skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The equations on this page don't render for me on either Firefox or Chrome, making reading this a little jarring. See their paper [0] for what I think is easier to follow.

*A more informative title would be something like "Improving Variational Autoencoders with improved Evidence-Based Lower Bound [ELBO] methods. The "What's wrong with VAEs?" title, followed by paragraphs explaining how VAEs work, made me wonder why I was reading it in the first place, but practically improving ELBO methods for VAE implementations is a meaningful contribution.

[0] "Tighter Variational Bounds are Not Necessarily Better", https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04537
In fact, how are pedestrians supposed to get on the median in the first place (legally, I mean)?

There are even "no crossing" signs where the paths meet the road. Apparently you're supposed to go to the crosswalk, cross to the median, then navigate down a thin strip which contains a bush that you have to step over and a bunch of loose rocks that you could easily trip on. WTF.
Google the reference text leads to PubMed site, download paper free.
Interesting. I'd certainly love to hear more about the inside scoop (but obviously don't say more than you legally can).

What's your take on the current push with the SDK coming out? Do you think this signals that they're really getting ready to ship something, or do you feel that they're still unready based on what you saw there?
We're a constitutional republic, not an authoritarian regime regardless of how much current administration wishes otherwise.

Good guys need villains, they need them to have purpose, to have focus. Without that ability to focus catalysts for change never amount to much.
Daniel Pennac certainly stands among the many great french writers.
Sure, and that’s what average may refer to before you drill in with a specific definition. If I say by definition, rectangles are technically polygons with 4 edges of equal length, you’re going to say “technically” I meant a square.
The combination of syntax highlighting support literally everywhere and a borderline typeless system and command completion. Those are developer positives. Here is the deal php is crazy easy to set up(& make basic themes) and lots of clients will pay for php for similar reasons. Php shared hosting is cheap and franlky unless someone creates something similar it will continue to power the estimated 80+% of the web that it does today. WP is also a killer reason. Any sane client wants a site that isn't stuck on node.js/plugin version 2.X only.
East Asians have some of the best outcomes of any demographic: higher income, more educated, lower criminality, lower divorce rate, etc. In a country that is arguably designed to maximally benefit whites, they are beating white people at basically everything. This goes far beyond gaming credentials, it's real world outcomes. We could stand to lower our bar with them a little and still get ahead.
So about 0.1% of the American populace knew that. (Ball park: call Facebook 30k employees. If you want to add a whole lot of digital marketers take that to even as high as 3M. That's still only 1% of the US population.)
Where does a Terms of Service violation fall in all of this? Because CA clearly violated the ToS.
What exactly do you mean by quality of art? Beauty is just an emotion / feeling triggered when exposed to certain stimuli. It's to some extent encoded in our DNA. Anthropology / human biology / sociology problem.
Did you graduate from the Engineering College?

I am on the Engineering Accreditation Board now and this is the feedback that we need from alums.
[Spoiler Alert] Let’s Talk About the Ending of Annihilation
The point about the woman being homeless made something click for me. If you drive in DC, you’ll see panhandlers and people who are very erratic. You have to concentrate on their body language to anticipate whether they’re about to leap into traffic. You often slow down because you’re not sure what they’re going to do. How does a self-driving car do that?

It’s quite possible that a human driver going 38 wouldn’t have been able to stop in time. But could a human driver been going 25 because they saw someone acting erratically on the median?
I'm not sure if you meant it, but you essentially answered my question with a "yes." It's to absolve individuals of responsibility in killing people.

If that's the case then I'm not sure how it is a benefit to society.
I've included a pandoc generated epub at https://github.com/joaoventura/full-speed-python/releases/
Biohacking Is Bullshit
For what it’s worth, their pedestrian detection algo might be better
How is Uber's experiment different than any other 20 companies working on same thing?
Now that Facebook is being associated with Russia—and its connection with Trump—it is being thrown into the political froth that predominates the media spotlight right now. Normally, very few people would care about data retention policies, targeted advertising, or twitter bots, but when it is connected to a hotbutton issue it becomes more palatable to pundits and dinner tables alike. There is also the new energy that was culminated in Trump's election, caused by fear and shock by some and by lifting the malaise of seemingly immutable conventions and power structures to most (although that is perceived differently to different groups), as was what propelled Trump into office in the first place. This is why both those that identify as liberal and conservative have become more active than in the past, but I think this is just an uptake in a trend which started long before now. History doesn't happen in a vacuum, that is to say.
If you want data abstraction to do at least a minimum of static invariant enforcement, you pretty much have to use abstract data types. But if you're fine with littering logs with “exception was caught here, such and such data structure was corrupted”, suit yourself.
You’ll notice someone gained access to your system (because the money will disappear) but you’ll have zero clue how they did it. Also, how do you prevent an employee from stealing the funds for themselves?

There’s a reason companies use bug bounty platforms instead of just having a bunch of bitcoins lying around.
I've just confirmed on a virtualbox installation of windows 7 and it is working fine on Acrobat Reader. It may be a crazy suggestion, but can you reset your computer? I've also made available an epub, so maybe you can use it instead of the pdf..
Cool! Do you have an example? Super interested.
This is a good question. Here are a few typical reasons why later-stage companies join YC.

1) Companies that are in international markets and want to launch in the US. YC can provide a great platform for this.

2) Companies that sell services to startups (i.e., devtools) and can make use of YC's network to get customers faster.

3) Companies that have bootstrapped thus far but now want to raise a larger round from investors and want help doing so.

4) Companies whose business is at a substantial size but not growing quickly, and want to grow faster.

5) Companies that want to make a major business change, and want help with doing that. We've had companies pivoting from hardware to software, from a service company to a product company and more.
And it's awesome.[1] Getting shadows right for the specifics of a game is a nightmare; balancing shadow acne and performance. Just being able to do one-size-fits-all shadows on desktops would be a major step forward.

[1]: https://www.imgtec.com/blog/ray-traced-shadows-vs-cascaded-s...
I agree the problem is money, and I also agree that bad faith and disinformation are true measures of problematic political communication.

A principle we could rely on is openness. Just disclose who is paying for what. And disclose the ads.
If Trump/CA/Russia targeted an ad at you distorting HRC's record, we should know who paid for it.
Up until now, political ads - TV, billboards, even direct mail - were discoverable to the American public, so big distortions could be called out (even if they sometimes were not, as with GWB's racist attacks in SC on McCain's adopted kid.)

But the current setup, where Facebook ads are effectively secret, is a big big problem. How do we know the ads were all honest? Let's just have FB release the 2016 ads so we America has time to figure out what to do before 2018.
I retract my prior comment about giving Agora the benefit of the doubt.

"...The Agora people appear smart, earnest. So maybe there's something here." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16599728

Voting systems are like catnip for both conspiracy theorists and charlatan's. It's nutty making. Sometimes I wonder which one I am.

On the positive side, the Sierra Leone govt's refutation saves me the effort of debunking yet another hairball scheme.
Mirror it as HTML / PDF please.
Samsung files patent for new smartphone that provides expandable display
German “Digitalisierung” versus American innovation
https://www.amazon.com/Blabac-Photo-Art-Skateboarding-Photog...
It's disingenuous to claim that employees of Facebook are being exploited as such. Factory workers maybe, but not a lucrative position at Menlo Park.
“Codes” is idiomatic in some disciplines. For example in aerospace engineering when discussing various analysis implementations, everyone calls them codes. “Which vortex lattice method codes do you like?” “Oh I just use panel codes.” And it’s not slang, you see that usage in textbooks and academic papers as well.
Some stats:

Taxify has had 130k downloads in the last 4 months.
Ola is at 24k for about 1 month.

Far cry from Uber which does that in almost 2 days
YC: California Dreamin, Marijuana Soda Startup
With power should come responsibility, sure, but "power" means "ability to affect the situation", not "joules per second." In the scenario of a pedestrian suddenly running out in front of a car which is driving at the speed limit, the pedestrian has far more power to affect the outcome (by choosing not to run into the path of the car) than the driver (who could not reasonably predict the pedestrian would behave in this manner).
Did the gaming company you work for represent themselves in inaccurate ways? This seems to be what CA did - fraudulent identities, putting out news that they knew was not truthful, and not identifying their ads and output as part of a political campaign.

That's one of the problems for me in all of this; a group that is lying, or perhaps breaking campaign disclosure laws, is acting wildly different than a gaming company.
Pedestrians have a higher personal responsibility since they have a higher risk. Common sense dictates this.

When you cross the road you know there is a risk. Driving down the road you dont typically have a huge risk.

Especially when its legal to drive down the road and illegal to cross the road outside the crosswalks.
While I was in school from 2011-2015 I noticed the GPA requirements seemed to drop significantly! Cat, John Deere, and Boeing all had 3.5+ requirements when I started. Last I heard, John Deere was at 2.8, and the others dropped as well.
Motion Sensor VCR
You're underestimating farmers, I'm pretty sure a good chunk of them could have very valuable insight on building an automatic corn harvester. A lot of them have second jobs in fields related to natural sciences and engineering, and they have farm machinery and buildings that they probably do a good chunk of the work on.
Physicists discover new quantum electronic material
https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming by https://www.edx.org/bio/ana-bell

Is worth the investment!
The HoloLens has many similar features:

* Persistent location tracking

* Processor/GPU power (HoloLens is x86-based with a dedicated HPU unit for hand/environment tracking)

* Custom OS based on Windows Universal

* Multiple apps can run

* FOV is small

* Display doesn't work with nearby objects

* Brief update delay for real objects - there's a short delay for direct object mesh tracking and a longer delay for spatial anchor updates, IIRC

* Can't draw blackness

From the last few limitations, it seems they may just be using the same waveguide displays as the HoloLens. Variable DoF sounds interesting - I suppose they're using eye tracking to provide blur-DoF effects, but I wonder how quickly they can adapt the image. Would also be interesting if variable DoF means something else.

A tracked controller is nice but perhaps nothing too new. I wonder how they track the controller if it's out of the FoV of the head-mounted camera setup? HoloLens has a clicker controller but that's inertially tracked so it's much more similar to a gyro-mouse than e.g. a Rift controller.
Ask HN: Has 9p (plan 9 protocol) ever been used seriously?
The question is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. I've been teaching myself Limbo programming lately and studying the design of Inferno (including with the Plan 9 protocol which inspired many aspects of the OS) but I'm not really finding many applications that really use the 9P/Styx protocol on the internet. It seems like Plan9 never really took off, neither did Inferno.

If you know of any serious usage of the 9P protocol or have experience working on it, or any takes on it, it'd be very educational!
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16624887 and marked it off-topic.
> Additionally, some see the collapse of stores like Toys R Us as the first wave of economic effects resulting from the declining birth rate in the US (note that Toys R Us also owns Babies R Us).

Toys R Us's collapse was mostly caused by a leveraged buyout in 2005.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-toys-r-us-leveraged-bu...
>mountains, ocean, vast empty national parks

None of which are relevant if San Francisco's transportation policy is effective and you go car-free.
Where have you lived? Here in DC you regularly have to slow down because tourists and homeless people will blithely jump into the street. Same thing in Philadelphia or New York.
Good question, as they are equally undemocratic (they hew to the goals of the billionaires that control the GOP - which is to destroy the gov't to cut taxes on the rich.)
To be fair, Obama's team also used data. But right now the threats come from billionaires or foreign powers. i360 should be the next subject of scrutiny. And they as well as think tanks and 'nonprofits' like Jud Watch should disclose who donated each and every dollar.
Google hired webOS's lead UI designer who led the creation of Material Design at Google: Matías Duarte[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mat%C3%ADas_Duarte
Google partners with Johnson and Johnson to make lower cost surgical robots
The Triumph of Emotion Over Reason
A couple famous examples are Dan Bernsteins's code style is considered weird (he was trying to write safe code his way in C) and Monty's MySQL code is considered "ugly" but runs great.
I had to clean my kitchen up.
Is there any company out there who actually says “our compensation is NOT competitive?” That’s pretty much the lowest bar. When I hear “competitive salary” it means the company can’t think of a more positive word to describe it that is also truthful.
What would this proof look like to someone with your perspective? I’m genuinely curious what they could provide that you couldn’t/wouldn’t hand wave away as fake news.
- Do I need to document every single expense with invoices similar to vat?

Not at all.

- What kind of expenses I can write off to my business? Apartment, house, car lease?

This is determined by US tax law, not YC. Generally part of your rent can be expensed if you are working out of your house or apartment.

- What kind of salary to founders pay themselves?

Usually founders pay themselves initially a salary that is below market for what they could be making at an established company, but enough to live on. Once their company reaches a certain level of success, they raise their salary to a market level.

- Do you hire yourself at the company or only pay yourself dividends as a salary? That's a popular method in Poland for founders to lower their income tax

You hire yourself.

- What's a popular visa used for this? I am looking at L1 but I am not sure how the connection between companies is established

During YC most founders stay on a visitor visa. After YC, most founders choose to get an O1.

- How demanding are the investors? If growth is slower than expected are there problems?

Not from YC or from typical silicon valley seed investors.
Greed is a subjective term. The company who is charging money could be described as greedy for making a profit when they could have lowered the price to remove any excess profit. Why is the person who understands and uses the system in a way it wasn't intented greedy?
I sometimes wish I had launched a similar porting effort with SageMath...
It sounds like they are being alleged of lying and not identifying themselves as having been affiliated with either a PAC or a campaign. By doing that, that's breaking the law.

Additionally, the CEO has basically admitted - under hidden camera - that they are fine with blackmail and lying. Is blackmail and lying technically illegal? I'm not sure. But if you lie and blackmail as part of a political campaign, but do not let people know you are a political campaign, you have broken the law.
I would wager that you won't find an obviously bad security practice like md5() the password in the PHP documentation comments that isn't voted way down.
Yeah, I'm a former VFX developer and now freelance developer in LA. This is site mostly for programmers if you hadn't noticed.

http://www.laweekly.com/news/did-you-just-get-a-500-freelanc...

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-horowitz-taxes-ta...

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/LA-Freelancers-Get-...

Not to mention the links from the grandparent making the case of the declining industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16621760

Oh, and the recent hidden trash tax, 35 million a year:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-trash-bills-los-... (Rent went up $100 in an already soaring rent environment.)

Paid shill from the city government? Sure sounds that way. It's obvious you've never lived in sane tax environment like New Zealand where you file in about thirty minutes a year on their website. That's what you're competing with.
Golang newbie here. Using a slice to hold different struct types of the same interface, finding it very annoying that every time I want to access a common attribute of the struct types I need to define a getter/setter.
> This is not true for any cohort.

I think it is, for a pretty reasonable slicing of the data. Here[1] you can find a table on pages 33-34 that contains cause of death by age cohort - the 15-24 group has only a single row that beats motor vehicle accidents, and it is "accidents", which motor vehicle accidents is considered a subset of.

I think part of the confusion from the table you linked to is that it doesn't contain motor vehicle deaths, and they are hidden in a weird way - in the 15-24 cohort, motor vehicle deaths are a substantial subset of all of the top 3 causes - unintentional injury, suicide, and homicide.

> By the way, the aviation insurance industry uses the per-journey statistic, not the per-mile.

That's perfectly reasonable for insurance purposes; a lot of the risk is concentrated in the takeoff and landing, so risk per journey is a more stable measure than risk per mile. But as a person who doesn't want to die, that's a nonsensical choice - I don't fly across the country because I wanted to take one journey; I fly across the country because I wanted to get somewhere that was 3000 miles away.
Are there plans for a beacon one could place on themself to make self driving cars recognize them better? Could be a light, a radio, or something else.

Perhaps there's a slippery slope before such things are required by law, but I am interested.
Working link to (I hope) the same document: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bE...
With the benefit of hindsight, it seems almost cute how strongly the DOJ went after Microsoft in the ‘90s, when they were just victimizing competitors rather than destabilizing democracies.
Statisticians tend to learn R in school. It's quirky structures are a major source of prototyping slowdown/technical debt. I recommend using Python/Pydata when people ask my advice in starting out. Once one learns Python then R isn't too bad to pick up.
Maybe more they want them nearby so they can keep an eye on things, make introductions, etc...
Ask HN: Is proof-of-stake algorithm implemented yet?
Hi hackers,
there are lots of coin who claims implementing proof of stake as their mining mechanism, however, I have never see one actually doing it.
Do anyone know which coin has successfully implemented the proof-of-stake algorithm and how they do it?
This should probably not be on the HN front page, its way to early to have meaningful discussion of what happened.
Did you reply to the correct post? This seems unconnected to the topic at hand in the extreme, but maybe I’m missing something.
> I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement

I think we want to believe that but hasn't been true for many years. Presidents sell a brand unfortunately, just like large companies do their commercials. With the same psychological and rhetorical tricks.

One of my favorite examples I always bring up is this: http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market... notice how with much fanfare everyone was happily handing his campaign the marketing award. Normally that is not awarded to political candidates, it goes to Coke, Pepsi, Apple etc.

---

"I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers," said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions "To see what he's done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it's created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It's very easy for people to participate."

---

Social network they say? They couldn't mean using Facebook,could they? But, I think they are. An unsurprisingly Obama's campaign used the same methods as CA did:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/face...

---

Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.

---

> Propaganda is not received in the same way.

That's exactly why it is disguised not to be perceived as blatant propaganda. It works best when it is sneaking its way in via a seemingly unbiased publication, or news story, a comedy skit etc
There are many instances in Asia of people committing suicide by car (jumping in front of a car with no chance for the driver to stop).

Not saying this is the case here, but it could be. As others have said, we need to wait until we know more before jumping to conclusions.
Right, but since the driver has seen there's somebody on foot on the pavement, how come they haven't slowed down already? Perhaps the person could trip and fall into the road. Perhaps the person could have a fit and fall into the road. Perhaps the person is just crazy and is contemplating leaping into the road. Perhaps the person is drunk, hasn't seen you, and just fancies crossing the road there and then. It really doesn't matter. These are not capital offences.

What if that person were your son, daughter, wife, husband, parent, or whatever? Would you be so blasé over their losing their life, and all because somebody couldn't even be bothered to just move their foot a bit and press a pedal?