skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it feasible to program a machine learning system (such as Watson?) to run a straightforward legal case, with a natural language interface?

The law is full of context and interpretation details. One example my business constantly runs into is weather or not we have to register as a 'foreign business" when we do business in other states (my business is an engineering consulting business that does work in many states, sometimes requiring travel, sometimes not).

All of the states we looked into have the same basic wording tin the foreign business statue, but they interpret it different - for some states, you only have to register is you maintain an office presence; for some states you have to register only if you spend a significant amount of time in the state, other states you have to register if the money originates in the state, even if you never set foot there.

I'd love to see someone with ML or AI experience address the challenges involved in this. I would imagine it would be possible, but require a shitload of work, and even then may require some review.
Prices are of course about supply and demand. The supply of business lawyers is limited, which keeps prices (relatively) high. What keeps supply limited? In practice, bar admission requirements are not the operative bottleneck. There are about twice as many JD's each year as there are jobs for them, and the prices for entry-level legal work (across the whole industry) have fallen far below that of entry-level engineering work. A programmer from a top 100 school with decent but not amazing grades can come out expecting to get a job and making $45k+. A lawyer with similar credentials might go a year without finding a job and end up making $35-40k at a small firm.

So what keeps prices high at the top end? The answer is branding. Business clients don't trust their sensitive legal work to firms that don't have brands. And these firms that have brands don't hire just anyone. Only about 10-15% of fresh JD's end up at a medium to large firm working on corporate law, and the majority of them come out of the top 20 (of 200+) law schools. There are only so many graduates of Stanford and Berkeley to go around, so only so many of them get hired and trained at business law firms, and only so many of those make it to partner and build up years of experience. This is the real supply bottleneck.

You've always seen this phenomenon in banking and consulting (business clients trust their M&A to Goldman, who hires from Harvard and Princeton, maybe Yale if they're really feeling pinched). Now, you're seeing it in engineering too. It used to be that large companies didn't care much about where you went to school or what your grades were. But these days, places like Google, Facebook, etc, disproportionately recruits from the Stanford/MIT set. As a result, salaries at these companies have bid up dramatically. I hear a fourth year engineer at Google can make $250k+. That's comparable to a fourth year lawyer at a top law firm. These salaries were unheard of in engineering back when places like IBM didn't care all that much about Stanford versus CSU.
ActiveRecord, except it isn't active (nor record). Not an actual project, just a piece of code.

https://github.com/eduardordm/inactiverecord
Recurring transparency report? Have you ever asked Google for such things when it reads your emails to sell you ads? Have you ever asked Target or Walmart for this when they track your credit card purchases and sell the ACTUAL data to other parties?

Stories like this are driven mostly by unverified rumors and sensationalist journalism that is JUST as rampant in the tech industry as it is in politics, economics, or any other topic covered in mass media today.
Valve Pushes Out Half-Life For Linux
All major Silicon Valley law firms (Gunderson, Wilson Sonsini, Fenwick, Cooley) will defer your fees to get you as a client. You should negotiate at least $15k-$20k of deferral of fees if you are a startup, which means you won't cut them a check until/unless you get financed. They should also offer you a discount on their normal rates of 10-20%. And they may ask for warrants; up to you to issue these. They may pound sand, but if they really want those, then you should be getting a lot of legal work for free.

The vast majority of legal work they do for you as a startup is form work, so don't ever pay a partner more than a half hour to review it. 90% of the work is literally changing names in a document: incorporation docs, board notes, issuance of options, option plan, assignments of IP, and financing docs should all be standardized. I know this because I worked at Gunderson as an attorney.

What you want from startup lawyers is a clean form that your investors have seen before. Don't do anything that makes an investor think twice. Any form from the firms I mentioned above will do.

Net net: you shouldn't worry about $700/hour. It's too much, you shouldn't be hiring that particular attorney, and even if you do owe thousands of dollars, you shouldn't have to pay it until you're financed (which means you have the cash anyway).
The first problem is to produce low energy muons. There are only few facilities in the world which can do that. The second problem is getting the muons slow enough to bind with the protons, and making sure the muonic atoms are at the right levels. The third is to get a strong enough signal from the setup.

But there are other problems too. For example, you need to measure the frequency of the light. Since the (quite recent) invention of frequency combs, this is possible with astounding precision. While this experiment is not the most complicated in this regard, it is still a challenge.

Also, even after you have measured the level difference, you need quite a lot of theory to get the radius out, which had to be developed first, as you need to know where to look.
You still ask for words, i still ask for your source code...
Based on your article and code, I believe that you have misunderstood what the statistical test is supposed to be telling you.

When you make decisions at 95% confidence, your guarantee is that at most 5% of the time are you going to wrongly conclude that one is better when it isn't. However you have absolutely no guarantees about having correctly called the direction of the test if you do hit that significance level. (Indeed if the null hypothesis is correct, every time you call the test, you're wrong!)

What you did is simulated the test many times, ignored the cases where you were told there was no answer (thereby throwing away a large part of your guarantee), and found that you could be wrong a large portion of the time. Furthermore if there was a large, discoverable, random factor, you found that could be correlated with a lot of the mistakes. Unfortunately, in addition to the discoverable factor, there are lots of unknown random factors that also get randomly correlated. And even if there aren't, there is always the possibility of experiencing bad luck.

The only way to solve this is to throw enough traffic at the problem that the underlying bias can be reliably detected statistically. There is a complicated relationship between the size of bias you're willing to get wrong, and the amount of data that you need to collect to reliably detect it. I hope to explore that relationship in the next two articles.

For larger sites, that solution is perfectly workable. For smaller ones it is not, and the best that I can suggest is that they rely heavily on design principles that have been validated through A/B testing on larger sites, and hope they are not going too far wrong.
Tom Chiarella on eulogizing Aaron Swartz
Reverse psychology?

We know he's had his falling out with Linus in the past. I tend to believe him, but with that hells angel biker beard, I don't know. There could be some sketchy and shady elements involved here. Probably not though, sketchy people watch black-n-white TVs, and I'm sure Alan either has no TVs or a color TV ;)
That was torture. I wish I was kidding.
I think Queen, cream and journey all also have prior uses that outdo the use by the bands ;)
Although I have to say I like schema.org, now we have:

- oEmbed

- Facebook OpenGraph

- schema.org

- Twitter Cards

WTF.
I wrote my own dotfile backup tool[1]. I am, as far as I know, the only one that uses it. Untold millions of these exist, I'm sure there are many that do it better.

Now that I think about it, most of my stuff on GitHub is, well, not necessary. I always think to myself "I enjoyed writing it, maybe someone somewhere can find it useful."

[1]:https://github.com/jakebasile/dotback
Foundation (with everything) compiles to 84k if output_style is set to :compressed in the Compass config.rb file. The 200k size for Foundation is fully commented, non-production css.
Emails From Steve Jobs Put Apple At The Center Of Wage Fixing
Cool! What's the keyboard shortcut to indicate "Exit Zen mode" after I am done writing?
this is my most recent personal project.

I built the platform from the ground up, a great learning experience for a beginner like me.

I would appreciate any feedback you guys have! Thanks!
I know quite a few languages, and I like Javascript. It has a nice mix of functional, procedural, and object oriented aspects. Once upon a time, it was a horrible language to work in (with browser differences making it infinitely worse); but now, I find I like it.

Now, that said, given the choice, I'd choose coffescript. It gives many of the same benefits in a more concise format. It has its warts as well, though, reflecting its desire to stay as close to a concise-javascript as possible.
The only thing you need to so to charge $700 an hour is convince a business your services are worth that much, typically by saying that in X time you can deliver Y result which will increase revenue or decrease costs by some number Z, where Z is greater than your rate times X.

There exist at least some software developers who bill $700 an hour or north of that, by the way.
How to Court Mobile Gamers: Creating the next addicting game
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/955/

Humour aside, I love these sorts of things. Even if there is no new physics involved, if it turns out to be some sort of error in the experiment, we are bound to learn something.
The Next Big Thing in BPM, bpmNEXT
Google: A faster image search
Why did they write pubic key in the solutions bit? Surely a sly joke..
I don't own the company, thus I can't give you the code. You can give me an explanation, but won't. Why?
Agreed on the nanny state must go. But the nanny state is much more than just banning internet gambling.

The federal government is so big and intrusive in our lives these days, it's out of control...that's nanny state. And do we (the U.S.) really want to be socialist/nanny-state? Let the Europeans try that model.
ur tl;dr summary:

The WTO granted Antigua the right to suspend US copyright to the tune of $21 million annually in 2007 because the US ignored the WTO's earlier (2005) ruling that the US violated international free-trade laws by barring Antiguan gambling companies from the US market. Antigua now plans to actually use that ruling to legally sell US copyrighted material over the Internet without paying copyright holders.
Mine is intentionally bad: https://github.com/ao5357/retina-spacer-gif

Perhaps other projects are unintentionally bad, but the above-linked was intended to be funny.
I use the standard Unix utility "seq" almost daily as part of shell one-liners. Lots of things are named with a sequential component. Sometimes iterating over those is easily done with a shell glob, but sometimes it's just simpler to do "for i in $(seq 1 8); do restart foo-$i; done".

It's very useful, but basically impossible to discover except by happening to see somebody else use it. So I really don't wonder that somebody would end up unknowingly reimplementing it.
Background for those not in the UK.

BBC Radio 4 - National speech radio channel with news current affairs, comedy and drama. Distinctly middle class. News is serious high quality and it is a serious debate platform for politics.

Women's Hour - Week day mid morning daily 45 minute (if you don't count book of the week) with a weekend highlight version. It is focussed on a wide range of issues of concern to women. This includes serious issues like domestic violence, practical issues, childcare and public policy, and lighter stories and some equality promoting issues such as women in tech.

Women's Hour podcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/whnews

I think Radio4 is globally available online and has some very good content http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ Let me know if you can't access this from abroad and I will correct this.

Update:
And in case anyone is wondering there is a Men's Hour too although it is on a different station (and unlike Women's Hour I have never listened to it). I think it is only weekly though. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t32zg
I don't see why doing it on the casino floor in Vegas is fine but doing it at home isn't.

Because it's damned hard to tax gambling winnings when they happen outside the US government's jurisdiction. A brick-and-mortar casino in Vegas will issue you a 1099 if you win enough; a virtual casino in Antigua is under no such obligation.
If the rules of interpretation (one might even say that this is the definition of 'context' in this sense) can be strictly defined (formalized), e.g. what you wrote:

> for some states, you only have to register is you maintain an office presence; for some states you have to register only if you spend a significant amount of time in the state, [...]

then this is doable, in principle. But the overall project and required workload would indeed be vast.. I wonder how much one might have to work to have some kind of a working PoC.. NLTK and their computational linguistics book / python tutorial might be a good start. e.g. http://nltk.org/book/ch10.html - we can do things like

dt = nltk.DiscourseTester(['A student dances', 'Every student is a person'])

dt.add_sentence('No person dances', consistchk=True)

- throws error 'Inconsistent discourse ..[list of predicates etc]'

dt.retract_sentence('No person dances', verbose=True)

- outputs

Current sentences are

s0: A student dances

s1: Every student is a person

But scaling this / making it work for something more than these simple linguistic tasks.. quite an undertaking! In any case, the field in question (and the task at hand) is very interesting, and I hope that lots of interesting stuff will be done in comp.linguistics / nlp in the near future.
Ask them what copyright law has to do with choosing your cell phone carrier.
It's hard to compare Clojure and Scala. Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language with strong OOP support and functional support. It's arguably more verbose than Clojure but looks much more similar to Java.

Clojure is a Lisp. Lisp stands aside all other programming languages, first of all, because it supports syntactic abstraction (a.k.a. "code is data"). Hardcode addicts (I'm not one of them) say there are only two programming languages - Lisp and non-Lisp.

Here's a good comparison of Scala and Clojure: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1314732/scala-vs-groovy-v...

When we made the decision to switch to Clojure, several things affected it, in no particular order:
- we had some people who were already very proficient in Lisp
- we liked how expressive and compact it was
- Lisp is considered to possess immense expressive power (see http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html)
- we were enamoured by Cascalog (http://nathanmarz.com/blog/introducing-cascalog-a-clojure-ba...), and it's written in and for Clojure. This one payed off very well.
- Lisp has a reputation of being great at manipulating data: lists, graphs, etc.

Here's a good answer from one of our engineers: http://www.quora.com/Clojure/Why-would-someone-learn-Clojure

As for libraries, both Clojure and Scala are JVM-based, and Clojure has a very good syntax for Java interop, so all Java libraries are available to us. But, of course, Clojure community also spits out libraries like crazy, for example, take a look at this marvel which we use in Drake for parsing: https://github.com/joshua-choi/fnparse.
In this article I was going for the highest possible standard. The ins and outs of one-sided versus two-sided was not a topic that I wanted to explore.

In the next article I plan to relax things a lot farther than just one-sided versus two-sided tests!
I guess most of the time the program features women, but now the editor wanted men for this. Sometimes media want to interview women, sometimes men, sometimes both.

I co-founded a program/organization to help women to get in to tech (which then spread globally). Wired UK did an interview, but the editor only wanted women for interview and the photos, so I was excluded as a man.

I was happy enough that they were interested about the subject which more important. I didn't need to get offended or call anyone anything.
show us some of your examples. would be interesting to compare between app styles and price difference in US and other countries
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Woman's Hour is one of the better bits of daytime Radio 4. It's far better than the godawful You & Yours.

Both Woman's Hour and Feedback will welcome emails about this.

There's currently discussion about the amount of male speakers on radio 4 programmes. I think iPM had something about it this week.
Further to that - if the title "woman's hour" seems outmoded that's because it dates back to 1946. Since then it has evolved into a more modern forum for feminist/female issues, although it is still faintly ludicrous - like everything on radio 4. That's the reason for the "an indulgent smile, a nod to our ability to see humour in everything" bit in the first paragraph.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_for_the_day
DIY Bioprinter Lets Wannabe Scientists Build Structures From Living Cells
According to his Wikipedia page, most of the claims he made were demonstrably false. (I had never heard of him before this HN post.)
There's a big gap between "not flawless" and "my eyes are bleeding" or "I can't make this stuff up".

Also: "should" != "is", I'm afraid.
Both Tom and Bruce are professors at my alma mater, and both were while I attended. Looking back, I regret never having had a class with either. I was certainly not expecting this.
I think it's because we invest so much time and energy working with them. Most humans can't do that without becoming attached.

Once you identify with something it becomes difficult to be objective about it. So discourse about technical tools is mostly emotion, however rational it pretends to be. That's why the core debates never end.

By the way, you can add version control systems to your list.
I don't really expect it to happen either; sounds more like a power play to get the US to finally cough up some restitution for the claimed billions in losses that Antiguan economy has suffered. If it does play out though, things will get very interesting.
I should add that "egoist" in Russian is indeed literally the same word as "egoist" in English (albeit written in Cyrillic), but semantically it is closer to what "selfish" means in modern American English. I think the note should be read as "you selfish person".

As far as I understand (I'm a native Russian speaker) in English, selfishness refers more to self-gratification while egoism refers more to acting in rational self-interest.
"A lot of folks, especially Apple supporters, like to characterize Amazon as irrational, even crazy, for its willingness to live with low margins. It must be frustrating to compete with a company like that."

This assumes that Apple is actually competing with amazon. Does BMW compete with say Ford.... maybe but really they are after different markets. Apple has said numerous times they are not interested in going after the low end market.
J.J. Abrams Will Reportedly Direct the Next Star Wars
Pentagon Watchdog Clears Darpa in Ethics Probe
So if Belkin hasn't ever made good hardware, and Linksys hasn't made good hardware in a few years—what company is making solid consumer networking hardware at a decent price?

Legitimately curious.
relax, bro.
"impractical to refactor the schema"

Relational theory is intended to make it easier to achieve data independence, including various kinds of schema changes.

You did not offer an alternative, but I am very skeptical that whatever alternative you have in mind somehow improves matters.

"you can't stream data effectively"

If the currently available SQL products don't allow you to stream data effectively, and that's what you need to do, then use something else.

My point was what people are actually doing for IPC. And for the most part, it's using SQL databases. Even communicating between processes in a single application (e.g. related web requests served by different processes), SQL databases dominate.
One of chef Gordon Ramsay's signature dishes is lobster ravioli with celery root cream and shellfish vinaigrette. If you were to hire Ramsay to come and make that dish for a dinner party at your house, I'd guess his hourly rate would be pretty high.

Now suppose you hired Ramsay, but instead of a dinner party it was for your kid's birthday party--and all you want Ramsay to do is boil Oscar Meyer hot dogs and serve then on Safeway hot dog buns with Heinz Ketchup (and only that) on them, and later scoop some store-bought ice cream onto store-bought cake.

This is something you could hire a neighborhood teen to do for $20. Do you think Ramsay is going to do it for $20, because you are asking him to do something much simpler than make his signature food?

Of course not. He's charging for his talent and skill. If you want to misuse that by having him work on something that is trivial and can be done easily by someone with much less talent or skill, that's your problem.

I suspect that's what you are doing with the lawyer. A partner in a major firm has the skill and talent to work on very large and complicated matters that involve big companies and a lot of money--things like major mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, and such.

You are asking him for something that could probably be drafted by a paralegal from his office, and then checked over by a junior associate--the legal equivalent of boiling hot dogs.
I know a guy who worked at Transmeta when Linus was there, and afterward he joked that anyone who got Linus hired should get their pay docked instead of a hiring bonus. So maybe.
Seems the last 5 episodes have been all featuring women and some men.
So you ascribe personal, leveled, directed malevolence directly against Heather Arthur and her replacer library to their actions? You don't think it had anything to do with just doing it for kicks, anything to do with how people see Node?
Gotcha, thanks. And one- vs two-sided alone would hardly be a huge win, I was just curious since I didn't remember seeing it brought up at all in any of the prior articles I'd read.
I agree with everything here and would add that the whole story reminded me of what it was like poring over my developer resumes a decade ago trying to impart a sense of achievement and drive in as terse a way as possible (don't go over one page, don't use pronouns!) and with little hard experience.

Today, aside from the sheer chance of being in an industry with more talent demand than supply, I can point to code that I've written and my raw merit as a developer can almost instantly be understood and I can easily find a job. Github is a resume and all that.

But I often forget that it's not always so easy for people outside my discipline and it's everything a person can do to differentiate themselves and show determination and a sense of personal development. That is the tragedy of his video resume, because there is certainly a talented and proud and sincere person underneath that production and all that so many people could do was find a way to tear it down.