skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The heuristics are generally implemented by an algorithm though. I think that is where the confusion arises.

In other words, you've got an algorithmic step that produces some output, followed by a heuristic step that ascribes some meaning to the output.

For example, consider spam detection with Naive Bayes. The parts that tokenize each email, accumulate the counts of each token, and estimate their conditional probability given the class are all algorithmic, even under the formal definition given by @zero_iq, below). Each of these steps is deterministic, finite, etc. The same holds for the part where you calculate the probability of a new email under each class, assuming that each token is independent (it's just multiplication!).

The heuristic part is the assumption that these numbers are meaningful (training data is representative, pre-processing is reasonable, independence assumption isn't bonkers, etc.) and where you choose to set a decision boundary for actually classifying each item.
Way to throw your media staff under the bus for not promoting your bug ridden app.
Calls and text messages to cell phones that use any sort of auto-dialer are illegal without express written consent (and the term 'auto-dialer' is applied rather broadly). The same goes for calls that deliver a pre-recorded message. Fines for violations can range from $500 to $1,500 per violation, but you'll have to figure out who's actually calling you in order to file for damages. Almost all of these calls spoof their caller ID, so good luck with that.

If you're in the Do Not Call registry, there are another set of fines on top of those imposed by the TCPA. They start out around the same range, but for excessive violators the fines can now reach up to $40,000 per call (as of August 2016).
Yeah, I'm with you to some extent. My mills, lathes, etc. are all very dangerous when treated wrong (Anything with a reasonable amount of horsepower is). Routers still freak me out since there is virtually no chance of reattaching things hit with a router. "A fine spray on the wall" is about all that's left.

However, I'll also say that de-risking tools is a good idea. If you want to avoid complacency, then avoid it. If you can't take the vigilance you have around a lathe or a shaper and apply it to a tablesaw, just because the tablesaw is safe, I'd say you should probably reconsider your safety practices. There is a difference between good process and complete paranoia.

At present, I have a standard delta saw, because it's what I have. It is "dangerous" and also kind of lousy. Because of the way the trunion mounts the blade carriage, it is not possible to adjust the blade to 45° without a few thousandth of pinch.

I know my next saw will be a saw stop. They are safer, yes, but they are also incredibly nice saws. Compared to the powermatic I used to have, they are even better. When I move next, my Delta won't be coming with me, and I'll be ordering a saw stop.
Australian agency believes it can locate MH370 with 'unprecedented precision'
If Canada actually favoured the criminal you would be saying "went to prison" instead of "almost went to prison".
The solution to 'assholes' like Shkreli is to preventing them from being able to exploit markets in the first place. He's already going to court for his shady actions in the hedge fund industry, so the system seems to be working there.

Regarding pharma he's far from the only person to increase pricing, merely the most popular (and easiest target) among a long list of companies who have jacked up prices in the past few decades. This is a uniquely American phenomenon and pharma is basically the only industry where a company can increase prices 200-500% and not get destroyed by competition (even well after patents expire).

> The “most important factor” that drives prescription drug prices higher in the United States than anywhere else in the world is the existence of government-protected “monopoly” rights for drug manufacturers, researchers at Harvard Medical School report today.

http://khn.org/news/government-protected-monopolies-drive-dr...

In addition to the extensive backlog at the FDA crippling competition, the various monopoly positions are heavily exploited by "pharmacy benefit managers":

> Americans pay the highest health-care prices in the world, including the highest for drugs, medical devices, and other health-care services and products. Our fragmented system produces many opportunities for excessive charges. But one lesser-known reason for those high prices is the stranglehold that a few giant intermediaries have secured over distribution.

> In the case of PBMs, their desire for larger patient networks created incentives for their own consolidation, promoting their market dominance as a means to attract customers. Today’s “big three” PBMs—Express Scripts, CVS Caremark, and OptumRx, a division of large insurer UnitedHealth Group—control between 75 percent and 80 percent of the market, which translates into 180 million prescription drug customers.

http://prospect.org/article/hidden-monopolies-raise-drug-pri...

Notably the power of PBM's monopoly is driven from the fact they control all the lucrative pharma purchasing for "unions, state and federal employee plans, even Medicare and Medicaid" as well as the insurance companies.
> but nobody is ready to leave their hip, startup lofts for the drudgery of a Westchester office complex (let alone endure an hour commute into the city every day)

I live in New York City, and I can certainly empathize with the no one wanting to do endure a long daily commute in a crowed, cramped, subway full of people where you likely might not get a seat. (LIRR/MNR/NJT are great in comparison (but terrible in frequency).)

But I dissent on your comment on living and working in Westchester (or really any suburbia in general). I understand people think the city is hip and all, but I really like greenery, nature, having a lot of space, being able to get to places in the comfort of your car, reasonable/low cost to own a home, generally low cost of living, the lack of noise, clean air, etc, etc. What's so dull about it?
The Unfortunate Fallout of Campus Postmodernism
Don't forget us down here in Boise. The constant influx of people from other regions is straining our housing market, especially since the vast majority of employment options still left (after HP split and Micron downsized) are in the service industry. My mom paid $900/mo for a 4 bedroom house in a south-Boise subdivision in 2010, I'm now paying $1200/mo for a 3 bedroom house 5 miles further out in Meridian. Our housing costs aren't SF-crazy, but when you consider the lack of public transport necessitating vehicle ownership and depressed wages (lots of people making under $10/hr at call centers) it's becoming unaffordable for the masses.
Well, it's supposed to be "hard done by", but that doesn't make it much better. I'm personally pleased to see a more sophisticated way to phrase something, but unfortunately it's not a common idiom these days (at least state side), so it can be a little confusing.
Rigetti Introduces Developers to Quantum Computing Through a Serverless API
The Reaxx is comparable (almost the same saw, just without the safety component) to the saw that I use (Bosch 4000-09) and IIRC it cost $1499 before the injunction, compared to the 4000-9's $600.
His excel stuff is pretty fun to watch.

That said, he's still a pretty typical 4chan-type when he talks of anything of social significance (politics and the like).

I'd say the media portrayal is totally apt. You don't get excused for being a dick because you have a good MOOC.
C# developers in my shop loathe the SQL type provider because it requires them to have a compatible SQL Server database schema at build-time. The extra level of organization required is more than they can accept.
I once joined a successful, for-profit, private company, because I liked its mission, despite being offered lower compensation and benefits than I could have accepted elsewhere. This was very naive of me, and didn't turn out how I had hoped at all.

It turned out that the mission was more of a very well executed recruiting and sales strategy than what I felt every day at the organization. Looking back, the recruiting effort talked about their culture and values so much that I should have known they were very insecure about something. The lower compensation wasn't required by the company's financials from what I could tell, nor was it made up for by especially meaningful work. Unsurprisingly, the organizational flaws of not valuing employees and cutting corners also showed up in other ways, most painfully in the form of amazingly bad code and hostile managers. The job was unbearable for me, as well as for many others.

I think the takeaway is that honest, successful companies should be willing to fairly compensate their employees. If a company can do that but doesn't, you should reconsider working there.
We're talking about a small piece of circuitry that detects a current. This was possible in 2004, it was hardly the dark age of electronics back then.

Besides, the more complex part of the sawstop, at least to my eyes, is the part where you have to stop a big metal blade from spinning very fast ASAP. Just putting some brake pads on it like a bicycle wheel is not going to be good enough.
If you had to pay market price you'd probably want to leave.
Microsoft boosts Azure power with new cloud acquisition
Not pertinent to the article but I guess to the people interested in this discussion.

The first in person F# conf in North America (to my knowledge)
Open Fsharp Conf. is on Sept 28, 29 in SFO. (http://openfsharp.org/).

My only association is I bought ticket for it.
"Many of these funds are putting time and resources into securing data sets" - this is key.
What is the reason for rejection of the passive voice?
QEMU's user mode emulation is a bit unloved, though. We did manage to fix some longstanding bugs a while back, but it's still I think a bit unreliable on complex multithreaded apps. It could really use somebody with a few months to work on testing some big apps (eg node.js), dig into why they're not working and fix the issues. But many more people and companies care about QEMU for KVM support and for full system emulation, so those get the lion's share of maintenance effort...
Type Classes, yes. Dependent types, eh.. that is a bit of a stretch to say the least.
The API looks nice and clean, but I'm puzzled by this from the FAQ:

> Puppeteer works only with Chrome. However, many teams only run unit tests with a single browser (e.g. PhantomJS).

Is this true? Do teams write unit tests but only test them in a single browser? With test runners like Karma and Testem, running tests concurrently in multiple browsers is easy. You'd be throwing away huge value if for some reason you only decided to test in one vendor's browser.
The author seems to completely misunderstand the point of AMP. It was never designed or created for dynamic, interactive content, especially e-commerce.

This is like complaining that a hammer is bad for driving screws.
Not at university level, where you'll get most of the symbols you'll see in a typical crypto primer.
Non-trivial projects aren't very common even in the bay area.

Edit: I just got out of a meeting with someone in eastern Europe. An extra $20 for a camera pointed at the whiteboard solves the collaboration problem 90% of the way.
No. He isn't.
He's a troll. Inflammatory speech is what he does.
I think you (and that article) completely missed the point behind the idea of free speech.

The fundamental idea behind speech is that it is a reflection of our mind and our reasoning. It is NOT the same thing as the actual 'reason' in our mind. By restricting speech, you do not 'change' anything of real significance.

If you force a man to only look in a mirror which shows a distorted view of his body, then not only he will be unable to do anything about his body, whenever he would want to do something about his body, he would go in the wrong direction.

When someone says 'gas all kikes', it isn't that by him not expressing that thought, you have permanently altered his reasoning. He is expressing that idea (assuming he meant it seriously, and not in 4chany way), out of the feeling of hatred and anger in his mind.

Similarly, when someone hears 'gas all kikes', and he thinks 'damn right', it isn't that without him hearing that vile statement from the first person, somehow the feelings in his mind won't really arise.

Now what about a more reasoned structured argument made by the first person, instead of just some call, for instance systematically blaming a certain group of people, and presenting 'proof'?

Again, if the speech is free, then it can be tackled down by other good people, explaining things. To every 'Mein Kampf', you can write 'Your Lies', or something else to appeal to anyone who wants to 'truly' believe in anything.

Finally, irrespective of what you may think, it is not possible to successfully curb speech, if someone writes a hateful book, it is spread in the underground circles, credited to anonymous groups. And when people receive that literature, the first question they ask is "hmm.. I wonder why some people are so insistent about not wanting anyone to read this? I wonder what evidence of wrongdoing is listed in this book against the other group. I wonder if what this book says is right, because otherwise the rulers wouldn't be so interested in preventing others from reading this". And I have first hand experience of this.

If by banning intolerant you can make people tolerant, if by forcing them to interact with others, you can make them like others, if by banning certain kinds of speech, you can change people's minds, then go for it. But since I know that's not possible, I am against restrictions on any kind of speech.
There's an episode of The West Wing where IIRC Donna was contemplating getting out of jury duty by employing something like this tactic. She was told in no uncertain terms by Josh and/or Sam that she would be thrown in jail for contempt if she did.

That does not seem to be the case in the real world, though. Who would have thought that fiction would lie to me.
I would also love to but extremely unlikely, crowdsource bureaucracy is a nightmare and he won't have problems raising that much.
Did the renaissance start a decade ago? yuppie job growth takes a while to move the needle - first all the nonyuppies have to move out
I think the charges are just for cell phones. For my home VoIP phone with simultaneous ringing, the service is free.
I'd say that this conversation fits under the first criteria I listed for circumstances where debate makes sense. Do you disagree?

If you read my post, it's immediately apparent -- from the very first sentence!!! -- that I am not stating that debate is always worse than discussion. I'm providing a list of reasons why debate is often not preferable to discussion, and particularly in workplaces (e.g., bullet point 4).

So I'm not trying to stifle this debate at all. In fact, exactly the opposite. I explicitly identified one class of circumstances -- which encapsulates this thread -- where debate actually works very well.

Rather, I'm explaining why debate is an objectively bad communication mechanism in many circumstances, and particularly in typical work places.

> stifle debate

Return to your original comment.

WHY is stifling debate bad? Basically, because debate forces us to substantiate our beliefs+. Why is substantiating our beliefs good? Presumably because we're interested in truth. So debate is not some inherent good; it's a useful and indeed sometimes indispensable tool for finding truth.

But I've claimed (points 1-4) that debate, in some circumstances, actually actively harms our search for truth. Again, not all circumstances, but some.

So it's very unclear to me why you would claim that stifling debate is a bad thing without responding to my four critiques of debate as a mechanism for finding truth.

Is having debates more important than finding truth? Is robust debate more important than getting things done? ++

> you think is so self evident that it does not need any

Oh cool, now I get to yell at you about dubious unwarranted claims ;-)

--

+ It's possible to have non-argumentative discussions in which everyone is forced to substantiate their claims; this is about good communication and critical thinking, not debate vs. discussion. Backing off from a combative tone is only equivalent to "stifling" when your communication skills are sub-par.

++ Finally, on a personal note, this realization that debate is often counter-productive was a huge turning point in my career and in my personal life. Identifying when debates are and are not appropriate is an important professional and life skill. E.g., I never, ever start a debate when I'm trying to convince someone to change a workplace policy. It's totally and completely unsurprising to me that doing so backfired in a big way, because the same thing has happened to me.
“The general purpose robot is a mirage” – Lighthill Debate (1973)
We're fans of LucianoGanga's project (and of Chromeless, Doffy, Chrominator, Chromy, Navalia). I can tell you from personal experience that dealing with the raw DevTools Protocol isn't ideal for a developer writing an automation script, so it's clear there's demand for libraries with this higher-level API.

Would love to know if there's a feature parity concern you have or what you'd like to see from puppeteer (or any of these projects). (My personal feature unicorn: generate not a static screenshot but a proper video of a page session)
Projecting a Modular Future (2015) [pdf]
Well...that's a bummer, as modern JS virtual machines used in browsers all use some sort of predictive code path model, and such static analysis is an integral part of this.
> Functional programming is also seeping in but again tons of boiler plate.

The bar has moved so much on this one. I remember when C#'s wonderful lambda syntax, along with all the extension methods that LINQ added, qualified it as having pretty good functional programming support. Now that other languages have gone out and copied sane lambdas, and "Map" is in libraries left and right, C# has to keep reaching for that higher and higher bar.
I worked as a software developer at a nonprofit for four years, mostly because of the organization's mission. It didn't pay nearly as well as the for-profit sector, but the job had quality-of-life advantages that mostly offset that.

The nonprofit sector has its share of frustrations. Nonprofits are subject to auditing requirements that restrict them from doing things that we take for granted in the for-profit sector, and fundraising campaigns were always really stressful. But, by and large, it was four years of productive, meaningful, good-quality work.
One thing I find problematic about the memo is that it conflate three issues: Google's diversity programs, Google's echo chamber, and the left/right politics.

If you want to talk about diversity programs, the other two appear to be attempts to shut down further discussion. If you want to talk about the problem of living in an echo chamber, diversity is, or ought to be, an example, not the focus. If you want to talk politics at work, don't.
It would be nice to see the visualization of the inflow-outflow: the people eagerly coming in to the city, then then gradual spreading out to adjacent metro areas as the city gets more crowded and unlivable. This style of growth would probably benefit from efficient, affordable, convenient transit options, like the high-speed rail teasers that pop-up every now and then in the news about connecting the east coast's major cities.

Taking hints from the likes of Japan to support this growth; and other examples and ideas would be cool for discussion here as a solution to this metro-area-growth.

> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/30/-sp-shinkanse...

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dkaid%C5%8D_Shinkansen
I look at announcements like this, and past ones about Ng, and I always marvel at how things have gone since I took and completed his 2011 ML Class...

That was one helluva course, challenging and interesting, and fun all at the same time (and so much "concretely" - lol).

From what I understand, that course is still available thru Coursera (which Ng booted up after the ML Class experiment; Udacity was Thrun's contribution after his and Norvig's AI Class, which ran at the same time in 2011).
Isn't this like saying you're not going to wear a seatbelt, because driving is still unsafe and you don't want to get complacent? I get what you're saying, but I would want to utilize as many safety precautions as possible, no matter what I'm doing.
Exactly.

I did the same in Europe and calls lowered.
^e for end-of-line, ^a for beginning-of-line. ^p for previous-line, ^n for next-line. All far more ergonomic than arrow keys.
Some CPR is better than no CPR
Not to mention that it's impossible to write a general contextual solution, so in some contexts it would not behave properly. I would rather have a solution that works consistently across all contexts than one that's perfectly contextual in some contexts.

(Also the reason I prefer Vim/Emacs over language-specific IDEs. I like to use the same editor tools for all sorts of writing – and good tools are general enough to work that way.)
@mlvljr: Your account seems to be shadowbanned, I can’t reply to your comment.

Currently, SpaceX has prices around 56-62 million USD per launch of a normal satellite (with a weight and orbit where they can recover the first stage).

Arianespace launches such lighter satellites in pairs, always two at once, at a price of around 60 million USD per satellite.

The Chinese launchers offer the same at around 70 million USD per launch.

So, the prices aren’t that different.

But, for launches from reused rockets, SpaceX is damn cheap. The first launch on a reused rocket cost below 30 million USD.

So, to recap: Today, in best case, SpaceX is between 4 and 13% cheaper than the next competitor. But in a few years, once they launch mostly reused rockets, they’ll be around 50 to 60% cheaper than the next competitor.
you have to know that every single time you bring up sexist and racist that someone is going to retort, very reasonably, with Bill Clinton, and how his policies affected black people in the 90s.
Report it anonymously to your insurance provider (*not sure if this is possible and/or would actually do anything)
Is your programming language unreasonable?
or, why predictability is important

http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/is-your-language-unre...
DAMN. I just did a basic test and it kinnda just worked?!? I created a test dataframe of 100M rows X 10 cols which took up ~2.3G and then used joblib.dump within the on_starting hook which is run when the gunicorn master starts up. Then loaded that df in with joblib.load within the worker and the total memory consumption was practically flat. Then I bumped up the number of workers to 20 and still flat. That is actually amazing. Coolest thing I have seen in months for how easy it is. Now I have to test out if the analytics actually work and a deep dive into the mechanics of mem-mapping.
"Not as bad as 1930s Nazis" does not seem like a sensible argument to keep pushing.