N connector on the front panel.
You might be interested in "Algebra: Chapter 0" http://amzn.to/2iYpAn5

"The primary distinguishing feature of the book, compared to standard textbooks in algebra, is the early introduction of categories, used as a unifying theme in the presentation of the main topics."
Nevertheless dynamic languages can fail to typecheck. To continue the analogy:

try {
fair (trail);
} catch (e) {
if (e == InconsistentLawException) {
// Oops, divided by zero,
// add a tiny epsilon to the denominator and keep going
law += epsilon;
} else if (e == ClassCastException) {
// some types are more equal than others
settlement (trail);
} else {
// escalate to higher instance
mapReduce (court);
}
} finally {
// might silently fail if
// higher_instance == SCOTUS and
// SCOTUS.busy == true
sentence (trial) . await (appeal (higherinstance));
}
The "note to the reader" clarifies things a bit -- he's aiming for requiring "no more mathematical knowledge than might be acquired from an undergraduate degree at an ordinary British university". Though he does not specify whether he has in mind a mathematics degree, I think this can be deduced from the fact that he indicates that the text developed out of a master's-level course.
Difference is that SS doesn't have a number that says 'this amount is your exact share of the pot', while your 401(k) does.

How a thing is originally presented matters, especially when it comes to what is politically possible.
One of the great things about this job is that we have to interact with a lot of teams across the company - so the clearance is definitely necessary and reduces red tape.
Getting Started with .NET Core on Mac or Linux
Location: Seattle, WA

Remote: OK

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Javascript, React, Django, Rails, Node.js, Python

Résumé/CV: http://www.thedjpetersen.com/resume.pdf

Email: thedjpetersen@gmail.com
Thomas Street | thomasstreet.com | Seattle | Web, iOS, and Windows roles | On-site, full-time

Thomas Street is a pocket-sized design and development studio in Seattle and San Francisco. Our teams of designers, backend devs, and application devs work together to design and build high quality software that our clients love.

We're looking for folks with 3+ years experience with either fullstack web, iOS, or Windows WPF/UWP. If that's you and you want to work with a team of designers and developers dedicated to their craft, send me an email at david@thomasstreet.com
Correct. A bijection implies isomorphism in the category of sets. Thus an isomorphism exists. I suppose we need to convince ourselves that algorithms and abstract syntax trees do indeed form sets. (Exclude such things as "the algorithm that computes the set of all algorithms", etc.)
The mathematical background assumed here is the content of the first couple weeks of the first upper-level course in an undergraduate mathematics degree. It really is "relatively little mathematical background".

That said, I second the recommendation of "Algebra: Chapter 0".
Show HN: Tartarus – Timer based locker to fight gaming addiction
yeah so what. that is the privilege of having power, you can exchange it for other forms of power.

And again, credibility is at stake. If I curate a list of awesome cloud providers, and IBM pays me to exclude AWS, then I look like an idiot.
All homicides in Mexico don't add up to 250k per decade. And at most half of the total is drug-related.

And car crash related deaths have even more negative externalities than drug war deaths. They disproportionately kill children and innocent non-criminals. People isolate themselves from dangerous traffic by avoiding walking, avoiding healthy neighborhoods, and by driving more in a vicious spiral. They both have negative social side-effects but car crashes are even worse by most measures.
Thanks, but is this another textbook that requires knowledge in abstract algebra prior to reading it, or make any sort of previous knowledge assumptions?
There is at the Federal level.[1] It's XML-based. Here's an example of a bill in raw XML.[1] It displays in the form that a bill is printed.[2] The GPO even puts in the XML, "Pursuant to Title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code, this file is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain."

There's a change control system behind all this. Here's a history of a bill, again, in XML.[4] There are change transactions, which are also in XML, but they're not in this database.

[1] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata
[2] view-source:https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS...
[3] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS...
[4] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLSTATUS/114/sres/BILLS...
Radar is the company wide task/bug tracking system, you'll see rdar://0000000 attached to random things across the net, those point to issues. See http://www.openradar.me for publicly tracked issues.

Tent-poles are the those bullet points that you see in a keynote. https://9to5mac.com/2016/06/13/ios-10-features-developers/
UN pension is 1.5% per year, which you can start collecting when you're 62 years old. Not that unreasonable.
Same topic presented at KDD, with timestamp that cuts to the results.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1kf4Zojtb0&t=1h8m46s
Side note: Cory Doctorow mentions "Bellwether" by Connie Willis in the article. Worth reading. See also his review of it [1]

[1] Bellwether: Connie Willis's classic, hilarious novel about the science of trendiness [ https://boingboing.net/2016/04/26/bellwether-connie-williss-... ]
"Automatically" isn't the best word, as TensorFlow won't make use of multiple GPUs unless you explicitly tell it to (at this time). That said, there are a number of benefits to using TensorFlow (including the ability to use multiple GPUs, if not automatically :) )

- Several common gradient optimization algorithms (Momentum, AdaGrad, AdaDelta, Adam, etc) are implemented already, which makes it a bit faster to get your training logic in place

- Going along with the above, there is more in the TensorFlow API focused specifically on training models, as opposed to being purely a math engine. Some might consider the extra funtionality "bloat", but I think it serves a good purpose

- The afforementioned multi-GPU functionality is nice, once you get used to it. It's good for either training multiple versions of a model in parallel or doing data parallel updates of parameters

- There are tools for compiling your trained models as static C++ binaries on mobile devices

- The TensorFlow ecosystem is quite nice: TensorBoard for visualizing training, the topology of your model, and various statistics (most recently visualizing projections of embeddings). TensorFlow Serving for deploying trained models. TF Slim for a more Keras-like layer by layer approach to model building. Several pre-trained models to jump start your own work.

- No compile times. There is a "no optimizations" option in Theano to remove the compilation, but many people's experience with Theano is having to wait to iterate on their code.

- I think the community is pretty swell too :) The Google team does a good job of responding to and working with folks who open issues or PRs

Generally, I'd say TensorFlow is really good when you want to minimize the amount of time between researching, training, and deploying your model.

Edit: line formatting
It feels like "relatively little" to many authors means "a complete set of undergrad math courses from a fairly math-heavy major" (which could be something like calculus including vectors, differential equations, linear algebra, real analysis, and maybe abstract algebra and discrete math). Maybe we need another term for "OK with logic, proofs, and calculations and doesn't mind learning notation, but hasn't had a lot of university-level courses, or in any event doesn't remember them".
Old story. We had some hydraulic valves in a control system that would 'scream' under certain input conditions. The techs had changed them out, and the noise went with the valves. Vendor was positive that it could not be the valves having a resonance in that range.
Borrowed an HP audio spectrum analyzer, and played back a cassette tape of the noise into it. Sent the results to the vendor, and they were able to duplicate. HP Test Equipment FTW.
> The reasons this problem exists are complex, but they boil down to the fact that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways computers can easily process, making it difficult to extract the valuable information they contain.

I'd argue that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways that the average person can easily process or understand.

Furthermore, I believe this ambiguity directly impacts the governed, causing them to be, in general, distrustful of most laws that do not affect them in an observable way.

Making laws more digestible is only part of the solution; the "what" should be annotated with the "why". Otherwise, with so many decentralized cities in an already decentralized nation, fundamentally sound, universally-applicable legislation may be ignored due to stereotypes and generalizations. Whereas, documented and annotated legislation can be analyzed, duplicated, and modified to fit different environments around the country, or reasonably ignored on verifiable grounds.
> our legal system is shockingly low-tech and hasn't yet caught up to what technology now allows.

Are there ways to improve this? What do you think the hurdles to technology adoption are in this field? Is it a document formatting problem, or a hosting problem?

Do we need to create a WordPress for state and local courts to adopt?
I did and Sasha dug out the interview notes from a few months ago. Kudos!