skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Author mentions style transfer as a product of NN research.

Yet this paper [1] from 2014 works extremely well, no neural networks. Here's one from 2008 [2] that worked extremely well too, better than most early NN techniques.

Although, deep learning is far from the intuitive approach that existed 10 years ago. It's clearer now how to reason about models, layers, activation functions etc. As much as there's no mathematical foundation, I do not believe it helps that much in the case of SVMs or whatever else. There still has to be experimentation, approximation and proper testing.

[1]: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/100018
[2]: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-540-88690-7...
Wow, this scratches a very itchy itch.

I've been so reluctant to do any outdoor gardening for fear of planting the wrong kind of plant in the wrong place.

This answers all the questions that made me scared and the database has a lot of specifiers that will help a lot.

Thanks for showing this.
Nvidia would be perfect
The deep learning buzz-word applies to models which learn feature interactions in a fairly complicated manner. While it is possible to explain what a model is doing, the model is a black-box in the sense that without a computer you could not develop the model. The model is making a lot of decisions, and explaining why all those choices are made is not really feasible. In contrast, I could create a linear model by hand easily, it just won't be as good at complicated predictions. However I think the stigma against black-boxes is undeserved. The human brain is a black-box and no one argues against using it.
That's what I was going to say. Shepherds pie is called shepherds pie because a shepherd is a sheep herder. If it's made with beef, as you say, it's cottage pie. Those crazy yankees :-)
The DNNs assumptions are "The true model can be fit by this network architecture". If you use convolutions, then an additional assumption is translation invariance.
this is one of the most comprehensive treatments of the subject I've found. Also works great as a reference/hand book
I've been thinking lately that the reason facilities of our minds are simply a reflection of physical reality but only one version of it most useful for surviving at the scales in which we exist and give the "reality problems" we've evolved to solve. The idea that our perceptions indicate some truth about reality becomes easier to discount.

We may not quite be there but in terms of the reasoning facilities of our minds, we seem to have understood nearly all that can be understood about the universe. All the quantum stuff is simply not understandable using all that machinery but seems to require we run a virtual-machine like thing grafting reason onto weird probabilistic models. Given all this, I don't immediately assume the most "elegant" solution is really the best anymore for most of the big problems we're now trying to solve. At least in the domain of science.
Ha ha. Cow pie. Straight out of Desperate Dan. Should it have horns and a tail coming out of it? :-)
I not longer use macOS, but Block Block looks pretty interesting. I couldn't tell from their website, but is it intended to eventually be a commercial product once out of beta? I didn't seem like it was open source.
To decrease NOx emissions the engine temperature has to be decreased which is equal to lower engine efficiency. It means more fuel consumption and more COx emissions.

When will CO2 obsessed bureaucrats begin to care about fine particles emitted by gasoline direct injection engines?
Athelas is hiring ML engineers
http://athelas.com

Come join a team applying powerful Deep Learning/Computer Vision technology to health care.

We're backed by some of the top VCs in the valley, and growing device deployments quick.

Shoot projects/resume to:
founders[at]getathelas.com
I don't think it's just that the flaw exists, which alone is pretty bad, but how widely deployed it is in large enterprise, coupled with Intel ignoring it after being given years of notice and also the unease about AMT in the OSS community since it's deployment. To be honest, I doubt 9/10 people who care about this are going to stop using Intel, but it's still a comedy of errors and I think everyone loves a spectacle.
On the hand hand, Trump supporters are claiming that Soros is -- more or less legally -- financing left wing organisations and influencing the political debate in many countries.

You know what? Both of them are right, and actually this is not a new phenomenon, rich people have been influencing democracy for a long time now.
> SoCs with random shit connected to random pins and non-upstreamable kernels

The non-upstreamable part is due to variety factors, including but not limited to dubious code quality, tendency to reinvent things in house and unwillingness to share code with competitors and develop common frameworks. UEFI won't help with these particular issues.

As for random shit connected to random GPIOs (or mapped to random memory), you probably really want ACPI. Fwiw, ACPI is said to be coming to ARM and last time I heard Linux developers weren't exactly excited - ACPI means running opaque vendor-provided bytecode which pokes I/O registers behind the OS's back and, if x86 is anything to go by, contains countless bugs which can't be fixed without the vendor releasing firmware update and users applying it, so you end up with a collection of machine-specific workarounds anyway.
It's peanuts to distribute your software to millions of people.
I think it comes down to politics, which is ultimately about convincing a public. The same public which has caused measles pandemics to rise again because enough of it believed a YouTube video.

One example is in the child services. We've got enough digital historical data from child services, that we're able to build models, that let's us predict whether or not a child will have to be removed from abusive parents 5-10 years from now.

This information is relatively useless though, because there is no way to explain how it works in a sense that the general public will accept.

The public is probably going to adjust eventually, but until that happens, you'll see an increasing push for documentation on how a result was reached.

Ironically an algorithm that explains how it ended up with the results that it did, isn't any more moral than an algorithm that didn't. I mean, you're losing you autonomy and freedom when the government knows what you'll do before you do either way.
I think the black-box nature or argument of deep learning lies in the fact of its parameters, not the architecture. Sure, the operations of deep learning, what they do is defined ahead-of-time, but together we still miss the point why it works under some scenarios but fails in another.

Take the recent discussion on reddit/ml for example, people are still debating about whether it should be conv-bn-relu or conv-relu-bn. This is a pretty widely used building block, if not the most widely used one, however, people still don't understand why the latter could work or even outperform the former in a lot applications since it filters out all negative values thus destroying/skewing the underlying distribution for bn. And for BN alone, there is a lot of questions to ask, like the running statistics feels like a hack, however it works very well in reality.

So I take no issue of calling deep learning nowadays a black box. We are far, very far from understanding why this monster does this well in solving so many problems. That is why it is interesting. Some researchers' attitude is confusing to me, because apparently there is a big juicy problem out there, waiting to be cracked, yet, they are distancing themselves away from it.I cannot help thinking it is out of contrarian, that the fear what they have worked for so long may not be useful after all. But true researchers should feel excited for the opportunity to be able to participate when the theory is still vanilla and contribute to it.
It's a compelling narrative, and yes it would be easy to dismiss as being conspiracy theory.

However, it's the first time I've seen an answer to the question "who's driving Brexit" that seems realistic.

Mercer, Bannon, Thiel, et al. and their psy-ops arms - what's their involvement now in the French election. Presumably if the article's narrative is factual they're trying to get Le Pen elected to further fragment Europe? Which French campaigns have had unsolicited calls from AIQ/AIS/Cambridge Analytica?
They just say that people lost their ability to think? How patronising. I understand that the vote didn't go the way the liked and it must hurt, but this is just new low. It only shows how EU is truly sinister.
So this raises a very important question: what about the CIA psyops? Is this kind of thing only "not OK" when certain parties are doing it, or is it one of those things that just makes the world worse and should be banned by treaty like biological weapons?

After all, the west regards "regime change" as its prerogative; what if the rest of the world wants to "regime change" us?

Edit: yes it's whataboutism, but I think addressing that has to be part of any good solution. Otherwise the only solutions are bad ones: every country has to build a Great Firewall to stop its domestic politics being destroyed by foreign intelligence agencies.

Also, note in the article that seemingly everyone is fine with CA doing this kind of stuff to other countries. This is like shipping thousands of tons of guns to Mexico and then being surprised when some of them turn up on US streets.
That makes sense. They're already an open source project, it could save them bandwidth, and if Github did have a security issue they could probably get information out faster as well (and it'd probably affect more software).
Γυναικείο εφαρμοστό παντελόνι floral
One irony is that these predictive/manipulative systems built on mass data and psychology are (currently) being used by the 'right' rather than the 'left', though they fit better philosophically with the latter.

Does anyone know of any work on the politics of trust/agency in the information/ algorithm age ? How does a normal democratic person self educate in this world without falling back to a siege mentality/ trust in a small cell, or proceeding in a 'happy-go-lucky', 'life is short' manner.

My uneducated guess is this is not that different from some periods of history (Russia, Communist Europe, French Terror, US west expansion?, Ethiopia?), but it feels different from 1960s-90s western Europe (though maybe not - qn raised by samsonradu in this thread).

Another way of putting the problem is as an arms race between vested interests with advanced predictive/ manipulative systems and the general populace. This is probably not new - does it balance out or does it get more concentrated ?
ESCORT ALENA – ESCORT – ESCORTS – ESCORT ATHENS – ESCORTS ATHENS
> The DNNs assumptions are "The true model can be fit by this network architecture"

Yeah, but that's tautological. What I mean can somebody sit down and for a given DNN architecture, write down (at least approximately) the set of functions that it can learn? Or more importantly, what functions it cannot learn? Or at least, how many bits are assumed and how many bits have to be learned?

I think that is what bothers people about DNNs. I personally think they are sometimes even inefficient - we are learning them much more parameters (bits) than the actual hypothesis space requires.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say because it doesn't taste very good. I lived in Colorado for years and spent a lot of time in and around the four corners area, Shiprock, Kayenta, Monument Valley, etc.

The traditional dishes are typically bland, and are very simple with not much room for improvement. Looking good on paper isn't really enough to launch a culinary trend.
Yeah, fair point. I guess I was erroneously looking at that from the standpoint of the financial scale I'm working with right now (don't have a job, etc) and didn't catch myself. (Hmm. I'll keep an eye on that.)

If distributing a commercial (or enterprise) application then yeah it's peanuts (or a rounding error). Good point.
I've been trying to create a complete open source solution to this exact problem, although I've only been working on it for a month and so far have only semi-complete the email part of it. You can see the current iteration of it here:

https://github.com/femto-email/client
Your example about the debate of BN usage demonstrates that it is possible to look inside a deep network and debate. That we don't know the answers doesn't mean the answers don't exist, or are impossible to find, which is what the term "black-box" suggests.

Of course, more research in tools for model interpretation would be awesome, and my own lab has done a lot towards it, and this remains an important topic. More is desired, but what we have right now is pretty good too, and is not at all inferior to old-school methods, esp. considering the performance.
Discrimination exists, true. So does racism, partly due to the fact that humans develop a preference for 'their own' within a few months after birth [1]. Those habits die hard and can, in some, end up as debilitating racism where they consider anyone outside their own phenotype to be undesirable. In most people it just stays around in a watered-down form without doing real damage. Some people make conscious efforts to try to unlearn this latent racial bias, some even go so far as to hyper-correct against their own phenotype.

Having said this, I still stand by my wish to get rid of identity politics and to tone down or get rid of focus on race/ethnicity/gender/etcetera. The reason for this is that it leads to less cohesion in society, not more. As usual in politics it is the louder mouths which get heard while the more thoughtful ones get relegated to the back. This quickly leads to outspoken people pushing themselves forward as defenders of their identity group, decrying the injustice society supposedly does upon them and calling for special treatment. It does not take long for all nuance to be lost, for the discourse to polarise around these loudmouths. Disparate identity groups withdraw behind their barricades, hurling insults and epithets at perceived opponents and soon any chance of improving the original situation is lost.

I'm left-handed. If I were so inclined I could start a political pressure group to fight all the injustice this right-hand-dominated society foists upon me and my identity group. I'd throw myself up as the fearless leader of the oppressed sinister masses - see, even the word used for left has a stigma attached to it - and request, no demand that society adapts itself to my minority. I'd be in the media, be positively flooded with funding from government and NGOs, I'd be famous. What's not to like...

...but I won't. Why not? Because, even though there is a clear right-handed bias in society [2] due to the fact that around 90% of people are right-handed, I don't see how it would help to focus my identity around my left-handedness. Jimi Hendrix was left-handed as well but that did not keep him from picking up a right-handed guitar. Like him and countless others I learned to adapt to my environment and use it to my advantage.

[1] https://www.google.se/search?q=babies+racial+bias

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_peopl...
Google Streetview link?
(HTTPS, actually.)

HTTPS (when combined with JSON) provides requests and responses, without harsh size limits, with nice addressing. TCP provides a byte stream. A lot of people are finding it easier to express their upper-level protocols in terms of requests and responses than in terms of a byte stream.

Having to cope with NAT middleboxes breaking the byte stream doesn't help, of course.
This Is How Uber Eats into Hertz
0h20! lol ... there are 10 types of people in the world ...
> But honestly I am certain that it is something in particular and not something mysterious about conservation of energy/momentum which i have not come across yet, because there is no formula in that gravity simulation which should be able to destroy momentum

It's a well established fact that numerical integration methods either gain or lose energy (in particular, the Runge-Kutta family is known to lose energy over time). For celestial mechanics simulations, a special class of numerical integration methods called "symplectic integrators" are used and their purpose is to conserve energy and angular momentum.

> but if you do any adjustments to correct it, that is a kind of fudge not based in true physics.

When you are numerically integrating differential equations that model physical phenomena, you're not doing "true physics" but an approximation thereof.

And an approximation that makes Earth drift 70 km per year or Saturn's moons drift out of orbit in a few hundred years is a very bad approximation by scientific standards.

The methods used for celestial mechanics calculations need to be precise over thousands to millions of years. And the way they work is to "fudge" with the numerical methods to preserve energy and angular momentum. It's a much better approximation of "true physics" than your toy simulation.

Your assumption that the issues are due to floating point errors is incorrect. 64 bit double precision is millimeter accurate to the orbit of Neptune. That's good enough for scientific applications.

If you're interested in this, you could take a look at this scientific grade N-body simulator and the methods it uses:
https://github.com/hannorein/rebound
Agree with most of the points you make, most of digital nomads in Thailand are not desirable people, one step above timeshare or boiler-room folk. All selling shit to each other.

Spend some time in Bangkok next time, keep away from coworking centres where everyone is wearing jesus pants and owners are continuously taking selfies and you may have a better experience.
The article is very interesting, but did anyone else found the surface stylistic choices ... more than a little weird?

"The world had not yet turned."

"The details of the Trinidad project finally unlocked the mystery that was AggregateIQ."

"[..]Is it unreasonable to see in this the possible beginnings of an authoritarian surveillance state? [beat] A state that is bringing corporate interests into the heart of the administration."

"Is it a telling detail, or is it a clue to something else going on?"

Instead of pseudo-Lovecraftian horror story prose, I'd prefer straightforward presentations of the facts. It's less annoying and less confusing to read. "The world had not yet turned." Indeed.
One of the core arguments for comprehensive corporate tax reform is that multinationals play accounting games in order to reduce it's taxable income, in ways completely detached from reality.

For example, I (a Dropbox user in Japan) am somehow paying Dropbox Ireland for my services.

Apple Ireland did not make Macbook Pros, so why should they be the one cashing in the revenue, when the "real" sellers are Apple US?

I realize that laws are complicated, so you might want national entities or something... but in that case, given there's Apple branches in many countries, shouldn't the respective national branches collect?

Part of a complication about this is that EU has a common market but far from a unified fiscal approach... but the EU paradox is not the source of all tax manipulation.
Agree with you. I think what I need to make it more clear, is DNN puts little assumption on data. It usually consumes it as raw pixels, in case of images.

The architecture of NN itself is the biggest assumption here, as it is how it will be used to process the data. But they those operators are usually generic, a lot of them just umbrella operators for matrix multiplications + non-linearity in between.
This article is acually really interesting and well-written.

I don't find the headshot photo of the American guy as creepy or toothy. And I don't think it's weird for a cashier to smile and have a conversation with a customer.

I can also see the origin of this non-verbal communication as being from our immigration-filled past. Which is great!

But, I'd say, to a decent number of Americans, the walmart chant is extremely fake and contrived. The only people who defend that as genuine are probably truly in love with walmart, whether they know its flaws or not.
devicetree is how this is all typically managed for Linux on ARM.
If the internet were around when microwave ovens were invented, there would have been much the same outcry. Deep learning is excessively simple and elegant, I can explain it in person in under 5 minutes to anyone who has done high school algebra.
My Struggles with Rust
E.ON to Bring Project Sunroof to Germany
Well the propaganda is certainly automated now
Is Soylent actually healthy for you?
Looking at the Cyrus code, the server doesn't even start sending search results to the client until it has completed running the search. And due to the response being JSON, and there being no pagination in the protocol, presumably the Fastmail client wont start displaying the results until it has retrieved them all either. So I'm not surprised it's slow.
What kind of sensor technology can "smell"?

I mean the CMOS was a break through for image sensors.

There are air quality sensors and various kind of gas sensors.

But what sensor tech can be used to smell odor?

There are dogs that smell drugs, cancer, and what not - so "just" a sensor is needed to get the data in difital format.

[btw NYT article page crashes my mobile browser mid article, what are they doing? Their site used to be lean, now it's dog slow and something is wrong with scrolling]
Sure. At this point its just a really weird prototype. I was thinking of getting a few early adopters, build a product to serve their needs and then extend it. Should I contact you on your email?
Sure. At this point its just a really weird prototype. I was thinking of getting a few early adopters, build a product to serve their needs and then extend it. Should I still contact you over email?
Is there such a thing as a co-hash where an application can verify the hash and the hash can verify the application?

It might work in the way that generating a hash collision for an arbitrary string works??

Probably wouldn't help in these situations, just curious.
It does.

I'm not saying that Electron shouldn't be criticized, just implied that saying it's stupid isn't very productive.
Not the in-house tooling for devs, but for non-devs in the company to support their daily tasks.
May i ask what font is that?
You find it realistic.

I find it another pseudo-logicical explanation for those who can't accept the fact that most voters don't agree with them. Who are trying to justify their own moral superiority by pretending those who don't agree with them were all scammed and cheated into that believe.

Nothing personal but since we are already picking those narratives that we favor let me just pick the other extreme.
Whataboutism much?
Shape Catcher: Find Unicode characters by drawing them
Thanks for pointing out @bArray.

I intentionally avoided describing the product as I wanted to know more about the problem space, so I can come up with the right solution using this prototype.

But I just realised that Google is working on something similar: https://developers.google.com/appmaker/
decrease your shutter speed.
https://bixense.com/pwcalculator
Should be more like a backdoor that NSA/CIA can walk in rather than hijacking flaw or "OH! I didnt know there was a flaw!"

Surely a new one must have been created since NSA tools are out on the net
A Neural network will give you a relation which is approximation of that relation not just a numeric output . Also you should remember that while it looks elegant the Newtonian model is also an approximation and fails noticeably in cases where relativistic effects are significant
Ask HN: Why Did React Switch to ES6 Classes?
I tried to find a justification for that change in the API, but couldn't find any. Using ES6 Classes in React seems more tedious to me, as I have to bind methods manually, so I see one downside and no upsides. Is it known what was the React guys' reasoning behind that switch?