skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a few things that really bother me about this post and many of the comments regarding it.

First, let me address a common theme that I see underlying this discussion and many others: theory vs reality. The common claim seems to be that scientists or other members of the academic community are often disconnected with "the real world" and blindly hold to models that don't quite work. This is both a damaging idea and a false one.

Science and math are two different things and science has always been about the real world. The key difference between science and math (or theory as some like to call it) is empirical data. In the physical sciences the fact that collected data contains errors or biases is a fundamental part of the process. Characterizing and understanding the error or other problems with collected data is critical to doing good science.

It seems that people who study computer science often forget this. When does computer science change from mathematics to a proper science? When you start applying it to real data or to real systems that contain imperfections. Situations precisely like the one being described. In this case there is nothing wrong with Bayes' theory and as many have pointed out the theory is not being tweaking at all. Rather, change in the mathematics is to address a shortcoming of the data. This is simply how science should work. Science is the real world and if you think otherwise you are not understanding or practicing good science.

My second criticism is with the suggestion that we should not care why this change improves results. Now, John Cook is not actually advocating this, but a casual reading of his blog post could certainly be read that way in error. He is saying that it's ok to use an algorithm in practice even though we don't fully understand it. In so far as it's been properly tested, I doubt most people nor most academics would argue with this.

But it's still important to try to understand what is going wrong in the application of the mathematics such that a fudge factor is required. Very often, understanding the root cause can lead to better methodology or a better modelling of the data.
> Here is another wildly fun 6.042 game that’s surely about to sweep the nation!

Makes sense!
Someone else here taking "Design of Algorithms I"?
How to make decisions based on data, rather than assumptions
Yes, apks are also signed, but the key generation is up to you. It's no problem to use self generated keys, it just has to be the same key across different versions of the same app.
Flying drone swarm could bring free Wi-Fi access to protesters [video]
It's troubling that this type of data gathering doesn't require a warrant. The American Government can't expect oppressive countries to clean up their act when the example they set is to bypass civil liberties whenever possible.
You're either being extraordinarily disingenuous or ignorant if you're trying to claim that socialism and anarchism haven't historically been aligned with each other. Bakunin was in the first international with Marx, Russian anarchists participated in the 1917 revolutions, etc etc. Your idea that socialists are trying to "co-opt" anarchism is probably due to a misunderstanding of what socialism is both historically and currently. Socialists and anarchists had a similar goal, which was to create a society free from coercion, whether by force or by need. While socialism failed at this rather spectacularly in practice, the authoritarian states of Mao and Stalin were never the end goal of socialists.

Also, your offhand dismissal of a quite well cited wikipedia article was rather classless tbqh. We know wikipedia is crowd sourced and vulnerable to bias, but to ignore cited factual statements because of that just leads me to believe you don't want to see anything that doesn't confirm your conceptions of both anarchism and socialism.
Cool, we're on the same page. =)
There are a bunch of minor differences between software and music that make software more viable as a business when using the same definition of property. Software companies often sell services that are wholly based on software, but it's the service that has value. Customized software such as an internal accounting system is worth more to the purchaser and often not worth anything to the world at large. It's also easier to use the old definition of property to sell because it's easier to prevent unauthorized users from using software.
The major meta-issue at hand here is the problem of thinking that property has a definition in the first place. We intuitively think of property in the sense of personal possessions, which works some of the time, but is quite inaccurate for the majority of properties:

The way in which I own my business is different from the way I own my house, which is different from the way I own my car, which is different from the way I own my dog, which is different from the way I own my computer, which is different from the way I own the information contained on my computer. All of these forms entail restrictions on the rights of others beside me as regards the property, but what these restrictions are vary. Thinking that any of the rights entailed by any of these forms of property necessarily has an analogue in any of the other forms will likely get me into trouble-- save perhaps the fact that any form of property must be able to be transferred to another entity by my sole consent.

Confounding this is the fact that there exists another class of things which are not property nor possessions, but which are nonetheless mine; for example, I neither own nor possess my apartment, but it remains my apartment in a real, legal sense.

So I feel addressing these issues as a question of "is this/should this be property" is putting the cart before the horse. The real, implicit question is, do the rights entailed (or rather restricted) by the relevant statutes pose a benefit, or a harm to our society?

That is the only way to have a productive conversation about intellectual property as adults interested in advancing the arts and sciences rather than as elementary schoolchildren arguing about who "stole" whose idea.
AppMobi Releases First Public Version of jqMobi HTML5 Framework
Permen Lolipop Harga Grosir
Swayable.com site is up for auction
Future of voice recognition: Assistants that learn from you
Since when does a post about free software turn into a political discussion on HN?
I don't think anyone is saying get rid of copyright, but there certainly are a number of people who believe music should be available in digital form, for free (i.e. since I cannot but it without DRM than I am justified getting it from a torrent, etc.). Whether that is right or not, it certainly seems to be part of our current online culture.

Copyright law should already protect "copies" of these things, and really has no regard to profit (how you profit from your copyright is up to you).
In reply to ocdprogrammer's dead comment:

> And where is Surface ? Is it available to buy somewhere ?(I never saw a single trace of it in europe) I have a feeling that Surface is already either too expensive or too obsolete.

I can't speak to what happened to it commercially, but it definitely was available to buy - I organised a demo of it at a trade show in 2010. Since then haven't really paid attention to it, I know a second version of it came out, but no idea how well it did or is doing.
> U.S. activists who thought Twitter was a secure way to communicate during demonstrations may have another thing coming.

People actually think this? I've never been a big fan of the occupy wall street crowd, and when I hear things like this, my opinion of them just keeps falling.
I think http://alliances.commandandconquer.com is a huge jump in web based gaming, it works great on FF and Chrome (faster on chrome, don't care about IE really), It's private beta, so i can't give much details yet, but i'm sure it will set a standard in lots of areas in web based games when released. And this leads to why i think we don't see it really bloom right now, the technology is there, someone needs to set the standard.

three.js looks good, I'm just about to dive into it, there's: http://spidergl.org/ and http://scenejs.org/ and they all look kinda solid, I actually have no WebGL experience, neither much OpenGL. but i really want to develop some web based games, and did quite a lot of research in the field in recent years.

If anyone developing open-source web based (WebGL or sprite) games i will be glad to help, i got my JS skills from years of web development and some free time.
> Screwing the middlemen out of their $.9895 (out of $.99) per track affects the artist not a whit.

I'm all for it (screwing the middle men, in case that wasn't clear).

So how exactly are you compensating those artists whose MP3's you've copied in such a way that the middle-men get nothing and the artists get it all?
How is it selfish and naive? The rights to the content should belong to the creator (unless they transfer them) and they should dictate the terms surrounding the use and consumption of the content they created.

Would it not be more selfish of you to say "I'm going to download that persons video game without paying even though they want me to pay!" than it is to say "I made this game, so I want people to pay me $20 to play it. If they don't pay, they're not allowed to play."

You shouldn't have any right to the work of others.
You make some good points about labor unions. On one hand, a voluntary association is intrinsically moral, and it could be a force for positive good.

I don't know if you've read it or not, but Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in one lesson" is a great book. [1]

One of the chapters covers unions and he shows how economically they cannot in the end benefit workers. However, even if they are inefficient or foolish, workers have a right to form associations. Its just that employers have a right to refuse to negotiate with them.

It is interesting how libertarian the software community is, and silicon vally, in some regards-- unions being a good example. And yet in other regards they seem often to be hardcore socialist. I find it perplexing.

[1] You can get it here: http://www.fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/
>Private property is an extremely useful idea—arguably one of our greatest inventions. So far, each new definition of it has brought us increasing material wealth. [4] It seems reasonable to suppose the newest one will too.

This seems like a somewhat weak argument from extrapolation, since there aren't very many data points and they're so heterogenous.

It seems reasonable to assume that people will respond to lack of incentives in content production by producing less content (if only because they now need full-time jobs outside content creation to support themselves). In a new world without copyright, then, we'll start out with a large "endowment" of movies and music from the "copyright era", but the endowment will grow at a slower pace than it did, and additions to the endowment will be less polished than those from the copyright era. Doesn't obviously seem better or worse to me.

It may be that there just isn't a neat solution to this problem.
I called out Microsoft on this here and on /. when the first previews came out. It made no sense. I remote in to Windows machines on my iPad. Its very difficult to use and I understand that.

Now Microsoft wants to have its cake and eat it too, look Windows is a tablet and desktop! It can do both! No, that means it fails at both as the common user is exposed to a sub-par experience no matter which device they are using.

This reminds me a lot of Windows Media Center. I don't know if it was XP of Vista that came with bundled versions of it, but it left the user thinking, "What the F is this?"

Microsoft is in serious trouble, and they know it. They refuse to take seriously the things that are most vital to their long term survival as a company selling consumer products. Apple's version of a half-assed product release is Apple TV -- "just a hobby"; compare that to Microsoft's expansive portfolio of half-assed products, Apple TV looks like a polished, finished product (and it is.)

If Steve Jobs was still alive and ran Microsoft, one would imagine that everyone responsible for Windows Metro would be fired.
See the major difference there is that engineers have recognized this and built a moat around their inventions. You don't just provide some bytes that run on someone's computer, you provide a service that can't be duplicated.

Now ask yourself why it is that engineers adjusted but media has not. What are their motivations?
India Overrules Bayer, Allowing Generic Drug
thank you, I was looking for something like this
Yup that's correct. Check out Ed Castronova's paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=294828

When I was in high school with plenty of time on my hands I turned my hobby of playing Everquest into a pretty lucrative business (especially for a 17yr old). I found it amazing what people would pay for items to help advance their characters, especially those who were older and had limited time, and thus wanted to minimize time-sinks.
an easy way to look at the way window 8 seems to treat the desktop is to look at the way windows 7 and previous treat the command line.

There are still many commandline apps, even many important parts of windows require the command line to operate, however microsoft hasnt exactly put a great deal of development time into advancing commandline UI technology (and there are many companies who HAVE done just that)

plainly speaking it seems they are relegating the desktop to be the "next commandline" another relic, however the transition fails to address the fact that at it's current state, metro is not able to replace the desktop for anything but the most basic applications.

another problem mentioned elsewhere ("windows 8 is leaky") can also be explained another way - tablets have touchscreens but no easy way to use a mouse / keyboard, desktops have mouse / keyboard but generally no easy way to use a touchscreen, so using one interaction method pretty much precludes the other and trying to make an interface which works with both creates a mushy middling kind of experience which combines good and BAD things from both methods.we see this when trying to use a mouse with metro apps as well as when trying to use touch with desktop ones.

I'm treating windows 8 as another vista for now (and I used vista for many years) it's usable, full of new ideas, but lacking in that final polish where all the new pieces and old pieces meet.
I could see Parental controls as well, but you can pretty much do this already, on a per-device level.

I think Apple's goal is to get you to buy your kid and iPad and lock it down, not let them borrow yours. I don't see iPads every having separate user accounts like a traditional PC has.
It's worth pointing out that a significant part of the software industry has adapted to providing services instead of licences to their software.

The argument isn't as much about what's morally right, but what's economically practical. It's really hard to control the flow of information, including music and software.
I'm a citizen of the Internet and sadly, Facebook is my passport.
It's definitely a lot less painful than dealing with disks as the article suggests. The variability of disk latencies is much higher and is even less expected.
If only I was a senior VP. :) There are many many Googlers who would like projects to be more open source than they are, since the company has aggressively hired people who value open culture. It's not always possible, I don't know the Android team's constraints, but I would gather if you're working with an OEM on a new secret device, they don't want hints of it leaking in the public repository. :(
Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

It's hardly a new position: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_citizen
The point is, having to stick your arm out to touch the screen over and over or for an extended period of time is an ergonomic nightmare.
Animal magnetism: modeling flocks of birds using simple attractions
I do Surface development. Surface v2 isn't that great, TBH. Lots of hardware issues. Lighting is still a huge problem.
What happens when you lose your smartphone?
I'm genuinely sorry that you feel that way.
The hyperbole is not mine. I simply rephrased what MatthewPhilips said.

> See to you the fact that the buttons are in the same place as the old ones is an indicator that they have similar functionality; the typical user does not make these connections at all. They only know that the old task buttons are gone, and replaced with something they don't know how to use (yet).
You're advocating the retardation of progress for the sake of familiarity, which has never worked for any company at any point in history, and I fail to see why Microsoft would willingly fall into that trap.

You innovate or you die, and Microsoft is dying. The iPad is killing them. Maybe not quickly and obviously, but it will end Microsoft's dominance in less than a decade.
A pretty harsh stopgap solution to this would require a large number of artists to be wiling to get of the gravy train and into a different frame of mind: Art is worth a lot of money until the day it is released, at which point the value rapidly diminishes.

This suggests that the ransom model might work for artists that have achieved a certain measure of success. You could set up a marketplace for art that has already been created but not released or you could use a mechanism like kickstarter to fund artists to create something.

The ransom model has been successfully used in open source (Blender for instance) and I see no reason why it could not work for other forms of creative output.

That way it is no longer a matter of redefining property, we simply recognize that certain demands by the artists should be met or there will be no more content. Smart artists will price themselves within reach of their collective audience.
Limitations are both a curse and a blessing. One of the brilliant things for new users about Windows 8 is they heavily encourage use of the Metro design language, ensuring consistency in application interfaces.
More discussion about petridish.org on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3680033

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3680002
Ebooks pricing is outrageous and short-sighted
True, but a major part of the reason it's enjoyable is because we know it helps other people, and we like helping other people.
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For an even more reasonable 50 cents a month, I'll provide the valuable service of warding off cheetah attacks*

(* not valid in vicinity of cheetah)
SuperNormal - A differnet type of tech journalism
Cali. Federal District Court Awards Cinesamples $379,050 in Digital Piracy Suit
Printrbot store opens
I am always thinking about just how productive I'm going to be, and just how satisfying it will be to commit one improvement after another, gaining speed as progress leverages earlier progress, once I hit the bottom of my current giant yak shave and start unrolling it, all the way back up the technology stack.
"You're either being extraordinarily disingenuous or ignorant if you're trying to claim that socialism and anarchism haven't historically been aligned with each other. "

I find it amazing that you're using a strawman- something I've never said, and don't believe-- as an excuse to call me names.

Anarchism is incompatible with socialism and communism. That is what I pointed out. You can't enslave people and make them act against their nature without a central government, and if you have a central government, you have no anarchism.

"is probably due to a misunderstanding of "

You're projecting on me....

" was rather classless"

... and characterizing me based on YOUR characterization: "offhand dismissal " and then you outright lie: "to ignore cited factual statements" (two lies by my count there) is used as an excuse to rationalize more ad hominem: " leads me to believe you don't want to see anything that doesn't confirm your conceptions"

Why is it, so often, people refuse to argue to the points and instead insist on arguing to the person?

I made my points in my original comment. All of these references to history of socialism are completely irrelevant to my point, I wasn't even talking about socialism, I was talking about libertarianism.

You two are bringing it up as an opportunity to manufacture rationalizations to engage in ad hominam, nothing more.
This is total bullshit. The argument is that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have a "symbiotic relationship" because Hollywood "inspires" techies to innovate and invent new things. The article and the video reference cult sci-fi movies and series as the source of inspiration and then proceed to grossly exaggerate the importance of that "contribution" to Silicon Valley.

First of all, Hollywood is not the entity responsible for this inspiration. The source of inspiration are artists who came up with that stuff, not Hollywood. As a matter of fact, almost all of the stuff you see in Hollywood sci-fi movies is taken from one or more books. Whether the desire to innovate is something innate or not is a discussion beyond the scope of a simple comment. But the influence of Hollywood as such is greatly exaggerated: Hollywood does not equate art.

Second, a lot of true innovations were done quite differently from what you see in Hollywood movies. Ironically, the article points this out: "Captain Kirk’s communicators didn’t receive emails, browse the web, or play music", unlike iPhone. With all due respect, Gene Rodenberry's contribution to our geek subculture is undeniably substantial, but he's far from being a Jules Verne.

Third, the whole thing about the music being "the first social network" is crap. Social networks form around personal tastes -- among other things -- but that doesn't make music itself a social network.

One thing the article got right is that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have a "market" relationship: one produces the tech the other needs. Now that's a "symbiotic relationship" I can believe in.
Observe the current state (near-non-existence) of the compiler market. This is not a bad thing: gcc is not the best compiler that humanity could produce, but we wouldn't want to trade it for a really expensive but marginally better one.

Similarly, games are pirated a lot; but is a world with lots of free-to-play games really worse than a world in which the games are (as now) largely too expensive (per hour) for the target audience?

There will always be money to be made in writing custom in-house software, but lots of software is becoming cheaper/free. This is mostly a good thing.
Wolfram Alpha Pro runs rings around today's search engines
Those are not my feelings, they are the objective fact of reality. I'm sorry I wasted time giving you the benefit of the doubt when your only intention was to engage in personal attacks.

If you were "genuinely sorry" for your actions, you would apologize for them.
I don't understand why this poses a problem, even for lawyers. The clause is clearly unenforcible so why can't it just be ignored? Is there seriously some concern that a judge would decide that it is enforcible?