skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Correct uniform sampling in things like this comes up a lot in Monte Carlo radiation transport problems and is covered very well in your basic first year graduate Monte Carlo class in a good nuclear engineering program. If you want to go deeper, check out the literature around that.
We dont need to make there no opt out for organ donation, all we need to do is make organ donation the default and it would drastically increase the number of organ doners.
> This matches my experience as well (I suspect it might not in less urban areas, though).

Indeed, I lived in less urban areas, and people are more open to socialize there.

As for the rest, I agree and encountered the same as well. What they are doing is parasitic, but they are naturally offended if you ignore them. For marketers especially, consider that every time someone ignores them, it means they failed at their job. It's a bad situation for them, and for us.
Seconding this. The first thing that came to my mind when reading this article was Hanabi - which is a fantastic game.

There's also a number of fun papers out there about Hanabi:

Hanabi is NP-Complete, Even for Cheaters Who
Look at Their Cards
: http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2016/5864/pdf/4.pdf

Playing Hanabi Near-Optimally: http://www.mi.parisdescartes.fr/~bouzy/publications/bouzy-ha... (Though maybe skip this one if you intend to play the game for fun with friends)
> "Forget trying to understand this issue, let us explain how you should feel about it!"

Well... yeah. Because you stand no chance of understanding the issue, and there is a very high risk that you will develop irrational feelings that will lead you to do dangerous things.

Take for example the flu effectiveness in elders study. The biased journalists summarized it as "flu vaccine is killing elders". It would have been harder to misrepresent it to such a degree if the abstract contained something like this:

"Public health notice: the authors believe existing vaccines are safe and effective and strongly recommend people of all ages to undergo vaccination. This study is a scientific inquiry with the purpose of increasing that effectiveness for elder patients, and our current findings have no imediate clinical application. More specifically, we report no evidence that flu vaccination is a net health risk for the elderly."
Sorry about that, I'm still in the process of converting my notes and memories into coherent posts. I just put up another one, and should have the next few shortly.
Illegal Alien Repeatedly Raped Two Girls, Ages 8 and 10 – United States
Open Source Mars Rover
Hades: An experimental HATEOAS-based HTTP/2 reverse proxy for JSON API back ends
Many academics also link to preprints on their CV/homepage. It is often worth a thirty second search to check for that.
I don't think this problem will ever be solved while you can easily find books written by MDs arguing that vaccines are unsafe. Alienating civilians who believe in what these doctors say is probably not the best approach.
In general we are talking about O(n) algorithms, and the gains are due to better CPU cache utilization and fewer instructions per value, which LLVM helps do
Depends on the crime and incarceration level.
Well, work cannot be cited, if it cannot be accessed. I would be surprised if any researcher would not support open access.
In 2018, yes. In 2006, not so much. Google Scholar was a very new thing back then.
We changed the title from "Apache Arrow LLVM Compilation for 10-100X Performance Improvement".
I know this is a controversial view, but how much progress has been lost to intellectual property in general? I do not think the temporary monopoly on an idea incentives innovation. If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in the first place. If someone sees that as attractive they will probably take other anti-competitive steps once in a position of power.

If people were free to copy ideas and products, we would make an extraordinary amount of progress in a very short time.
> in your basic first year graduate Monte Carlo class

How many years of graduate classes are there on Monte Carlo methods for there to be a 'first year' one?!
it's so amazing how level they can keep their heads while the rest of their bodies contort so quickly and graciously.

That really caught my eye too, it's incredible.
That is also how it looks when someone has a SaaS hosted in AWS. Then wonder why potential clients are asking for self-hosted.
Would you call it discrimination to specifically target poor people to receive government aid?

Typically people call a policy discriminatory when some person or group is being harmed, but most people here agree that vaccinating children is helping to prevent harm from occurring, so it does not appear to be discriminatory. The fact that this policy does not apply to wealthy people is a red herring, since it doesn't impact whether or not poor people are being harmed.
This problem is equivalent to generating random orientations, which can be easily done generating random unit quaternions (see, for example, [1]). Each quaternion found will correspond to a point in the surface of a 4D sphere, which can be mapped to a point inside a 3D sphere.

[1] http://mathproofs.blogspot.com/2005/05/uniformly-distributed...
Ask HN: Open source library to generate music programatically?
Have you heard of any open source library to generate music programatically? I'm interested in generating music from the "first principles", that is to say, chords or notes.
This is the article you're referring to:
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/10/25/how-to-differentia...

This is the wikipedia page on integration by parts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integration_by_parts

He's setting u = phi(x), v = f(x).

Since he's integrating on the real line, a = -infinity, b = +infinity, so on the right hand side for "uv" you'd have u(+inf)v(+inf) - u(-inf)v(-inf) - and since u (which is phi) is 0 outside of a finite interval, you know these terms are 0.

[You obviously can't evaluate functions at +-inf, and you have to take limits to evaluate u(x)v(x) for an improper integral, but you can see the result is the same if u(x) is zero outside of a finite interval]
I believe it is relevant to the part where you said it's damn hard to find a company using it.
It would be a ring with a stick through it. In a 2D slice down the middle, it would look like a donut with a circle (the slice of the stick) in the hole. The circle appears to be stuck inside it, with no way out in 2D. In 3D, you just pull the stick out of the ring.
good catch! I forgot to put the "regular faces" part because everything in the app so far is regular faced. I was trying to make a definition of "vertex transitive" that's intelligible for someone without a math background but I obviously have a bit to go! I'll update the text based on your comments.
You can't take back what you've said while on-the-record (you are on-the-record unless you have jointly agreed otherwise... not to mention clearly agree on what 'on background' or 'off-the-record' means to each of you).

Next time, seriously, read up on or take some media training before speaking with a journalist unless you are open to your words being repeated, summarized, abbreviated, etc.
I just saw this myself and went to share it here. My girlfriend and I are ecstatic!

It's going to be quite challenging for him though I imagine. Patrick Stewart is quite advanced in his years. Thrilled to see what they come up with.
> Their shot protects ME.

Just to be clear, herd immunity protects those who aren't vaccinated. If you are vaccinated, your community's vaccination or lack there of doesn't affect you.

> Give a tax break to those who vaccinate etc. instead.

Yes, despite all the down votes my comment isn't about who is right or wrong, it's about respecting the other side. Just because you want your government to make laws about having to put medicine in your body there are millions of libretarians that would disagree on principle no matter how glaring the health benefits. It's less about taking the vaccine and more about the judgement and punishment if they don't that actually makes them resist more, not less.

You can't get rid of guns by deamonizing those that own guns and you can't increase herd immunity by deamonizing anti-vaxxers.

So I really like your idea. Offer carrots and respect, not sticks and judgement.
That’s only a problem if they can prove that you published it elsewhere.

“Oh no! Someone uploaded my paper to SciHub! What a pity :((((“
Accessibility demands Tourette Syndrome Compatible noise word support.
I have too many unread articles saved for later… and that’s okay
Nook is linux-based too IIRC. Should be possible to adapt the author's approach to the nook. You'd just need to root it using nook specific instructions.
Well that is the way of the world for everything else, but if the aim is ensuring herd immunity then encouraging the poor (who have most of the kids) to vaccinate then it works.
To be fair, they're not equivalent knowledge. Labs often imply equipment that cannot be gotten by normal means. Training and mentors know which knowledge is important, and sometimes possess knowledge that is hard to find because it's too specific and/or deep.

Research papers are a more obvious problem that is also easier to fix, but labs is nonetheless also a problem. Especially in fields where physical experiments are required, such as biology and chemistry, it's really hard to get anywhere without a lab, and running your own may be prohibitive and at times even illegal.
Marvellous article. Bill Evans' playing is one of the great consolations of life. For anyone who likes guitar, I also highly recommend Ralph Towner's lovely Nardis interpretation on his great album 'Solo Concert'
Yes, of course, I'd completely forgotten about that achievement.
If it is your accent, check out the Mimic Method. https://mimicmethod.com
But the behavior of any data dependent algorithm depends on any behavior change in the upstream data source. If you pipe Seti@home data into the array, the behavior of the program might depend on what some distant alien intelligence did thousands of light-travel-years ago. Is it "weird unpredictable" or is it exactly what you programmed into it?
If you take the stereographic projection of a uniform random unit quaternion onto 3-space, then to get a uniform distribution in the ball you need to apply a non-linear scaling function to the radius.

I’m not sure this really makes much sense as a way to generate random points in the ball (especially if you care about the details of rounding etc.), but maybe fun for someone to implement. I would expect the rejection method to be noticeably faster.

* * *

Another cute thing you could do is generate 3 normally distributed random numbers (giving a normally distributed random point in a 3-space), and then apply the appropriate non-linear scaling to the radius.
> Perhaps a blunt question, but what took scientists so long to figure this out?

The other science disciplines (mostly the life sciences), saw the AI/ML field greatly advance with their open research (e.g. arxiv, Github) and now want to copy it.

And yes, it was specifically AI/ML. Look at IEEE -- they're holding back the entire EE field. The ACM holds back the other areas of CS.
Yea those Kenn Borek guys are a different breed.

I think this has been posted here before but: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/kenn-borek-smithsonia...

As for the crossing from NZ-Antarctica, even large planes struggle, there's generally a point in the journey that they have to commit to landing as they don't have enough fuel to get there, abort and come back. This can be an issue as the weather in Antartica changes rapidly so you may find yourself in a storm after getting the green light to commit, as the RNZAF 757 did a few years ago:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/news/65543703/murray-mccullys...

(I'm not sure if the C-17 planes the USA fly down there have the same issue but every other plane will)
Nobody invests, everybody speculates. Even bank accounts carry risk in certain circumstances.
In Africa, Technology Is the Final Weapon in the Deadly Poaching War
Ask HN: Which parts of everyday life are more complex than people expect?
I recently appeared on radio to talk about Unicode [1]. In the introduction, I said that Unicode is interesting because text encoding and rendering sounds (at least to Western people) like something that's boring and solved, but then you look at how people actually write across the globe and you go down this gigantic rabbit hole.

Afterwards, I realized that in IT, we touch on a lot of aspects of real life that a layman thinks of as boring or trivial, but which turn out to be surprisingly complex when you look at them in detail. Since my time on radio was quite fun, I'm thinking about maybe making a small podcast series on these surprising complexities.

Now, of course the first step is to actually come up with a list of such things. That's my question for you: Do you know some aspect of everyday life that is much more complex than what laypeople usually appreciate?

I'll start with the first one that came to my mind: time zones. Did you know there are actually two time zones in Germany? The first one covers nearly all of Germany, the second one is for one tiny village of 1,300 people that is one very special snowflake in a lot of ways [2].

[1] Recording is here, but it's German: https://c3d2.de/news/pentaradio24-20180724.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCsingen_am_Hochrhein
Sure, but not everyone wants it as bad, plonking down $1.5B.
There's a difference here though. It's a lack of benefits, not a fine. You could adjust the latter based on the income, but not the former. Technical detail, but i believe benefits impact is easier to pass as a law than an outright fine.

Btw, higher income people are also impacted by policies like kindergarten access http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/no-childcare-o...
It is a natural tendency for people to want thinking done by someone else. This explains demagogues and self driving cars. How much power will we give machines to do our thinking for us? I think "Colossus the Forbin project" has a good impression on where things like that lead to. The backstory to Dune, Butlerian Jihad etc was an interesting take also.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
With PHP, all you have is legacy

This is not true. I think you'll find a lot of new projects being written in PHP 7.2 and/or using some newer framework, like Laravel.

There is nothing wrong with getting PHP work. PHP is not going away anytime soon, and the language has improved a lot since 5.6.
No, I don't. If someone insists on counting, it's like watching paint dry. It's a little bit more interesting if everyone is willing to wing it, but still not something I'd choose to play.

So I'm certainly not going to tell people that they should play by the rules as written. There's no game there. But perhaps this explains why the author of the original game perceived it as being polarizing. (But the problem is that the moment you transform this to a game about communicating over a limited channel, or to a game about reading tells, there are better options around.)
I would say the motivation is important. We do not live in a society where one can simply do a lot of work and see nothing for it without consequence. The problem is not originally with intellectual property, the problem is that every person has to justify their right to exist, and they do that through acquiring money by some means, which means a big chunk of what they're doing has to be concerned with acquiring money. Things like research and innovation take a lot of time.

We already have somewhat of this situation in reality. Many people involved in research a very poorly paid. Is it really resulting in better/faster research, or just people moving from academia to industry, and a lot of benefits pocketed by side actors?

> If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in the first place.

I.e., people who do not have lots of resources and need to figure out how to survive? You only want to see innovation from rich people with nice safety nets?
I think he/she means the Monte Carlo class you take in your first year of nuclear grad courses.
Depends if your graduate focus is on core neutronics or core thermodynamics.
Pleasantly surprised by the effect when scrolling over the sphere
>> Historically, particularly in recent times, medicine has been more right than wrong when giving out advice.

Source?
This is one of the dream jobs of aviation in my opinion. Many young pilots dream of becoming military pilots or airline captains, but for me the dream would be either ferry flights or bush flying to remote areas.

Some people invest large sums of money for an adventure flying around the world (see link below that has many examples) but if you are a ferry pilot or a bush pilot you are basically being paid to live the adventure.

While not being about ferry flights, the website http://www.soloflights.org/index.html has a list of common Atlantic and Pacific routes, it's very interesting.
We changed it.
Humble Book Bundle: Game Design and Puzzlecraft by Lone Shark Games and Friends
macOS. Not much interested in VMs, for efficiency.

Yeah I was playing with a separate user account, could get some basics working but I wonder how far could I get with that.

What are the bigger security risks for that approach? Assuming constrained file permissions, and that no secrets are in ENV (https://gist.github.com/telent/9742059 )
R.IP. Aaron Schwartz
So which algorithm ended up being fastest?
This is also very important in many global illumination techniques which requires sampling the hemisphere around a point.
As case in point a simple Monte Carlo path tracer uses this to sample random directions, see e.g. [0]. In addition to this there are many 'tricks' one can use to reduce the variance/noise using a differently weighted sampling (to help the converge of MC).
A nice technique to get a cosine-weighted hemisphere sampling is to generate a random point on the unit disc and then project them onto the (hemi)sphere.
Seems somewhat relevant here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing#Algorithm
Some might remember this excellent treatment of higher dimensions [1] in which you first manipulate shapes to solve a puzzle in 2D, then 3D, and finally 4D. YYou develop a keen sense of 4D objects:

[1] http://harmen.vanderwal.eu/hypercube/
Yeah, generally there's a lot of coursework like this in the first year. Then if you specialize in it you're going to take like 2-3 advanced classes plus relevant math and computer science stuff.
As non american, I’d love to know more about this kind of business with China, and how it relates to the US government political choices. Why the US looks so scared by China, if it has such economic relatons eith it?
The Rockett 25/7 Company Inc Fan Base – Home Facebook
Analogue TV and radio rebroadcast used to depend on atomic time. The vbi timing stuff needs to be regenerated as it's rebroadcast. Sure.. you can let it slip: what if people set their clocks from the timing pips on the radio?

Likewise mains AC power frequency policing. It has quite interesting set points and limits.
Of course. Now I take questions in writing, and respond in writing. It's less work for the journalist, too, as they don't have to spend time transcribing a recording.
This. Imagine how much faster we could lift the world out of poverty if copyright & IP weren't strangling us to death.
Well, the only major media outlet that supports anti-vaxxer's stance is Fox News...FYI. It is hardly a left movement, appeals to low educated crowd as well.

The right wing anti-vaxxers love to make analogy in between vaccine and guns, claiming it is their freedom to keep or resist and a unique denial of science and statistics, which I would say it mainly a right-wing hallmark.
How a bunch of lava lamps protect us from hackers
Looks awesome!

The difference between the "time" and "non-time" font styling is more subtle here - when I changed #main_text to have color: gray, it became a bit easier for me to see the time.
I do think you have a good point. What I have been telling people who wants to learn things for a few years now is to make sure they have a pipeline to test their ideas. To many people are perpetually learning, tinkering and building fantasies in their head without having the opportunity to make something out of it. I would say "to each their own" if it wasn't for the fact that it usually becomes sort of destructive. So while I do support more generous access to information it is also important that it doesn't just become "window shopping".
Notice how the rejection method becomes useless for higher dimensions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
The C17 usually flies from Christchurch to McMurdo and back, without taking on fuel in McMurdo. They are such impressive machines!
Depends on how fast your PRNG is, but I would expect the rejection method to be best under pretty much any circumstances. The code is also simplest. If PRNG speed becomes a bottleneck just use a faster PRNG.
I think this is great advice. I've seen it work for some people. It's a lot easier in some cases to transfer from a QA or Testing role into a dev role when one opens up. People have already worked with you and know you, and they feel more confident about your ability to get the job done. It's a smart move if you know anything at all about QA.
I also used to be an artist (am planning phase from art theory / music theory / mental abstractions / code influences / painting) to computer, mind, code, pure computational proof, etc.

I have to have my mind organised very precisely for this, that's something I have to accept as fact for stable mental trends.

But I am putting my email address in my profile if you want someone to get in touch with about art. I have been identified by others as an artist for much of my life, I have put a ton of work into it and I have created a lot of art. I have a lot of beliefs about art. Bounce ideas, etc.
Most of the annoyances in my life come from dinosaur corporations who have dumb policies and most likely won't go out of business for it.

Some examples:

1) Banks in the US put the burden of ID theft on the consumer. This is hilarious, because it is the bank who has been robbed, not me. Additionally, why does my bank mail my personal info to my former addresses for a few months? I always ask for web statements only.

2) Why does a passport cost nearly $100?

3) Why can't visas and borders be paperless and less restrictive?

4) Why can't month-to-month leases be easier to find?
Power frequency policing is a great idea! I actually saw a talk about this a few years ago, but it didn't cross my mind yet. Thanks!
> we are currently involved with UIs that tend towards consumption

Astute observation. Clearly this relates heavily to our culture of consumption and the asymmetry of creation/consumption.

But I wonder if another important part of this is related to the divide between how humans learn to do things and how computers can't teach humans very well. If we could automate showing people how to accomplish their goals, we'd be empowering creatives. So far, this task is relegated to youtube videos (e.g. "How do I make two shapes into one shape in Adobe Illustrator?").
Mission failure was also extremely expensive in monetary terms. ;)
I find that "The Game" and its "Extreme"[1] version with event cards where one of them is actually disallowing communication until covered by another card more engaging and fun to play then "The mind". Its fun to see the emotional rollercoaster that someone goes through when you put something on the pile they said they are interested in.

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/209325/game-extreme

edit: fixed name and added link
Note that I said "complex", not "complicated". I would like to tell interesting stories about how our modern life works. Cataloguing the stupidities of bureaucracy, while important, is not exactly engaging.