skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I write "generic" Natural language processing for a living.

Also "nintendo" is a particular domain. When you only have a "language" of 8 directions, A, and B, and only time to deal with in response to a screen that side scrolls in only one direction the programming is easy.

A chess engine has more potential decisions for a bishop than this has for a given move. And unlike the the NES, the chess engine has to adjust for changes in the behavior. Given the same input the NES would make the same choices. You can macro through most the games.
Your argument rests on the flawed premise that the reader is a passive fool waiting to be spoon-fed their morning panic ration. An article may be the top story of the day, but that doesn't mean it is important or relevant to me. Clearly there is a "news cycle" and every day there must be some top story. The reader is not compelled to pay heed. The discriminating reader does not perceive a newspaper to be some distilled briefing of matters important to them personally.

As with anything else, you must research your news if you hope to understand it, and you must seek out the truly pertinent things.

I truly fear that the research culture fostered by Google searches, etc. is greatly damaging our own ability to parse sources. It is a wonderful convenience to have indexing machines working in concert with query engines, allowing the researcher to skip the 300pp of drivel to unearth some crucial paragraph by asking the question in their own words.

It troubles me greatly that the solution always is to find a better indexing engine or aggregator (or sharpen one's skills with the software), rather than refining one's own ability to parse sources. Yes, these engines expose an impossible amount of information, and this is tremendously valuable technology. It will never be a full substitute for the pain of manual research.
I think you're conflating throughput with availability. They are distinct non-functional requirements and they should be considered and architected for distinctly.
I came to some of these conclusions in 1997: http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/real-news.html

In 2008 I savaged Digg and Reddit for the same reasons:
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2008-January...

I recommend watching the EPIC 2014 video I allude to in that post; even though it's nine years old and clearly depicts an alternate history at this point, I think its core points have aged well. http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/

Today, I think there actually is a better alternative to reading news sites. You can read Wikipedia. Instead of reading the HN frontpage post about how Sebastian Castro likes having his office in Kendall Square http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/04/13/square-still-... you can read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendall_Square and get the history, polysemy, and local attractions of the place — with photos of Kendall Square instead of Sebastian Castro. Or you could read something on Wikipedia that there will rarely be a news story about, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadhu or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina%27s_12th_congres..., or never, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vis-viva_equation. And the things you read will be verifiable, objective, and most likely true — unlike the vast majority of crap that passes for journalism today. And most of what's true will still be true five or ten years from now.

But the Grauniad piece is, mostly, not really about how to form a better understanding of the world. It counsels ignorance: don't learn about the world because it isn't practical (doesn't help you make better decisions affecting your life), stresses you out, is enjoyable like a drug, confirms your pre-existing prejudices due to confirmation bias instead of changing your mind, makes you feel helpless, limits your creativity, and is deeply intertwingled, which "inhibits thinking". Reading the encyclopedia has these same drawbacks! But I don't believe that ignorance is bliss, that ignorance helps you think clearly, or that ignorance limits your creativity. Instead, I believe that a broad base of knowledge gives me perspective on our current problems, helps me think more clearly, and enables my creativity.

Up to a point. You can become a mindless factoid junkie from any source of factoids. Building real knowledge out of facts requires really understanding a subject; as David MacKay says in the preface to "Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms" http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itila/, that means you must "creat[e] it for yourself."

I admit I'm pretty distracted by news items myself, at the moment.

(edit: changed "more or less these conclusions" to "some of these conclusions", which is a lot truer.)
> The dependencies have to be a true tree.

Surely he means DAG?
if you stifle the ability for new players to enter a market, easily, and compete with the established ones you direly hurt the economy by creating artificial monopolies.

I agree with everything you say, but I think I come to a slightly different conclusion. It sounds like in the special case of natural monopolies, what we need is rather than simply trying not to stifle competitors, we need to work to empower competitors- because of the special nature of natural monopolies.

This is still a form of regulation, so it sounds like regulation is fine for natural monopolies, so long as it goes in the right "direction", i.e. regulation that opens up the market rather than closing it.
That article is either an ironic metacommentary with itself as exhibit A of what is wrong with news stories, or the edits were ironically introduced by the editor doing what he typically does. For starters, the title is hyperbolic click bait, and the hyperbole continues. "The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely." Clearly the only choices are inundation and complete isolation. I suppose moderation is one of those "non-stories" too boring to report, because it doesn't stimulate the limbic system and get clicks. One clue of intentional irony: "In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases." In the article, that sentence contains a hyperlink.

That said, I agree with 98% of the article. Like everything else, moderation, critical thinking, and self-reflection are essential.

Food for thought: perhaps the author's reaction is similar to an alcoholic who realizes their weakness. Though for many people, alcohol can be a healthy and beneficial part of their life, for some the most effective relationship to alcohol is complete abstinence.
A bladeless wind turbine
PocketMonkey by Zootility Tools (Kickstarter funded)
patenting something that (i assume) is a basic component of other "products" is what's being objected to. Sure, you can _use_ the patented product/idea/method in your research, but the end result is that you cannot commercialize the research if it becomes patent encumbered (or not profitable to do so), and thus the eresearch never get funded in the first place!
News used to be bad for me when I was a young kid in my teens. It used to depress me. Now that I'm in my thirties I've become desensitized and pretty much nothing bothers me. News is only bad for you if you let it affect you.
A system of connected virtual worlds. Combine an Oculus Rift on steroids with Minecraft (scaled down from meter-sized boxes to sub-atomic particles). The user creates the world solely with their imagination. You can go on intense adventures with friends, defy the laws of physics to create anything, and generally do whatever you want. Your creativity is your only limit.

Unfortunately, I don't really see this happening just yet. My biggest dream would be to create this though.
Humans: it's status hierarchies all the way up.

The main dishonesty with the piece is his portrayal of himself as the only bullshitter in the game. I bet the girl that hugged him after he lost the Rhodes thing plagiarized her personal statement (or something).

In many ways his essay, rather than a deep critique of human obsession with status signalling, was just a big status signal itself, since essentially the take home point was "look how fucking good at status signalling I am".
I was under the impression that "Big Data" is a moving line of "too big for single systems". As system density increases, the Big Data threshold moves too.

I don't see this ever being resolved for all time; but right now SSDs are the one technology that's put disk-using designs back into the hunt.

Where single-systems really shine is simplicity. Distributed systems push a lot of complexity up into the solution space and experience seems to suggest that it cannot be safely abstracted away.
EU reportedly accepts Google antitrust settlement
such a good person does not, on average, exist. No one cares about "humanity" - they care about their immediate loved ones, and they care about profit.
This is a fairly uninteresting insight--if your data fits on one machine, use one machine to process it!

But in many cases, your data does not fit on one machine, even one with gobs of ram and SSDs. In my work, we receive hundreds megs of data per second and our jobs run from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of input data. That is the scale where "big data" ceases to be a meaningless buzz word and becomes a serious technical challenge, requiring distributed storage and processing over hundreds of machines.

Really, this is about the devaluation of "big data" to mean anything over a few gigabytes, which is a drastically simpler problem than peta-scale computing.
It's entirely possible that the NSA possesses quantum computing capabilities, in which case they also possess the extreme power over bitcoin cryptography. If this is the case, then they are able to track black market transactions including ones among terrorist cells. If I were the NSA, I would say it's a safe bet that when you release am "anonymous" currency, you promote an illicit economy. Andie you secretly have the ability to omnisciently track its activity, why not promote the currency?
It's worth noting that 'merit' in the 'test scores' approach just means scored X on test Y and/or Z on test W. So if (for example) someone gets low SAT scores, but cures cancer, they don't get admitted, because 'cures cancer' isn't part of the admissions criteria.
You will be amused to learn that the author, Tom 7, also wrote the Crap Art Manifesto at http://crapart.spacebar.org/, which is equally funny and even more thought-provoking.
By that notion, America doesn't know what Democracy is, nor does China understand what Communism is. The definition isn't what's necessarily the problem - its the implementation of it. And by his account, that IS how we, as a people, tend to implement meritocracy.
I think the idea here is that by creating and using some simple physical models they were able to learn things that they wouldn't have thought about if they had kept everything in their heads. Even making a virtual model wouldn't have given them the user-experience information that they were looking for.
So? Why should progress be a goal in and of itself? Shouldn't progress be in the service of something else? If that something else is solving unhappiness, then why do you have a problem if unhappiness is solved through other means and progress becomes obsolete? Perhaps you are just addicted to progress and future-oriented thinking and thus cannot stay happy for long.
High Performance Browser Networking – Early Release
Not to be pedantic or anything, but I wouldn't necessarily expect a 15 year old to have had a girlfriend or have gone to parties in the past. But as you grow older, the desire to have a girlfriend only increases, it doesn't decrease.

While it is good to be someone who doesn't mind loneliness (as I am), I long ago understood that human relationships are incredibly important and powerful. Opportunities present themselves to you through other people. The most enjoyable experiences in my life have involved other people.

The ironic thing is that if you ever freelance - the epitome of not talking to other people (because you get to work from home all day), your "network" becomes even more important than ever, because that is how you get new work opportunities. And unless you want to be condemned to forever having to apply to jobs through an application process (hint: highest chances of getting rejected), social relationships matter.

I cannot tell you how many times people remembered me and thought I was an interesting person (and the opportunities that presented themselves through these associations) simply because I come off as very articulate, opinionated, and curious. The mechanistic "trick" to doing that is to keep asking people questions and then run a "pattern matching" algorithm whereby you see if anything you know or any stories you know relate to their answer, and then you relay that back in your reply.

Again, I don't want to be a downer, but as you grow older, social relationships only increase in importance. The ironic thing is that as its importance increases, the surface area of opportunities for new social relationships decreases.
Boston has been the second biggest VC market (counting the Bay Area as one) but every report I've seen shows New York has tied or surpassed Boston over the past few years.

http://mashable.com/2013/02/21/top-cities-startups/

http://mycrains.crainsnewyork.com/stats-and-the-city/2011/te...

http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/tech-venture-...

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2011/10/13/mass-drops...

From the last link, dated October 2011:

"Still, for Massachusetts to fall behind New York in VC financings is noteworthy, said Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights. New York had already been leading Massachusetts in VC for tech — including Internet, mobile, software, hardware and electronics — since the second quarter of 2010. But due in large part to health care VC activity in Massachusetts, the state had remained ahead of New York in overall VC until the third quarter."
yes this is why i am not going to read this item
Google and the European Commission: A flavour of utility
>"Kendall Square institutions like Aceituna Cafe and Voltage Coffee"

These aren't really institutions so much as they are a restaurant and an overcutesy coffee shop that are only a couple years old each. Voltage opened in 2010, and it's some of the most overhyped espresso I've ever had. I think Acetuna might be a couple of years older, and it's a decent Lebanese lunch, priced for the pharma clientele ($20/plate).
...What should I do if I want to fix an apostrophe in your readme? GitHub is making it difficult for me to do a #L link to your file but:

- It is slower than the C version (duh, its in javascript). Specifically, physics simulations using chipmunk-js runs about 3 times slower than the C equivalent.

should be

- It is slower than the C version (duh, it's in javascript). Specifically, physics simulations using chipmunk-js runs about 3 times slower than the C equivalent.
I'll bite. I didn't say VGA was cutting egde, or the one true cable, or that real programmers use butterflies - only that it remains practical for a very large number of uses. I believe the longevity of VGA has a lot to do with its compatibility and explicit lack of DRM features. I have often had a choice and gone with "good enough" VGA when digital was an option, simply because I am aware that by buying HDMI I am not only financially supporting and licensing DRM, but am committing to a technology that can be used against me. I may not be the norm, but I am far from a Luddite.
While this is an interesting topic, is this hackernews material?
Meta-Anlaysis Simulation – Monte Carlo
Would you prefer I left your typos in place?
after success, people boast to become smartest one on the planet. what were they moments before the success?
An interesting application of Pin for malware analysis / visualization is Danny Quist's Vera[1] and de-obfuscation framework[2]. It's also used in MIT's Architecture course to benchmark different architecture designs.

[1] http://www.offensivecomputing.net/?q=node/1687
[2] http://www.offensivecomputing.net/?q=node/492
Europeans Reach Deal With Google on Searches
Another serious problem is the parasitic real estate developers and agents that are driving up the costs of space in the area. Yes, there's a lot of demand, but square footage is now competitive with SF, and it's not ... ahem .. SF.
Mass media focus on drama not in information; so your emotions are appealed more than rational thoughts.

You can't do nothing about the North Korea crisis even if you watch the news, that's a "Reality check".
I don't know if I agree with everything Krugman says here but the more I think about bitcoins and real money the more I realize how much better life would be if the world of abundance would finally get here.

The idea of treating electricity and clean water (among a whole host of other resources) as abundant as the air we breathe is one worth pursuing.
Investment Firm Expects AWS Will Hit $20 Billion In Revenues By 2020

I expect that Investment Firms Will Keep Making Ridiculous Predictions Even In 2020 And Beyond.

Tech predictions on what will happen 7 years from now in a hotly contested field?
Daily post on go.

Go and its advertisement campaign have something in common: lack of subtlety.

I will eat my hat if tomorrow I don't see another go post.
I will look into this a bit tomorrow. Can you supply an example command-line invocation?
Yes, as you consider it interesting and I do too. "What to Submit - On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| I'll put islamism in that bag (the basic idea
| of stoning to death women who had sexual relation
| outside of marriage in this day and age is not
| very palatable to me).

It's my understanding that rules like that (e.g. stoning) are not in the Qur'an, but are 'old' rules thought up by different sects of Islam.

1. This is like decrying Christianity as a cult because of David Koresh. Or getting angry at all Christians because the Catholic church tried to cover up the whole paedophile priest thing.

2. Even people that are part of these sects don't necessarily follow all of the rules. E.g. I've known Jewish people that ate ham.
The client uses a new address for each block.
Reason says rent seeking is improductive and self destructive behaviour. One will engage in such activities only if the expected returns outweights the costs, which include the destruction of the system.

A rational person will not come to this conclusion under a system where such inefficiency is discouraged - pure and perfect competition, capitalism.

Many people wonder whether capitalism is a good thing. Bring them reason, science, let them work it out and make their own basic decision. Let them fight the bad reasoning themselves, come out of their local optimas if you prefer a math analogy. Racism and religious extremism must have some value, or such behaviours would not have because so widespread. But they seem to be local optimas, or even destructive in the end, just like rent-seeking.

Here is another way to look at this - look at the immigration net flows: it seems that more people want to immigrate in capitalist countries than emigrate out of them.

If it is reasonable to doubt my deductions, is it reasonable to doubt so many people may have made the same conclusions independently ?

Read about how immigrants affiliate politically, which belief system they adhere to. Apparently a lot of them want to be paid for the fruit of their labour, and not for pure idleness, want to be left alone - and many other libertarian values.

I'm sorry if that is not a valid explain for you. It is for me.
By the absolute definition of Meritocracy, no, it's not. But then again, by the absolute definition of Democracy, America is not.

However, in the sense that nature/nurture (being born to a well off family that constantly provides opportunities) leads to more "merits" it technically is. Therefore the real problem is that it is so -bound- to income and class.

(and just because we have no explicit labels for class, if you think that such a notion is an "illusion" then you are living in a bubble.)

A child raised in an abusive home has a far lesser probability of success than a child raised in a supportive one. This indeed disbands the zeitgeist of meritocracy (anyone can do it), but reinforces the definition of it (success based on achieved merits).

Zeitgeist of Meritocracy !== Definition of Meritocracy !== Implementation of Meritocracy
I find most natural monopolies are either the result of stupid artificial government regulation (patents, like the article mentions - doctors, farming / food / pesticides, etc) or are infrastructure monopolies. I commented to someone else, but systemically I don't think infrastructure is viable as a privatized good. It inherently has to be public, I think, in the way it acts as a foundational element of society. This includes power lines, rail, roads, and cable / phone / fiber. I don't think these wires under public roads and through private property should ever be private, but should be public, easily plugged into and utilized resources to build industries and tremendous productivity gains upon.
50 traffic tips for content marketers[slideshare]
Agreed. Since 1995, I've been hearing wild-eyed "visionaries" predict that the internet will bring about equality and the Age of Aquarius. They seem to forget that the same sort of things were said about radio and television. (And probably the telegraph, too.) Proponents of television believed that people would take distance learning courses by sitting in front of the TV. Instead, it turns out that it does nothing more than further propagate least-common-denominator pop culture. My, how things do change...
Well noted.

In addition to the "The libertarian fantasy that once we sufficiently undermine governments they will fall and a utopia of individual action free of tyranny", all processes that uphold all forms of government around the world are merely an illusion that reinforces the status quo globally.

But then again, things can change whether we want them to or not ;)
Voice quality: Can can you you hear hear me me now now?
I'm not for or against any religion.

It's all a matter of proportion. How many Koresh are there? Enough to put beheading/stoning/etc. videos on youtube ? Islam seems to have the #1 "bad spot" at the time.

I feel very sorry about that, because as the human race it's like trying to advance without the help of a whole third of world population - and the worst thing is we do not let the people who refuse such belief system immigrate easily in democratic countries. Just look at the way muslims (and apostates) emigrating from north africa to europe are treated.

At the moment we are wasting a lot of human potential, and that's sad.

Hopefully things will change [even if I'm not sure about it when I see the "antilibertarian" downvotes posts, without even taking a minute to express why they think it does not contribute to the discussion. I guess I should know better about liberals and their so called values :-/]

EDIT: I was talking about the 1st post, about reaon, which took multiple downvotes but not a single dissenting reply in about 2 minutes. Prove me wrong, give me arguments to challenge my position - I'm begging for them.

But no, nothing at all. And my attitude is the problem ?? It's like watching a reddit gang in operation, sorry
Yes, that's very helpful. I do that whenever I work at my university lab.

Unfortunately, it's not really an option when I work from home.