skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Implementing Gaussian Processes in Python is a fun way to practice your programming and mathematical abilities.

I was working on a course project that used GPs for regression, with the inputs taken from the output of a CNN. We were trying to predict crop yield from satellite imagery, and GPs helped to incorporate spatio-temporal locality: think of predictions for neighboring county, or for image from a previous year.

One issue we ran into while using the model from the original authors [1] was a memory constraint from building on top of Google Colab instead of a private AWS instance, and using a larger dataset to predict upon.

The Gaussian kernel matrix grows O(n^2) per data point, and we had up to 22,000 datapoints to use. To get around the memory constraint, we had to re-implement the GP from scratch - carefully avoiding memory spikes that came with computing the kernel and mean predictions.

It was a two-fold process. For understanding the exact equations, I would highly recommend the resource mentioned in the article [2], Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning Chapter 2. For a lecture video, I would recommend [3] which is from a ML course at Cornell.

As for implementing GPs efficiently, this is still a challenge: numpy has a bunch of matrix-vector functions that are helpful, but there isn't a way to exploit the symmetry of the kernel matrix and use half the require memory.

[1] https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI17/paper/view/14435/...

[2] http://www.gaussianprocess.org/gpml/chapters/RW.pdf

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-NUdqxKjos
I just read an interview with him in which he renounced his belief that adult-child sexual relationships aren’t necessarily harmful. As for the concept of coercive consent, his point was that if you have sex with someone who’s being coerced, but you aren’t aware of the coercion, you haven’t committed sexual assault. The blame rests entirely on the person doing the coercion. Of course, if you suspect that a potential sexual partner is being coerced into having sex with you, you should refuse (and, ideally, try to help them). But if they don’t seem to be in any distress, you can’t be blamed if it turns out that they were actually being coerced.
Secret Cities
I wish brave would just go for a plug-in approach, and partner with some news sites.
People in CUBA using Bitcoin and other crypto to circumvent US sanctions
By disagree you mean people might put pressure on your employer until you are fired in order to silence you and anyone who thinks about expressing such thoughts.
Couldn't have they used that money to make Firefox consume less battery on mobile? At least on par with Chrome?
I didn't know that, thanks for the info!
PCs would have looked much different had Compaq not been so lucky with their reverse engineering attempt, hence that whole failed PS/2 MCA recovery attempt.
> I mean... powerful billionaire brings you to his private island and presents to you a beautiful young woman who wants to have sex with you

Which means powerful billionaire wants to own you, and you should gtfo while you can.

> You'd have to be obnoxiously naive...

Well, some people probably are.

> ..to believe the woman wasn't being coerced in some way.

or believe that she was willingly paid?

Idk, I think I'd be creeped out way before it came to that, but who knows.
It's not a "quirk" in copyright law or a "loophole" — books before 1964 had a 28 years copyright period, which could be renewed and many authors didn't do that. It was "secret" because up to recently it was difficult to find out whether the copyright was renewed, but now the information is easily available (it was always public, as far as I understand).
Why not have a lottery and give non-transferable tickets to US nationals and have a fixed number of tickets for non-US nationals that are charged for?

[NB I'm not from the US but have been to a few US national parks].
It does not. Parents not filing complaints is an entirely different matter to courts letting perpetrators skate.
The proper comparison is not what a politician could say 20 years ago, but rather what a well-known software figure could say on a mailing list. "Predating social media by decades", you should appreciate how online communication was before the status-gamers got here and reasserted their tribalistic bullshit.
> They need to be independent as well

No, the sum of correlated Gaussians is also Gaussian. [Edit: or more precisely it can be, if they are jointly Gaussian, the point is that they they don’t need to be un correlated.]
It isn't accurate to presume that someone is deaf to a tone, just because they make a statement that doesn't acknowledge the tone.

Let's not make the mistake of calling Stallman unintelligent or deaf. He simply chooses to direct his attention to other tones.
If the other “incidents” are like this one, then the problem isn’t him, it’s the community’s puritanical streak.
Because for Wall St capitalism, dominance is the product.

Which is why steady-but-slow niche businesses don't get this kind of attention, even if they have better long-term prospects.

The product being sold at IPO is the promise of dominance of a market - because that implies a whole set of predictable relationships with investors, employees, and customers.

The product as sold to customers - whatever that is - is almost irrelevant.

A successful IPO is a convincing statement of political intent. We has almost managed that - but not quite enough to get it over the line.
I was not aware that phpbb forums disappeared; I regularly read three of them that are all quite active. Yes, there are subreddit counterparts, but the reddit versions are mostly filled with crappy karma-seeking memes and wildly off-topic discussions.

The phpbb forums tend to be a lot more ruthless in self-moderation and probably a fair amount of gatekeeping too. But the content is significantly better than reddit, which I believe is a source of pride for many of the participants. I also get the impression that there is a growing sense of “coolness” using a crappy outdated UX. I predict the return and rise of the niche community sites will happen before its total disappearance.
> I never believed that Microsoft was the great Satan.

I suspect that the great Satan for RMS was mostly Apple. I don’t think he and his organizations have ever advocated a boycott of Microsoft, while they have called for boycotts of both macOS and iOS at times — and notably at a time when MS owned something like 90% of the OS market, they advocated for a boycott of more or less their last PC OS competitor.

I never quite understood that focus. Maybe it was because Stallman thought that Apple, with its hippie roots, was the bigger disappointment for not aligning themselves with his values.
> "Friend" isn't just some flag that gets set by cosmic rays and then stays that way forever.

Agreed. It's more of a collection of experiences and knowledge of character.

If I've known you for 20 years and known you to be a good person, if I hear something like this I'm more likely to believe this is some sort of a mistake, as it is completely out of character. One way to rationalize it would be to believe that you were misinformed, rather than me being a poor judge of character for all of these years.

Again, not saying it's what happened - i dont know. But it's just human nature to react like that. It's not really human nature to consider the social media and print media applications before writing an opinion.
>If you really want to see "cash on the internet" I would advise you to do some research and find the cryptocurrency that best resembles it

A large part of the BTC community forked Bitcoin Cash from Bitcoin and removed the artificial limits imposed on it.
My apologies for the misattribution.

Suppose Acosta started the lie, and refuses to talk about it. What would the follow-up reporting look like?

"I contacted 16 US intelligence agencies. 9 of them denied that Epstein worked for them, and the rest would neither confirm or deny that Epstein worked for them."?

Would you have seen that sort of reporting? Would it be convincing? How many relevant intelligence agencies are there in the US?
The making of Gears 5: how the Coalition hit 60fps – and improved visual quality
Make the bucket buyer-pays, but offer Torrent links as well. Businesses doing CI will pay for S3 usage so they don't have to deal with torrents, end-users will get free torrent access, everybody wins.
Raspberry Pi 4 bench for industrial IoT
It's smart but pretty fucking rude tbh.
There are a lot of interesting ideas here. They're two years in, I'd guess perhaps one or two years from the larger vision of supporting real applications with lots of users.

I'm interested to see where this goes, and if they're not able to turn the closed-source version of this into a business, perhaps they'll inspire some community of OSS people to do something like it.

I'll say after having worked on migrations out of proprietary platforms like App Engine, I wouldn't use anything I couldn't run myself all the way down to the bare metal should their company up and disappear. They will have a lot of problems convincing people to bet their business on this platform if it's completely closed.
There are multiple issues here:

* General principle that people in influential positions have less protections and should have more scrutiny than average John Doe. Celebrities and influential people have less legal privacy protections.

* People are free to speak as individuals, but they may not be free to speak while they have public position in the organization. Elected members of the organization like FSF don't have the same protections as employers have. They represent the organization even outside the work. Their public position gives them a platform where what they say goes trough bullhorn and private becomes public and reflects the organization. If something they say harms the organization they should go even if they are right.
In 2017, Australia, Chile, and Argentina produced 91% of the world’s lithium
If your CI/CD is re-downloading and re-building everything on every single run, you are not only being wasteful, you're actually more likely to have an outage due to not storing dependency artifacts needed for deploy. Use a local artifact store to be more resilient to failures of servers you don't control (and also save everyone money and time).
I assume it was willful optimism on the part of the envisioners. If you tell people it will take decades it will take even longer!
I’m not a friend of RMS, although we have argued over email.

RMS has a unique super power I propose you admire: he is deeply committed to his convictions, and willing to construct his life around them.

He has autism so he finds himself in situations that you are politely calling tone deaf a lot; he has said in public that he can find the responses hurtful. But he still keeps on with his values, at times at great personal cost.

I think of him as a sort of national treasure; if we had 10 of him in the last twenty years the world would be a much better place.
Stallman was right though.
Ok, I should have said 'one of the reasons' ... and maybe there is a better road-map, but I was dabbling with Elm around 0.16, and then watched 0.17 change a bunch of stuff I liked to bunch of stuff I didn't care about as much and I decided to stay away for a while.

But if it looks like we would be on 0.19.x for few years to come, I might dip in it again ... it's not like I ever published anything in Purescript or ReasonML and I never used Elm in anger, so it is probably just a matter of time til I jump in again :)
Great work Yuge!

This post from Distill may also be worth checking out for those interested in Gaussian Processes:

https://distill.pub/2019/visual-exploration-gaussian-process...
Simple, paywall but provide an option to pay a reasonable price for an article, say $0.25 instead of tipping or ads. Of course NYT and all want a sleezy $5 subscription that’ll balloon to $30/mo in three months.
Assuming the allegations that they had sex are true, I think the most likely scenario, and the one that Minsky believed, was that she was a completely willing paid escort. It's only in hindsight that you think it must have been obvious she was coerced in some way. Why would he assume a billionaire had not simply used some of his money to pay for escorts? Isn't that more logical, without knowing what you know today about Epstein?
Excel, the most popular functional programming language in the world, is closed-source.
Consider this then: People who are not allowed to speak their mind will simply be hateful and creepy in the privacy of their home. Wouldn't you rather know who exactly is hateful and creepy to avoid them entirely, rather than create a fake atmosphere of safety.
A common UX dilemma with the listings on e-commerce websites
Magento 2 – Programmatically recreate the missing Catalog Search index table
I'm sure I read a definition of engineering once that was basically "meet the requirements doing as little new as possible".
Good point. MVNOs don't really do all of that, but I see what you mean.
Do you agree with this list? If not; what's your favorite?
freedom of speech merely means the government can't act against you. it doesn't bind any other entity from responding freely: in fact their response is also freedom of speech
Fixed. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Mirror and control your android device on Ubuntu using an app called Scrcpy
This is not FUD. Using it in production is a risky bet. And I say that as someon using Elm in production. We use it in a short-term, demo project. The project was started using version 0.18. Now we're stuck, either we rewrite huge parts of the app (and we don't have time for that), or we're stuck with older versions of the libs.

This is not something you can afford to do with a long-running, critical app, or at least you have to know you're taking some risks. It's a tradeoff.

Also, what would happen to Elm if the author suddenly died?
I didn’t even realize that the headline was incorrect for another reason: The tax rate for banks under the Gross Receipts Tax is actually 0%, not 0.4%+ as implied by the headline! (Business and Tax Code 954(f)(1) http://library.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll/California/busine...) Instead of a local gross receipts tax, the state of California imposes a 2% bank tax on net income (RTC 23151 http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xh...). The gross receipts tax on financial services is on businesses other than banks and insurance companies.
raspberry pi 4 is a best
What common brands can you get in more places than Evian?
This should be done more. I was absolutely bummed for not being able to the see Da Vinci's "The Last Supper", but in hindsight I understand and feel that is the way to deal with precious places.

At the time, you were required to book ahead, could only stay for 15 minutes, and the number os visitors was limited (so even in November you had to book weeks ahead).
> Addict or pseudoaddict, the solution is the same. Give them [it]

Exactly. If someone shows up at your clinic wanting drugs that you think they're addicted to -- especially ones that are cheap generic -- are you really preventing harm by not giving it to them?
ROIC?

Have you got figures because I just googled for Telsa, Ford and Facebook at that doesn't seem to be the case, albeit with older figures.

Anyway at this stage Tesla are selling luxury cars to the converted, its unclear to me that they can keep doing that. Eventually they'll have to start selling to Joe Bloggs.

https://www.gurufocus.com/term/ROC/NAS:FB/ROC-/Facebook

https://www.gurufocus.com/term/ROC/F/ROC-/Ford-Motor-Co

https://www.gurufocus.com/term/ROC/TSLA/ROC-Percentage/Tesla...
I agree with you, but if you can't secure the data, you shouldn't collect it in the first place. Not collecting data to begin with is a big part of the GDPR.
I have no opinion on Stallman, he could very well be that awful person.

The twitter discussion[0] seemed to me to be very polarized and targeting rage with all the common traits of typical fake news/mass hysteria communication. Maybe it is just the way these things naturally come to daylight.

[0] https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1172283772428906496
Iranian women have been historically been very well-educated, and this predates the Islamic republic. They've been churning out lots of female engineers and physicians for some time. I know women well into their 70s who are graduates of med school in Tehran and practicing in the US for e.g.

I'm not sure how you can hypothesize these things without any historical and cultural context
fanstasic
RMS is a fool. He should have kept his mouth shut because he is one of the least qualified people to speak on this subject, given his own admission of having problems relating to others in an empathic way and his previous very insensitive comments on adults having sex with minors.

On top of that he does Minsky a huge disservice:

Minsky can't defend himself anymore and RMS has now made a direct connection between Minsky and having sex with underage girls when in fact this may never have happened at all.

The deposition is unfortunately ambiguous about this fact:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14ZOEKwoBnDKUFI1hLbFJH5nsUFx...

Page 204, the question is 'Where did you go to have sex with Marvin Minsky?'; then further down that Ghislaine Maxwell directed her to have sex with him but crucially never asks her whether or not it actually happened, and at least one person is on record that Minsky turned her down:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/339725/
as much as possible
This is great. Not sure why the copy command doesn't succeed. I had to go in the source code to get the url.
Samson's Death and Burial
Yes, the actually unpalatable elements of the FLOSS community are crawling out of the woodworks now. I would have never expected the Software Freedom Conservancy and the EFF to be amongst them though.

Poor Richard, having his life's work usurped by the ankle biters and the self-aggrandising.
People in the US don't even know there was an English Civil War.
John Lennon was a misogynist but wrote world changing music.

Churchill was a racist that (arguably) saved his nation from invasion.

Stallman is a Marxist ("from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs") when it comes to how the power of computing is used and distributed and arguably the GPL and Linus's choice to use it for Linux have had world changing effects.

But Stallman is a man that also has no clue about how to deal with people in general or in tolerating other views.

His defence of Minsky's behavior is unacceptable as the head of the FSF and damaging to CSAIL/MIT (as is the relationship of MIT to Epstein in general).

It is unfortunate for him that his defence of Minsky has had this effect on his career. However, the impact of the result of that defence on the institutions he represented is much more important to resolve.

Geniuses in one field are not knowledgable in others.
There is a permit system for Half Dome in Yosemite that expanded after we climbed it, and one for Machu Picchu that came in after we hiked the Inca Trail. The Wave has had an infamously brutal one for a while, and I think Buckskin Gulch has a limit for overnighting. So it's already done in a few places. It can be frustrating though - I've tried for The Wave a few times and never been successful. Their limit seems low.

One thing worth doing is a shuttle system. Zion has one for peak months and as well as removing cars from the main canyon, you then have a captive audience which you can reach with messages about best practice in the wilderness though people ignore everything and feed animals anyway. Bryce has a shuttle too. Wouldn't surprise me if Arches was already planning one. That at least helps with the need for more and more parking.
This is the greatest apology on the méthode déconstructiviste that I have ever read. The subtle implicit suggestion that academics are actually on the verge to save the whole society through their epic use of wit will surely instill in any reader mind the obviousness of the Translapping Magisteria tenet that underlies the deconstructive reflexivity.[1]

That revival of the text comes just in right time in a period where for example Scull so severely critics Foucault's Histoire de la Folie.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory) Note that the French article https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9flexivit%C3%A9_(socio-a... is, obviously, superior as it goes further than the narrow scope of sociology
[2] https://www.books.fr/michel-foucault-deconstruit/
There are many people who's defence of headphone jack removal is 'Bluetooth works for me'. That's not the point though. You may like it, but this is about choice. By removing the audio jack, we have has a choice taken from us, and choice makes or brakes a device.
Uh, an engineering degree from a good school confers plenty of status in some of the countries we are duscussing, in which teens stop socializing their last year of high school to prepare for college entrance exams

And we can be similarly reductive about any profession. Lawyers are just paper pushers, academics are glorified grant Chasers, and so on
NASA Fires Space Burn
No. I live in the Netherlands and most brokers here allow you to invest/trade in US companies. I'm sure this also goes for a lot of other countries.
Or maybe it's because Apples values are significantly more hostile to FSF than Microsofts? Apples flagship devices are completely forbidden from running anything not approved by the corporation and their AppStore is completely incompatible with GPL software. It fundamentally goes against everything FSF stands for: being able to run any kind of software and modify it on your own machine. In a world of Apple, FSF is forbidden from existing by policy and hardware lockouts. Microsoft never came close to this kind of lockdown.

And Apple was always like that - even for Apple Lisa they developed a scheme where a floppy would be permanently bound to a single machine on first use practically forbidding resale. There are really not many large software companies that would be more hostile to FSF core values than Apple.
> Maybe it was because Stallman thought that Apple, with its hippie roots, was the bigger disappointment for not aligning themselves with his values.

I also believe this is the reason.

Recall RMS's commentary when Steve Jobs passed away, he basically said: nobody should die, but I'm glad to see him leaving Apple, as he has built a cool prison of Apple in his life. It even triggered some strong actions within the community, "it's time to fork the FSF", from members who see and respect Steve Jobs as an important hacker in computer history. But to RMS, he has been excommunicated from the hacker community for what he has done, regardless of his early life.
Like all urban legends, there is likely a core of truth in the story. Certainly Bezos is known for micromanaging and arbitrarily overruling employees' decisions on everything from strategy to product design. Now, if a leader really does have great instinct, this can work out for the better (like Jobs). And I think in some areas, Bezos does (he has done surprisingly well with their IT strategy). But I know that in others he doesn't, and he just botches stuff (like many horrible Kindle design decisions).