skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I am left with a feeling of awe at China's development, and frustration at the UK's stagnancy.

To be fair, the UK was overspending on railway long before it was cool :-)

From Edward Chancellor's "Devil Take the Hindmost" [1]:

> In January 1845, sixteen new railway schemes were projected. By April, with rail receipts continuing to grow rapidly, over fifty new companies had been registered...

> By June 1845, plans for over eight thousand miles of new railway -- four times the size of the existing railway system and nearly twenty times the length of England -- were under consideration by the Board of Trade. In the following month, new schemes appeared at the rate of over a dozen a week.

> At the end of October [...] over twelve hundred railways were being projected at an estimated cost of over £560 million. The total amount of outstanding railway liabilities was nearly £600 million. This figure exceeded the national income, estimated at around £550 million, of which perhaps £20 million a year could be spent safely on the railways without starving the rest of the economy of capital.

> In Britain, [...] the spirit of laissez-faire dictated that the development of the railways should be left entirely to private enterprise. The uncontrolled expansion of the railway system, in the hands of semi-criminal entrepreneurs, produced a haphazard network. For instance, by the 1850s there were three independent routes from Liverpool to Leeds and three alternative routes from London to Peterborough.

> The results of the mania, however, were not entirely negative. With over 8,000 miles of track in operation by 1855, Britain possessed the highest density of railways in the world, seven times greater than that of France or Germany.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Specula...
From TFA, “the quality gain is clear to see”, and then they show a picture where pixels have been upsized into weird painterly blotches, with essentially the same level of detail as the original.

This doesn’t seem to produce results which are obviously better than the state of the art from 20 years ago. (Or if so, this article certainly doesn’t demonstrate it.) So is the novelty supposed to be that it’s less computationally expensive?

Here’s a site I just found in a quick web search with some comparisons of other upscaling tools: http://www.americaswonderlands.com/digital_photo_interpolati...
At the very least, the ACA was billed as being the antidote to cost increases. Of course, they also said "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" and many other untrue things.

Everyone that I know is paying significantly more for significantly less coverage than before.
Agree. And a similar thing happens when the word hero is bandied about.

Example:

- Jump on train tracks (when it's not your job) to save a complete stranger even though it might leave your own family without you: HERO!

- Fireman runs into burning building to save people? HERO! (Even though that is the job description).
I went to Paris in January of 2016 for a conference. Spent 3 days there, got spat on twice and yelled at. Would not go back even if I was paid to do nothing.
I have the following aliased to gbl:

git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/

With formatting:

git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(HEAD) %(color:yellow)%(refname:short)%(color:reset) - %(color:red)%(objectname:short)%(color:reset) - %(contents:subject) - %(color:cyan)%(authorname)%(color:reset) (%(color:green)%(committerdate:relative)%(color:reset))'
Yes, big problem
Just because something is worth the hazzle doesn't mean people do it. Of course, some people are willing to study and learn, but I think you also need to cater to those who are not if you want widespread adoption.
Just randomly stumbled upon this and almost teared up a bit. Absolutely beautiful, and brilliant.
Having been there I think it's hugely inflated. Chongqing isn't really a giant city but a large city with a huge rural area around it that has been declared to be part of the city now. Not sure why that even happened. Maybe so that it can become a special trade zone without much political work?
Long term, we probably want to have facilities at the Earth/Moon and Earth/Sun Lagrange points. These can be used as part of a system for cheap (but slow) interplanetary transport network (ITN). (See [1]). When we have that we can start sending supplies ahead on a regular schedule to places that we want to establish human occupied facilities at later.

The idea is that if we plan to put humans at X, we start sending cargo drops to X every few months via the slow but cheap ITN.

After those start arriving at X, we send the humans. The ship for transporting humans only has to carry enough supplies to keep the humans alive during the trip. It doesn't have to carry supplies to keep them alive at X, or equipment to set up their base or colony at X, because those have already been sent via the ITN. The ship for the humans can be optimized for one task: moving humans fast.

Setting all of the above up working with materials from the Moon and from bases on the Moon will be a lot less expensive than doing it from Earth. First, the gravity difference makes it a lot cheaper to get something from the Moon to an arbitrary point (like one of those Lagrange points) than it does to get it from Earth to there.

Second, because the Moon has no significant atmosphere you can do things on the surface that would not work well on Earth. For instance, on the Moon you could build a long linear electric motor on the surface and use it to speed a vehicle up to escape velocity. Try that on the surface of the Earth and your vehicle is going to get destroyed by friction in the atmosphere.

The Moon is the key to long term human utilization of the rest of the solar system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo...
This had been twisted by the nytimes, Bloomberg and everyone else. The majority of the ml community agrees that schmidhuber is in the wrong here. And this isn't group think either, he interrupted a tutorial presentation to argue about something that the presenter (Goodfellow) had already discussed with schmidhuber.
Automate the deployment of Flask apps behind Nginx and LetsEncrypt
HN doesn't let you delete your account. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
Iran requires a license for gun ownership, and gun licenses require background checks and passing a test on firearm safety and law.
Startup Company: The Game on Steam Greenlight
Ask HN: Programming to learn math?
Hey Guys,

I'm doing an undergrad in math and would like to learn programming to help me better learn math, are there any intro programming books with a large emphasis on math?
Not just HN. If you look at the last week's "trending" Ruby GitHub repos, they're mostly old projects or even things from other ecosystems: https://github.com/trending/ruby?since=weekly (e.g. fastlane, brew, awesome-react-native).
"The Tesla driver was stranded six miles from home"

I'm a little speechless why this is referred to as stranded. Six miles is nothing for a healthy adult.
The question part was fine to drop, but removing the word "perceived" substantially changes the claim.
The Year in Analytics
Yes. It's what I call the "corporate tax" in the States, and here I'm not referring to the taxes corporations pay. I'm referring to the non-tax tax imposed on citizens of the United States which are effectively taxes, but which are paid to private companies, e.g. private health insurance costs. If you factor in all kinds of these infrastructure costs which are dumped on people in with actual gummint taxes, you'll see that living in the States is a hell of a lot more expensive than people want you to believe.
Yes. Americans pay the most of any first world country, with worse outcomes. [1] [2] [3]

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scienti...

[2] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/health-costs-how-the-us-...

[3] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/08/us-health-care-spending-is-hi...
They might be thinking "Back to the Future" rather than unix?
Vtunnel Giriş
Because payroll taxes go to social security/medicare. Robots don't need either of those.
I can share now if you like. They're at http://bernsteinbear.com/blog/lisp/ -- still a work in progress. I hope to be done with Primitives II tonight.
Nah, it is mostly traffic to manage the computing activity of large enterprises, not directly related to what we consider the Internet.
I really feel like I'm going lengths in order to satisfy the compiler. The compiler should work for me, not the other way around.

Why do I need to manually create a scope when the compiler can see that variable is never used again afterwards?

In Jill.name().first_name(). Why can't the compiler extend the lifetime of the return value until the end of the statement?

Having a borrow check to ensure memory safety is good. But those are just unnecessary and pointless. These are not pitfalls in user code, but pitfalls in language design
Riot looks nice as far as I can tell. Is there any documentation, proper list of features, what kinds of bridges exist, how to use them etc? The info on riot.im seems really sparse.
I so can't wait to play this game and get it. Having my own real start up company I would like to play this maybe it might help out. - PmoneyxD
Discord also has this advantage.
But 'be a hero' is pretty much the job description of a firefighter.

See also 'badass' for special forces and 'brainy' for scientists. It's not wrong to describe them that way even if it's all in a day's work.
From the EU draft report:
"whereas at the same time the development of robotics and AI may result in a large part of the work now done by humans being taken over by robots, so raising concerns about the future of employment and the viability of social security systems if the current basis of taxation is maintained, creating the potential for increased inequality in the
distribution of wealth and influence;"

I'm sure everyone here has thought about the implication of automation on the future of employment. But I personally hadn't considered the impact specifically on social security systems in particular. Interesting!

I must admit, this all seems very murky to me. When does a collection of hardware running some software become a "robot"? If I can replace an intern with a Python script, does that script start having to pay social security too? If one were to take a principled stand on this, each business should have to estimate however many people have been "automated away" and pay that much social security. Maybe we could back-date the impact of automation to the invention of the steam engine, perhaps, since this is clearly an ongoing trend and not something that is only starting in 2017.

And why does a piece of equipment need to be deemed a "robot" in order to for someone to be liable for damages it might cause? I'm no legal expert, but my understanding is that there are already plenty of laws and judicial precedents in place regarding such liabilities.
Agreed, but the linked paper was one of the more talked about ones during the conference, and has a fairly accessible discussion on the topic, including a history of related work in section 1.2 with references to many of Jurgen's papers.
Can't wait for this game to come out, great developer. Make sure to also follow him on Twitch
Actually, what I'd really like to be focused on is the availability of the mechanism. The open-source, self-powered, free model is key to this being a true success, rather than just decentralizing factories but requiring that we all still work in order to gain their output.
Even if your program is great. You really need to fix the UI, it looks like it was designed when visual basic 6 still were cool. And I could for that reason not take it seriously.
I wonder if this could be used to upscale, say, a 1080p movie frame-by-frame to 4k? Could be fantastic if so. Imagine if it could be built into an FPGA and done in real-time by high-end TVs. Very impressive!
You can sue Google about misuse of MPEG patents and keep your protections under the WebM license, so long as you do not sue Google or anybody else about WebM's patents.
A high deductible health plan is usually optimal for the unattached 20s crowd that startups tend to attract. This caps an employee's annual health expenditure to the amount of the deductible. Employer contributions to an HSA will further lower their health care costs.

That is likely the most cost effective way to offer full health insurance. It is also competitive with what larger companies tend to offer their employees although larger companies tend to also offer an HMO option too.
Schmidhuber has a fair claim to being the father of successful connectionist AI. Others would be Hinton and LeCun. Schmidhuber is maybe a bit of a controversial figure, he's quite open about insisting on getting his credit for his early research and upset when the credit for the connectionist resurrection goes mainly to others such as Hinton instead of him. He is certainly the inventor of LSTMs at least.
This is very important. It seems that the automation of labor is underexplored due to political and economical inertia (I know that industrial robots do somewhat improve, but they still are very costly, very proprietary and require experts to use them. Could this be done another way? Companies like Rethink Robotics show that maybe the answer is "yes").
There needs to be more fresh thinking in this space.

There was an ambitious NASA project 35 years ago: a self-replicating lunar factory http://www.nss.org/settlement/moon/library/1982-SelfReplicat... . The engineers tried to design a manufacturing system aiming for almost full parts closure.
The project was too ambitious (e.g. it looked optimistically at AI's capabilities), and didn't went past design study stage then;

But maybe now, 35 years later, the technology is good enough for something similar to be viable?
Yes, there are taxes paid by the employer. I dislike infographics, but the text at the bottom breaks it down also:

https://framework.gusto.com/the-true-cost-to-hire-an-employe...
Gravity Waves Might Be Lighting Up Venus' Atmosphere
Show HN: Azuqua, a visual backend development platform
Seems like a cool game, but there's some sort of voting ring going on. First three comments are brand new accounts that say, "Can't wait!"

Each all created under an hour ago?
Those are pretty bad things.

If I had to make a list, I couldn't do much better.
> Validity: Four years, on a renewable basis.

I quickly skimmed the page, but could not find information on a basic question. Does this visa allow an engineer to immigrate to France as a permanent resident/citizen in the long run? If so, what is the time horizon one is looking at?
/usr may be pronounced "user" for convenience, but it was conceived as "Unix System Resources directory", not "user directory".
There are some (significant?) drawbacks to this. Although English fees are outrageous now, 8 years ago here's the differences I observed between English and German university. Because it's free, the first year has to be brutal to weed out <x>% the huge number of applicants. Lecture halls are overcrowded, especially for popular courses. If you want a seat, you need to get there 10 minutes early. The amount of 1:1 with staff or lab time is often small or non-existent. And courses aren't necessarily set up so you can take them in the correct order. In England, 3 years for a bachelor is normal. In Germany, I have known many people to take 6 years or more.

So just because it's free doesn't make it better. Having said that, if you know the flaws it's fine. Many people go to University to have a degree for a job later, for that not having crippling debt is much more important than the absolute quality of the academic education. And post-grad courses and research don't suffer from this AFAIK.
Hehe. For what it's worth, the bugs aren't all worked out yet so you do have to walk into the building a lot to get your food. :P They also have it for dine-in customers.
That's not also strictly true. I can spin up redundant cloud server instances on three continents for roughly the same price as three instances in a data center physically near me. If I need to put a drive in a physical server on the other side of the world, I'm dead in the water. It's only a matter of convenience if there's a reasonable, cheaper alternative.
I agree here. When I got to the site I thought that it was just a placeholder image until I saw your comment and tried the keyboard.

Browsing the web is pretty mouse/trackpad driven. Especially for landing sites like this. It just felt un-intuitive.
Looking to build a startup in 2017?
If you're looking to build a startup in 2017, there's no better time. There was a massive rush of "Wantrepreneurs" in 2013-2016 this phase is over, and the real ones have prospered. The market is opening up again for new ideas, and is less competitive.

I'd be happy to help you build your initial MVP, or full-product (web-app or mobile app) all the way to launch (usually 3-6 months) at a discounted rate due to the lack of competition. In addition, I love seeing companies succeed, and happy to tag along and help as it grows! Please email for details on pricing, etc.., venuezzdev@gmail.com.
If each CCTV system did this on its own, I don't think there would as many objections. If all or a whole bunch of CCTV systems aggregated their footage into a central location where these types of analysis can be done, that would be a very different situation. Someone having access to this system could use it to do a lot more than just catch a known suspect.
There isn't a source mentioned for the denial of tapes but this article claims an Amazon insider verified that it is tapes:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/18/ipexpo_2012/
I've said in a few conference talks that I see it more like this: your compiler is a good friend who is telling you that you're about to do something stupid. Relying on your friends' advice is often a good idea.

And sometimes your friends are wrong because you know things they want, so you do what you were doing anyway.
What I struggle with, especially when it's someone that clearly has great integrity, is the apparent need to favour one group of tyrants over another. The idea that communist leaders felt any different at all to the fascist ones seems delusional to me. They simply had different tropes, different conventions. I had the same feeling seeing everyone praise Fidel Castro while simultaneously gnashing their teeth about Trump.

Why can't we just accept that tyrants are tyrants, regardless of the particular ideology that has catapulted them into position? If we did perhaps we'd accept the need to overcome our primitive attitudes to leadership and charisma.
And they didn't have a complete land bridge to get there. There has always been a sea gap between SE Asia and Australia/New Guinea. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Line
You keep missing the most important point, which is that these games are very fun. That's the reason for someone who hasn't played a Mario before to pick it up.

> As a person who hasn't own a Nintendo console in a decade, what would be my incentive to buy one to play Mario?

Because it's a lot of fun.

> How the heck would I be able to tell that the Nintendo Switch Mario is any different than the ones that came before?

If you haven't played the ones before, then you don't really have a point for comparison. But in that case, the question doesn't seem meaningful at all. Why does it matter that it's different than the previous games, as long as it's fun? You certainly don't have to buy the latest console just to play Mario, you could buy an older console in order to play the older games. Or you could buy the latest console and then pick up older games on the Virtual Console. That said, if you're going to start with Mario (or Zelda or any other Nintendo IP), it's never a bad idea to go with the latest, then if you like it you can pick up the older games. Of course, if you're playing games from older platforms, the visuals won't be as good as the more recent ones. And you may also find that they're not quite as polished as the later ones, because they learn from their older games so that way each new one is better. Most notably, the current level design philosophy they have with Mario started with Super Mario Galaxy 1 (and refined in 2 and then Super Mario 3D Land), so the older games will feel a little different (info about this level design philosophy can be found in this interview - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/168460/the_structure_o...). And of course there's an obvious important difference between the 2D Mario games and the 3D Mario games.

> If it is in fact different, why the heck isn't it in a different series?

Why? It's not radically different, every Mario game has a lot of commonalities (though each new game tends to introduce something new to the formula). And just in general, why throw away an IP that millions of people love? There's literally no upside to doing that.

Also, if we consider Zelda instead of Mario, even though each Zelda game is a brand new story, they're all connected to each other (a timeline of all games through Skyward Sword can be found from the book Hyrule Historia, or at https://zeldawiki.org/images/7/7c/Timeline_Hyrule_Historia.j...). But there are also really big differences between the games. As one example, The Wind Waker takes place on a series of islands scattered across a large sea, and you have a boat (that talks) that you literally sail from island to island, and with a lot of related mechanics around that. Compare that with the other Zelda games, where every other game takes place mostly on land without any sailing (except for Phantom Hourglass, which was a direct sequel to Wind Waker). Similarly, almost every game follows an entirely different character, but each character is basically a reincarnation of the Hero Of Time (Link).
It sure is! The US even outmatches Switzerland, the most crazy-expensive country in Europe![1] We're #1! Go America!

[1] Well, ok, maybe Luxembourg or Monaco are more crazy-expensive, but those are freak countries.
This is a good summary, but we used both machine learning and maximum likelihood to discover the Higgs Boson. The difference is that we frequently use machine learning to identify the (already discovered) particles that the Higgs decays to.
This is an excellent start to a game. I've been talking to the developer and asking how he did it. The game is created in Angular and uses all web technologies, he uses electron to package the app into a desktop application.

I'm a web developer of 11+ years experience and i've only ever done normal web interfaces, this is a very cool example by jhovgaard of what can be achieved with web technologies if you have the dedication to create something.

I found this game yesterday and find it really enjoyable, game is $10 if anyone is interested and you can play immediately. http://www.startupcompanygame.com/
>Attention economies are always very winner-take-all, and become more so as you remove barriers. If you relieve people of all tasks except showing off to each other, that will create cutthroat competition for attention where only a small minority can ever flourish. In my eyes that's much worse than the current situation, where an uninteresting person can still become worthwhile to other people by doing necessary work.

I find this very interesting and it sounds correct to me. Did you read it somewhere? Can you recommend anything?
From personal experience Some bosses I've had preferred to share them when selecting providers
To state what should be obvious,

starving << being uninteresting

Do you think people working at subsistence wages today have fulfilling lives? I'm having a hard time seeing how they're better off than if they wouldn't have to do anything to survive but maybe were low status.
> when the compiler can see

If you look at the rest of this thread, you'll see that the compiler _can't_ currently see that; this is the whole issue.
Does past behavior of S&P500 indicate 'selling the inauguration' is a good idea?