skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For political opinions sure, but if he's changing his opinions so often ...

When you're a big scientific figure, I think that you have some extra responsibility to the public to only say things you're very confident about. Or otherwise very clearly communicate your uncertainty!!
It's still an interesting project, even if drama like this sucks.

Of course, I'd have preferred to see a technical article about the engineering backing the project. Rather than one about a bad apple making its way to a foundation board member sit and caught self-dealing by the rest of the team. But, it's not the end of the world. I hope people will move on soon. Guy was caught. He has been suspended. I guess his removal is pending modulo some legal process.

That being said, I'm a bit surprised the project hasn't had much more interest from HN readers though. Why is that?

It's going to be one of the largest commercial application of OCaml, alongside Jane Street's. There's lots of cool hacking going on and software engineering challenges associated to it e.g replacing wasteful Proof-of-Work with PoS, hot-swapping protocol upgrades (voted on by stakeholders) safely, figuring out constitutionalism etc. (https://github.com/tezos/tezos).

Among the thing that I'm most excited about is the inflation-funded innovation.

Every voting cycle, you can submit an amendment to the protocol alongside a potential token issuance (i.e an amount of tokens that will be issued to you if the amendment is accepted). That means you get directly rewarded for the added-value you bring to the protocol.

That's a great positive feedback loop. Right now, I believe that there can only be one amendment approved every cycle. So, the "great engineer quits menial technical job to work on state-of-the-art amendments to the Tezos protocol" scenario isn't quite feasible on the short term horizon. I'd wager that is a limitation that will be eventually engineered out. It has so much potential.

Disclaimer: author donated to the Tezos fundraiser.
China’s Space Station Will Crash into Earth in Months
Michael Redmond mentions this in the AlphaGo vs AlphaGo review series he's doing with the AGA. AlphaGo selfplay games are with 7.5 komi under Chinese rules, and apparently, Deepmind has stated that black vs white wins is almost exactly 50/50. IIRC Redmond mentioned that white (?) only had some sub 1% advantage in the entire self-play corpus.
Pascal assumes one true God or not. For all he could prove, maybe the afterlife punishes people for choosing that God.

All that aside, there's zero evidence to believe in an afterlife. With cryonics we in theory understand it, if the brain is just its atoms, then it's quite conceivable that the information might be able to be reconstructed.

I don't see how they are comparable.
Ok we've taken a crack at finding a representative sentence from the article to use above. If anyone can find a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title lurking in the article body somewhere, we can change it again.
Would be great to have a link to the actual study, but studies typically control for socio-economic-status, family situation, etc... I share the your general sentiment, but keep in that Mensa's threshold of 130 means that 2% of a population with a 100 median IQ (assuming a 15 SD test) is eligible to join.

While far from everyone eligible to join Mensa does so (and as you've said, there's a very good reason for that), there is likely large enough to be able to form a statistically significant sample that resembles the general population with the same IQ which I suspect is readily available (at least in US SES by IQ can be gauged from GSS -- where the WORDSUM question is a "good enough IQ test", or from college statistics -- where the SAT is also a "good enough" IQ test for the purpose of a general study; not sure about UK.)

This isn't a "correlation vs. causation": I don't believe the study was looking for or claiming a causal relationship; I suspect it could well be the reverse: increased anxiety about predators being a push for better ability to predict where the predator might appear -- i.e., visuo-spatial intelligence (there is also some data that suggest that Homo Sapiens intelligence may have evolved accidentally out of certain neurological disorders).

So if the question is "is this a real correlation", there's good reason to think that the experiment was indeed designed to handle any confounding factors like the one you suggested. This is probably a better experimental sample than "college students who volunteer to take part in a psychology study" and easily allows for the most obvious variables to be controlled.
What would be a great idea is an app that scans for the presence of these conditions.
A related public key news:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/crypt...

It compromises the TPM 1.2 and Microsoft Bitlocker HDD encruption.

The researchers also scanned the Internet for fingerprinted keys and quickly found hits in a variety of surprising places. They found 447 fingerprinted keys—237 of them factorizable—used to sign GitHub submissions, some for very popular software packages. GitHub has since been notified of the fingerprinted keys and is in the process of getting users to change them.

The researchers also found 2,892 PGP keys used for encrypted e-mail, 956 of which were factorizable. The researchers speculated that the majority of the PGP keys were generated using the Yubikey 4, which allows owners to use the faulty library to create on-chip RSA keys. Other functions of the USB device, including U2F authentication, remain unaffected. Yubico has more details here.
Yeah, it's only been 6 months since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed. I guess we have to hope that they got religion after that :-/

It's kind of funny that we have Google pushing to force everything to be HTTPS, and in response everyone adopting a service provider that MITMs them through shared proxies written in a memory unsafe language, and doesn't require a certificate or even HTTPS from the origin site (so that third parties can still do MITM attacks), etc.

It's still an improvement over an `http` scheme site in an absolute sense -- at least it protects customers from their own ISP or unencrypted wifi -- but it also hides the insecurity from the user. Oh, well.

Maybe what we really need is strict liability for data breaches. A few companies getting successfully sued for $100 per user account after a breach would actually start to change the culture around security.
I was describing the college I cited which is thriving (which else?). I can't access the first link (paywall), but the second starts off describing Franklin Pierce University, a small private university, which isn't the topic of the article (public research universities).
Eliminating scarcity mindset at work
> I don't know why everyone thinks Google pays well

Because strong, senior engineers who have been at the company for a while (say at least 5-6 years) can get total comp that is in the upper six figures when everything is factored in. That's well higher than the vast majority of other employers.
I was wondering about this: can we study AlphaGo Zero and other nets created in the same way for similarities, extract and study them? Or are we limited to observing the behavior and learning from that?
> I dont think JavaScript needs threads.

Seriously... when publishing a project like this, the authors ought to give a least a bit of insight into their motivation. Their examples include calculating Fibonocci in parallel, not exactly breakthrough.
Source? Noncompetes are disallowed in CA, and federal (and probably state) law prohibits a ban on employees sharing salary information amongst themselves. But AFAIK there is no direct prohibition on a contractual obligation not to disclose salary to a third party. You could of course be cute and merely disclose 1040 income or somesuch.
I'm kinda wowed that something so rudimentary (the map doesn't even have clustering FFS!) can generate a "life changing" income.

Developed during a single flight? It shows. So the real question is, why the $$$$$ valuation?!
Interesting read, I've been using Vim for some 18 years myself and I was completely unaware of fzf.

However, I'm curious if you know `rg` (aka. ripgrep): https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep In my experience it's markedly faster than `ag` (which is markedly faster than `grep`).
And ticks.
South Dakota Civil Liberty Groups Urge Senator Thune to Put the Brakes on SESTA
Alice Saves Medical Startup from Death by Telehealth Patent
You can bypass the paywall with this link, https://outline.com/WthVfn
Not unlike if one drives up the cost of rent in a city so high that the people who make it function, can't afford to live there and leave. Dogs don't get walked, burritos unmade and drinks unstiffened. Jane Jacobs outlined all of this decades ago.
Photos: The secret Swiss mountain bunker where millionaires stash their Bitcoins
It seems as though people are getting the idea that this was a randomized trial, where people were assigned to receive units of blood from various types of donors. However, it was a retrospective case-control study, where records from everyday clinical practice were analyzed after the fact to look for patterns or, as in this case, try to answer questions. Did people who had received units of PRBCs from various types of donors fare any differently? I tend to view this kind of study as valuable for hypothesis generation, but not for solid conclusions, because it's impossible to control for every possible confounding factor. So the notion of ethics committees being concerned about patient's mortality doesn't apply here. All patients in the study have already either survived the study period or not. Same for safeguards, monitoring, and early termination.
If Big Chocolate wants to spend money to help me rationalize my 2nd (or 3rd) Twix, who am I to get in their way?

(De Nile is not just a chocolate river in Egypt.)
Immunotherapy research uses cell lines as much as every other branch of microbiology. For example, the T2 cell line is lacking in a peptide transport protein called TAP, which makes it handy for studying the immune recognition of arbitrary peptides (not just those from the cell).

* Examining the presentation of tumor-associated antigens on peptide-pulsed T2 cells (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3894244/)

And if you want to study the effectiveness of any immunotherapy, it's very common to implant a mouse cell line like B16 in live mice and then see if the tumor regresses under different treatment conditions (e.g. with or without checkpoint blockade).

Example:

* Localized Oncolytic Virotherapy Overcomes Systemic Tumor Resistance to Immune Checkpoint Blockade Immunotherapy (http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/6/226/226ra32.short)

...but really every preclinical paper on a new kind of vaccine or immunomodulatory antibody uses cancer cell lines in this way.
Let’s say you were interviewing a butterfly — or a Mayfly. A Mayfly lives for four or five days. Say that Mayfly was standing on the branch of a giant Sequoia tree in California, which lives for thousands of years. If you were to ask that Mayfly, “Do you perceive this branch that you are standing on as being alive?” The Mayfly would say, “Of course not. I’ve been here my entire life, four days, and the branch hasn’t done a doggone thing.” Yet when you look at the tree in our context, it is very much alive. It started with a seed, and it grew. Well, the earth is very much like that tree, and mankind is very much like that Mayfly. If we are lucky, we will live a hundred years. We are standing on a planet that was born four and a half billion years ago. It looked very different when it was born; it evolved and has changed. Africa used to be just outside the window here. Morocco was connected to Cape Cod. Beneath this building are rocks from Africa. It’s hard to imagine that. But if you were to sit on the moon, and look at the earth and blink your eyes once every million years, it would come blossoming to life.
Next, a Lego person who bathes despite getting dirty again.
Wow! That's a seriously big project I never heard of!
still no solutions for IoT devices serving webpages like routers , nas, ip cameras, etc
All H1b salary data is already public.
is there a reason why bitlocker would use rsa for encryption? afaik how bitlocker worked with tpm was that it would generate a (symmetric) key, store it in the tpm, then seal it, binding it to the current PCR value. on boot, it would unseal it (which will succeed unless the PCR changed).
Asking as someone who barely has any clue in this field: is there a way to use this for full-text search, e.g. Lucene? I know from experience that for some languages (e.g. Herew) there are no good stemmers available out of the box, so can you easily build a stemmer/lemmatizer (or even something more powerful? [1]) on top of word2vec or fastText?

[1] E.g., for each word in a document or a search string, it would generate not just its base form, but also a list of top 3 base forms that are different, but similar in meaning to this word's base form (where the meaning is inferred based on context).
In the US you can't really get a reliable network connection to your residence. The entire shift towards the cloud is in no small part due to crappy internet. The large ISPs really missed the boat on this.
I have no idea the mindset of these robbers who seem to be after your paycheck, but I do know that Norway has made salary information public [0], and they have a very low crime rate [1], in fact it's far lower than the U.S. crime rate.

0: https://qz.com/784186/in-norway-you-can-browse-everyones-tax...

1: http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Norway/Unit...
A lot of the problem is that people pay attention to the hype of news articles rather than the particulars of the papers.

In the one you link, they don't describe what they mean by "hold up." It turns out that the only definition that those authors give is in the caption of Table 1

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...

>The term 'non-reproduced' was assigned on the basis of findings not being sufficiently robust to drive a drug-development programme.

Now, this is a completely different thing from reproducing in terms of getting the same science. Driving a drug program is not biology, it means does this phenomena that you found in one thing apply to the vast majority, so that a pharma like Amgen can run a trial, put all stage 4 patients on it, and have it work on enough people that the trial has good enough stats.

However, that's really not how cancer works. Cancer is extremely diverse. If somebody is publishing a "landmark" paper (whatever their definition is of that), then they are publishing something new and unexpected most likely. That means that the landmark finding is almost certainly not going to generalize to enough that a large pharma can run an uninformed clinical trial and throw it all patients without pre-selecting for patients where it will most likely work.

Further, that silly thing is just an editorial. It's a plea for science journals to only publish things when it's found in the majority of cancers, or something. If we did that, we'd know far less about cancer, because it's treating something that's actually diverse as a monolithic entity.

Are you going to get a particular cell line to have exactly the same gene expression as another lab? Probably not, if it's a tricky to grow cell line. Are you going to get cancer drug sensitivities to be all the same? Probably not, if you're testing when the cell lines are growing at different densities.

People really should distrust that any individual data point from a particular model biological model is going to generalize, especially for difficult biological models. That doesn't mean we should stop publishing, because if we do, we're not going to be able to figure out what's actually driving those differences.
How many primes within the usual range generated for RSA happen to fit the form 27a^2 + 27a + 7?
No. Skipped straight to Zero from AG Fan Hui (not AG Lee).
I think the big mistake one can do when comparing digital and physical textbooks is compare then one-on-one with a level playing field. Why do that?

Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from extremely zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. Or just audio, say to listen to case studies or know how a bird sounds. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. There is so much more digital books can offer.

Once you bring in these advantages, I bet the pedagogical advantages will be enormous. I'd like to see that study, and I bet digital books will blow everything out of the water.

There are advantages apart from learning benefits. Errata can be a thing of a past with updatable textbooks. You can search for every single word easily and save time. There's no wear and tear. Students can get away with having textbooks on their phones, avoiding carrying textbooks weighing several pounds. Another huge benefit is accessibility. From large font to audio output, all accessibility features ever possible on a computer are possible with the textbook with minimal effort.

The publishing industry is only limiting itself because any innovation on its digital books will mean death of its money maker. It will mean much less production and distribution costs which will put in question its atrocious pricing.
Yes, it's easy to penalize hoarded money. The hard part is penalizing substantively hoarded money. If I just make sham exchanges back and forth between some ring of addresses that I own, then we're right back to square one.

Does it do anything to distinguish sham transactions from real ones? Or have any theory about the difference? If not, then it's not doing anything novel.

(I know you're not the advocate of this, just a general reply to technical solutions to low money velocity.)
Of cource, science itself isn't failing, and hopefully it isn't science itself that people are losing faith in.

Rather, performing proper science is despressingly difficult. So much that we would like to believe is unbiased can so easily be biased without us knowing it.

Actually, I'm glad for this lack of trust in ourselves. Self-doubt is the beginning of wisdom, so they say.
First off, stinging insects hardly make up 100% of the biomass of a meadow, so if it's full of stinging insects, it's a bowl filled with stinging insects, not a meadow.

Secondly, http://www.countrylovers.co.uk/hort/wildgrdn.htm

> Where 'attracts insects' is mentioned you can assume that birds will also be consequently be attracted

https://www.kingsseeds.co.nz/Kings+Seeds+Blog/x_post/Plants-...

> But what if we are trying to DISCOURAGE insects from coming into our garden. After all, there are some we just get completely sick of. What can we sow to help us to repel the insects we don’t like? Here are some ideas for that:

Thirdly, if all fails, enjoy it with binoculars. You'll live. Heck, most people will even survive insect stings.
>What is the reason to not get a salary accordingly to my seniority, expertise and work output?

I've said this many times and will say it again, most people's salaries are more closely aligned with their leverage than their output. Now leverage can be value too, so it's a complicated picture to unpack and I won't get into it too much.

People who are benefitting more so from leverage (which tends to be the people with the best salaries) will HATE this move. Salary transparency would take away their leverage and they would have to focus more on their output to justify their high salaries.
Pascal's wager boils down to "vanishingly small likelihood, but nearly infinite reward." It's fascinating because it's difficult to get to a reasonable answer in a way that is consistent with normal utility-maximizing behavior. Comparing probabilities and expected costs and benefits is normally an extremely useful thing to do, and it doesn't just automatically stop being useful when the probabilities get small (consider that many people choose to buy insurance even when only a small percentage end up benefiting from their decision).

Fundamentally this boils down to a pretty simple question: what's the likelihood that cryonics will "pay out"? If your answer is 0.00001%, sure, don't sign up. But if your answer is, say, 2%, then maybe it's worth it.
Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do?

Build a time machine, and instill this sense of dismay, terror, and dawning realization into everyone then.

Barring that, a series of technological miracles would help, but we needed them yesterday.

Don’t have kids.
You are moving the goalposts.

If we're talking about doing a specific task within a well-defined framework, computers are already proving to be superhuman. That includes image recognition beyond ImageNet, as well as games like Go.

But yes, if we're talking about a generic system, then humans are better. And I think they will be for a long time.

And yes, I agree, there is a lot of noise and sizzle around AI (but there is also quite a bit of steak there too.)
Aristolochic acids and derivatives implicated in liver cancers throughout Asia
Has anyone ever studied this stuff before? You think they'd have noticed that if true...
Yes. When I reached the end of the article, I was looking for the button for page 2. But there wasn't one. Come on, Bloomberg.

Does this guy do crowd simulations, or something like that?
It doesn't matter if you don't retain anything. Anecdotally at least, I and most people I know absorb information better on the printed paper than on a computer screen. Even when I'm writing code, i'm usually taking notes and drawing diagrams in a notebook. Digital media or a supplement, not a replacement, for traditional dead-tree media.
Have you ever worked in a research capacity at either an academic or for-profit institution? My experience has been that private for-profit entities are good at scale and terrible at discovering new ideas.
I second this. This was the explanation where I finally understood the big picture of ledgers, blockchain & proof of work
That brain is going to be a brain slurry after freezing, but hey, I’m scared of dying too so I get it. I’m just no more able to buy into the fantasy of cryonics or digital afterlives than I am the “divine” kind. More than anything it strikes me as old hopes, dreams, and fears in a new skin, like “Simulated Universe” theory.
This is a good introduction to possible attack vectors in training models. Thank you for sharing!
Developping a Flask Web App with a PostreSQL Database
Until I see AlphaGo zero defeating StockFish 100-0 and with same algorithm defeating best Go AI and killing the Atari games including montezuma’s revenge, I call this hype bullshit.

Give me your results on OpenAI gym in a variety of different styles of games including GTA and WoW. I will believe you if a generic unsupervised algorithm running on a single machine is absolutely destroying the best players.

Until then ...