skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's really no reason we can't treat it like navigating a video game; movement and interation through the normal kb+m/controller model; the helmet is just the monitor, with a bigger pov (due to head turning)

Im not sure why there's a belief that you need to pretend you physically exist in the vr world; you just need to be able to interact with, and navigate, for it to be sufficiently valuable. ie imagine using it as an infinite real-estate development environment, with possibly a visual layout of your data structures, and the ability to change location (ie a mountain top view). Its sufficiently valuable as a product with just this basic featureset.

We don't need to wait for full-body VR, or AR, though no one seems to believe it
> I doubt people's willpower has changed much over time.

I doubt that peoples' capacity for willpower has changed, but that the exercise of that capacity has. There's a lot less personal discipline than there used to be, across the board, and the less you exercise your personal discipline, the harder it is when you try to.
You're neglecting to consider scale. That is, the healthcare costs that arise when you have 30% or 40% adult obesity in a nation.

People over the age of 65 are less than 15% of the population in the US as a reference.

Further, a lot of those obese people still live into their late 60s, 70s, 80s. We've gotten better and better - at a high cost - at keeping them alive despite the consequences of the obesity.
That's a nice domain, didn't realize .qa was a ccTLD
What is unbound fructose, and can you give some links about it?
> there's no intrinsic need for it to be "messy" regardless of the target language

The generated code with “re”constructed control flow is going to be a mess and you can't really help it. Worst-case it'll be a `while(1) { switch(i) {` type of thing.
Why can't you just go through the assignments and decide which half your child doesn't have to do?
Did you actually read the link? It's clear that this Google feature is designed to identify fact checks from websites, as opposed to providing an authoritative fact check itself.

If you run a website that hosts fact checks, you are now encouraged to annotate these fact check articles with "ClaimReview" elements that describe the fact in question and your website's verdict on the fact.

In the search results, users see "Fact check by Example.com". Google does not present fact checks as a "truth-telling mechanism" in any way, shape, or form.
average and peak developer income would be a good metric.
A Tom Sawyer business plan where the users do all the work and pay for the privilege by having their data sold to the highest bidder.

Free as in money does not mean the same as free as in speech.
It's also useful to understand how this kind of zoning restriction raises the price of housing, leading to all kinds of amusing and depressing unintended outcomes: http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f...
Walter Isaacson Goes Inside the Mind of Leonardo Da Vinci
Yes, and rape seed oil has the about the same combination of fatty acids as olive oil; which is healthy; but it's still poisonous gmo crap. Same goes for HFCS. The amount of genetic manipulation, processing and refining matters.
Agree with you. It actually not boolean though:

-1 = "Hard to categorize"

1 = "False"

2 = "Mostly false"

3 = "Half true"

4 = "Mostly true"

5 = "True"

What it doesn't have though is "debatable" or "unknown". As if we always have perfect information. "Hard to categorize" one fits more for unintelligible questions which don't make sense at all.

I guess google could assign "debatable" if for the same claim different sources assign different truth. But that's pretty wack too, because a single source can't concede that a question is debatable and is forced to pick a side.
In standard policy gradient, the weights for (apparently) suboptimal actions are free to trend downwards to arbitrarily small values.
If you're using a Gibbs distribution[0] the probability of executing alternative actions is nonzero but potentially very small.

With entropy methods, you add an artificial bonus towards policies that execute more varied actions[1].
So while there's a tendency towards improving the policy by executing apparently favorable actions, it is counter-balanced by a term incentivizing different choices.

Why not just optimize using standard gradient descent?
Typically, the variance is high and the algorithms optimize very greedily, so you end up in situations where a few bad trajectories cause certain actions to be avoided.
Or the agent might need to refine its policy for the states that come afterwards, but because that hasn't happened yet, the actions that lead to those states are ignored[2].

So exploration needs to be incentivized, and while this can be done with ε-greedy or optimistic initialization, those techniques are kinda ad hoc, while entropy methods have a bit more mathematical/philosophical heft behind them.
Plus they seem to work, which is always nice.

-----

0. That is, if you'll excuse the notation: p(a) = e^α/Σ e^β where 'p(a)' is the probability of taking action 'a', with weight 'α' and you're summing over all possible actions (with weights denoted 'β') in the denominator.

1. For a discrete space (absent other information), the maximum entropy distribution is the uniform distribution, i.e., all actions are equally likely.

2. For example, a human-like robot might try stepping forward, but hasn't learned how to balance after it lifts its foot, so it stumbles and falls.
Crawling is less efficient, but provides constant progress and is easier to learn.
So the robot 'gets stuck' crawling since it had a bad experience walking and doesn't attempt it again.
ssijak is right, Apple still doesn’t allow general purpose interpreters, so you can’t put an app in the store built on the JVM.

As others have pointed out you could compile the Java code to native code before submitting the app, the way C# apps are put in the store.
Perhaps you can offer a rebuttal to my arguments instead of doing an implicit name-calling?

Immigrants do work harder and offer cheaper labor, not unlike the example of younger developers vs older developers. Companies can feel free to make the trade off
Meh. This is is just extra training for the ground crews with a layer of political posturing on top.
"Every country should take a stance they wont be first to fire. It reduces the likelyhood of actually having to use them."

What makes you think they want to reduce the likelihood of actually having to use them?

It's like another part of the article:

"One painting -- a symbol of the Cold War -- depicts a silhouette of a B-52 with the words 'Peace The Old Fashioned Way,' written underneath."

There's a gigantic military-industrial complex that is built around the virtually unquestioned assumption that military force is an excellent solution to many of the world's problems -- and that often such force is best used "preemptively". Many if not most politicians in power around the world share these assumption, as does much of the general population.

There have been multiple very serious pushes towards preemptively initiating nuclear war throughout history, and certainly no shortage of preemptive conventional conflict.

I am continually astonished that the world hasn't already ended in a nuclear conflagration by now.
Is there any info on what sort of returns Softbank is getting? Or on what basis investors think that sinking so much money into this fund is a good idea?
Let's not make everything streamlined, bland, and the same everywhere! Let's keep our respective characters, idiosyncrasies, that were passed down from our forefathers. Let it show when you travel from one country to the next!
>Faculty members are not in control of their own situation.

Yes, they are. They are in so much as a police officer. They too, can leave their positions any time they please. They can discuss and protest, by all means. Teaching and research can and might should be done elsewhere.

The growth of administration is dispicable but not authoritarian. I will argue the administration bloat is of the same sensibilities as the oversocialized culture of academic careerism. I say with much disappointment 'Flush them both!'

We would be insulting to conclude hypocrisy excusable because of a little "head in the clouds." I will defend with you the value of submersion, of passion and obsessiveness to inspire study and discovery. Anecdotally, I find this freedom abounds more outside of academia than within.

Nonetheless, I understand your reasoning; more generously in some disciplines than others. Political theorists may visit "the clouds" but if they hang out too long, they would be oblivious to the very specimin of their research!

I am young and cannot claim to have known these mythical "genuine marxists" who amandoned Academia some decades back, but conceptually they are relatable. I would have liked a shot at an academic career but lacked the quite obvious requirements: monetary entry fee, cultural decoration, marketing/social skills.

My work has involved many ties with Academia and I've even been published in some academic journals. I want to believe, but I just find Academia and its' self-obsessive traditions, processes, and increasingly oversocialized culture to be terribly distracting. The necessity of these things is a worthwhile debate, but with so many bright minds enmeshed, anything less than greatness would be near impossible. But, my observations and personal experiences suggest that the "clouds" in which the academics' tend to place their heads are so rarely a result of curiosity and exploration as you imply. They often more resemble a narrow path down which they will chase the next carrot.

I understand you to be defending those few who place their research practice above all else. I implore you to question what might be if they were not constrained by this path. Admittedly, I'm not offering any more a solution to this than I am to the problem of pay: Leave the path or speak up/protest. These rhetorical frameworks for distancing sake is a losing proposition, and has become commonplace. These practice of prioritizing the carrot path favors a survival of the shmooziest. This is bad for research, bad for education, bad for faculty, bad for business. We can probably agree the administration does not represent bygone Academia, but I assert instead it is a bureaucratic creep that will feed on academic careerism like a virus. I suggest it is a symptom, not a cause.

Sorry for the length. My battery is soon to die or I would try to edit.
Venus has an induced magnetic field that may protect its atmosphere. https://www.astrobio.net/also-in-news/a-magnetic-surprise-fr...
> but only after it was needed by the sales team.

?
stutters horrendously very often for my work setup (~800 people). also eats tons and tons of memory and kills my battery
Can you elaborate how big the effective political risk is? I always thought LP commitments are pretty binding - are there many ways out of the fund for Saudi/Emirati money that aren't available to other very big fish?
Shouldn't the goal of a bookie simply be to balance his book and have no position on the actual odds of the match? Of course it makes sense to deny action to known sharps, this should come as no surprise.
... or maybe not. Parent post's "another possibility" is also a plausible explanation. Your claim is very strong and requires some evidence.
The aversion to new facts is palpable. This is the top google hit to “wheat dietary inflammation”: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3705319/

But really, your problem is not that the GP did not cite their facts, you just don’t like the sound of their claims, so you’ll respond in a toxic way. I hardly expect the actual scientific literature to change your views.
Long term sustainable? You should look at the turnover in the S&P 500 the last couple of decades. Some of the most valuable companies in the world (Google, FB, Amazon) explicitly eschewed short term profitability in order to maximize growth and share. Your cheap Uber rides speak to this phenomenon today.

If you're waiting for ambitious tech companies to prioritize turning a profit in order to provide some liquidity to their workers, good luck.
I had interpreted the "hard to categorize" as "hard to put in any of the other categories", which could also mean "unknown" or "conflicting information".
> insane monarchy that delayed industrialization

That actually isn't true. Russian monarchy wasn't late to industrialize, and around half of industrial success claimed by USSR is rooted before 1917. For example, Donbass was already a thing back then.

The other half was built by the USA.
Yuck; Here is a real beauty:

http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-6199.html
25 Free Online Programming Courses for Beginners – 2017
Calling all millennials: your cybersecurity industry needs you
Big difference in unskilled vs skilled labor. Knowledge workers do better when they are more educated and experienced, something that there is no shortcut for.

But you don't have to take it from me: https://twitter.com/werner/status/867323121019351041
Dr. John McDougall refutes the arguments that whole grains are unhealthy and cause disease in his critique of Wheat Belly.

https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2014nl/jan/smoke.htm
> but it's decreasing with time and will probably not

What’s your source for this assertion?
children tend to become their parents.

you get less than 10 years to raise your child, then most of the big blocks are carved. a lot of human learning is imitation play. pushback naturally occurs for all parents because civilisation extends by destroying it's foundations. the child's naive critique is sound, most people have never stopped to question their own motivations and have no refutation to certain truisms except to feel frustration at cliches. explaining to your child that what they are doing is perpetuating the cycle they are unconsciously criticizing is pointless.

instead if you ever get into an argument with your teenager, take their hand, show them its shadow then say this

"there are five things you can become in life: a shadow, a hand, or a light..."

"i'll tell you about the other two when you're older."

(the other two are patient when they become parents, and
I'm strongly in favor of arresting people for violent crimes. One would think it would be an easy "guilty" verdict if the situation was as you (and most of the media) describe it. Oddly, though, there have been multiple trials of the participants where multiple defendants have been declared "not guilty" on all charges[1]. Either the jury trial system in America is extremely unreliable (certainly possible) or there is more to the case than the summary you offer.

I wasn't there, and haven't read the court records, so I don't know what happened in the courtroom, much less what happened in the real world. My guess would be that unsettled law was not a reason for the (lack of) verdict, but that it goes a long way to explain how the situation came about. I'd also guess that they story being reported in the media misses a lot of important details.

The video interview with Carol Bundy in the earlier link I gave you describes a different view of the situation. I don't have specific reason to trust her, but I think she comes across as fairly trustworthy. In her view, they were terrorized by corrupt government officials who brazenly lied about what happened. This clearly isn't the whole story, but might explain why they get the popular support the do.

It also might be relevant that there are several ongoing parallel cases that involve the BLM and FBI agents. The BLM agent in charge of the Bundy ranch raid was found guilty of "ethical misconduct" with regard to Burning Man[3], then later sacked after another OIG investigation cited him for "official misconduct"[4].

The FBI agent who fired two of the first shots in the killing of Lavoy Finicum was indicted for obstruction of justice by claiming he had not fired his gun.[5] The camera video filmed by a passenger in Finicum's car tell at different story than most of the media coverage[6]. I think it's worth watching, at least to see the other side of the story.

But as I said, I haven't been following the details of the Bundy case. Maybe they did things that are horribly wrong. I don't assume, though, that hearing the national news coverage gives me insight into what actually happened. So I'll ask you instead: If these are open and shut cases, why is it so hard for the federal government to get the verdicts they are seeking? Separately, thank you for participating civilly in a discussion even though we seem to disagree.

[1] http://thehill.com/homenews/news/347611-cliven-bundy-followe...

[2] http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-standoff/2017/06/fbi_agents...

[3] https://www.doioig.gov/reports/investigation-ethical-miscond...

[4] http://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2017/09/25/interior-b...

[5] http://reason.com/blog/2017/06/29/fbi-agent-indicted-for-lyi...

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEswP_HSFV4
It’s really not clear what the electron app even provides over the same app in chrome. Its own icon, sure, but the behavior is just as bad as on the web—just take slack for example.
Starship is lauded as one of these 'Estonian success stories', but to me (as a half Estonian / half Australian with I would hope to think a somewhat balanced perspective) it seems like one of these 'solutions looking for a problem' startups. When we have food delivered in Tallinn it's often by an older person who is obviously making some extra cash to help ends meet; I feel better about my 5EUR or whatever going to them than to some startup. The "person in a car" solution, which can do multiple deliveries and also immediately handle at least some product quality issues on the spot, seems like a fairly optimal solution to me. Does the world really need a 10k robot to be delivering a $10 pizza? What happens when there is snow / ice / people messing with it etc etc?

"It looks like they're trying to make enough noise to be acquired by Amazon and exit, rather than actually providing a service that gets used."

I could not agree more.
Sounds like Lustig's holy war on fructose again. Show me on an animal model how fructose is linked to hepatosteatosis and we'll start from there.

Until then, I'm just going to remember how Lustig's main argument for fructose being a toxin was that it's metabolised in the liver.
It's simply where the water from the broken spillway plunged down into the hillside.

They talk about two plunge pools (upper and lower), basically two different depressions in the stable bedrock. They do not have a purpose, but are rather just the result of the disaster.
I wasn't really referring to how you physically interact with the system. More along the lines of: if you implement a 3D environment of your files, but you're still interacting with a directory/file model, then you've just constructed a less efficient interface. But if you can now move on to some kind of 3 dimensional, or n-dimensional model, maybe there's something to gain with the 3D interface.

Theres little point representing 2D structures in a 3D environment. You have to change what you're representing as well to see any fundamental benefits.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. What is the future of email? How will person to person text communications evolve so that they are more secure, in your opinion.
If only there were terrorists on the moon, then no one would worry about the cost.
I guess it's like with muscles. If you put load every single day, your progress is stale; if you balance with rest, your progress skyrockets until you hit your limits. Long-term overloading might kill though.
Kid cannabis: The wild rise and violent fall of a teenage weed kingpin
I spend $5m a year on programmatic ads, so I think I can answer the author's questions.

> What made you think advertising on a few hundred thousand sites many any sense it the first place?

I'm intending to reach millions of people with my ads. Those millions of people visit a few hundred thousand sites. Why would I only buy ads on a few sites. Big brands buy tv ads and billboards on thousands of shows, whats the difference? Buying on many sites also allows me to reach a very niche audience that otherwise you could never reach (or it would be 10x as expensive).

> How much is being wasted on fraud protection that doesn't do the job?

This is a good question and I don't have an answer. I spend money on fraud/bot protection and can't always verify if it works. But as long as my ads are producing results and have a good ROI or the client is happy, I don't even need to know what the answer is.

> Why does every single publisher or ad tech company boast of working with three or four anti-fraud vendors at once?

Digital marketing as an industry moves super super fast. At least one of those four anti-fraud vendors will pivot in the next year, and another will focus on something niche like viewability. Having multiple vendors is necessary, and there isn't really a downside. The switching costs for me between two vendors is literally unticking one check box, and ticking another.

I'm not familair with the author, but it honestly doesn't seem like he understands advertising. Are you complaining about the use of third party data (but no mention of privacy?), that advertisers are lazy (personal attacks..okay. The whole industry is lazy?), that advertisers buy ads on and support small websites, or are you just feeding on the ever-popular disdain for advertising?

There are no doubt problems in the industry, but if you want to write about it you'll need to make a claim and support it with data. If you think 3rd party data doesn't work, or allowing ads on lots of sites doesn't work then claim that and prove it.
> If we strike first, they'll destroy Seoul in seconds and cause the largest near-instantaneous loss of life the world has ever seen. They don't even need nuclear weapons to do that.

That's incorrect analysis. Nothing like instantaneous destruction would occur without nuclear weapons. It would take months of perfect artillery fire to destroy Seoul, assuming 100% detonation rate, unlimited ammo and assuming zero artillery is destroyed. They would run out of ammo before destroying Seoul, even in the impossible perfect scenario.

"How much damage an initial attack would inflict depends on how many are used and on how much of the ordnance explodes. In 2010, North Korean forces fired about 170 shells at an island in the South, killing two civilians and two soldiers. Analysts later concluded that about 25 percent of the North’s shells failed to detonate.

"A study published by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability in 2012 accounting for these and other factors such as population density concluded that an initial artillery barrage by the North focused on military targets would result in nearly 3,000 fatalities, while one targeting civilians would kill nearly 30,000 people."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/world/asia/north-korea-so...

"A retired U.S. general said a Pentagon war scenario showed a conventional war with North Korea could result in about 20,000 deaths per day in South Korea, according to the Los Angeles Times."

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/25/korean-war-simulation-by-dod...

http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6212/north-korea-a...

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/how-north-korea-would...