skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, really? I didn't think this was necessary, but I guess I will have to specify: My girlfriend is not developmentally delayed. She was a counselor at the camp like me and is in the "normal" intelligence category.
I would point out that this actually is not in the App Store, you need an Apple developers account to install it.
Interesting that we can detect it at very small concentrations. Maybe this is an adaptation from some proto-mammal or even earlier ancestor whose environment had few pockets of fertile ground, and detecting this smell was a good way to find food by homing in on high concentrations of plants. (It would not necessarily be just for herbivores. You could be likely to find the plants themselves, but also to find creatures who fed on plants.)
I think it's not just about time. Computers are way faster than humans for multiplications and elementary arithmetic, but it doesn't "think".
Computers are just doing some calculus, with less information on their environment than we get with our human brain.
Computed missile guidance will in most cases fail if its target fires the right countermeasure, when a human guiding the missile would more likely avoid it and reach the goal.

Also, I do think that basic understanding of mathematics seriously enhances human intuition, which then helps develop better strategy.
You're right, what extra information is this URL sending? I haven't seen it any other techcrunch linked article.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/20/cognitive-overhead/?icid=wym3&grcc2=870a9d585d2156a619b69a6861141a34~1366515093871~fca4fa8af1286d8a77f26033fdeed202~507a1debf7b9102c09107d1e3b60a173~1366514940000~0~13~0~0~0~0~0~0~7~13~26~H4sIAAAAAAAAAIVQy2rDMBD8lfoDFEtaaSUHSik99RxyLhtpVQv8CLackIu-vU5_ICzMwM7AzmxfyvXYtoVDH5ZtCv0hzGOrpYJWmp3bkZYgaIoL87ryJErP4j4vQ9xx2_HCYtxCv3MpvIicxJ1FT1FYKcZ5YbHmIYd5EjcaBn6sbUWpjJGoDVqnrVbou9q_ihHm3ymXfGMx33jpmWL7kUOO7_fHCFX5WmXVtqZAJpGnpLTH6Mm5pFECpMgctdSvDV13gaBsBAWJIlqGJJ9u4yUCIdW65sLf8ShQopPeemtBo3POW_wJNF4p_05P3SIoB_sZ0ymAzqHSe8jnnE_NeW_D8e1UqPDaGOmb0zZNj_1J3HjpGnAHQO-lbYTS-iAB4X_ffH1WfTGA6QKWWBmfPCZWBFpjUtaBS_UP0H6PptUBAAA
Not that high up; I'm able to downvote stories.

The ability to spread misinformation requires > 10K, though, I think.
The core concepts are in the Arc source code (which I can read, with effort, even though I'm not a programmer, because it is well commented) but as another reply has already correctly pointed out, some of the current implementation on Hacker News includes "secret sauce" algorithms that don't appear to have any public documentation. The ongoing effort here

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

is "making a conscious effort to resist decline," so that participants "don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."
An article in the Guardian last year by a journalist who lives in Connecticut. Headline - "The TSA's mission creep is making the US a police state"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/...
I thought that sounded reasonable until I considered "You shouldn't be worrying about X or why Y. Just contribute Z and things will take care of themselves naturally". I agree with the X and Z parts for some values, but think I disagree with the Y part outright. Always question why!
Review: Google Glass API
I just want to back this up by saying that I've been exposed a little to some AMP lab projects (Spark, Shark), and they're pretty cutting-edge for the industry. That lab seems to be focused on tackling the same problems industry is actively working on, which is rare at my university. If you're interested in distributed, parallel computing in the vein of MapReduce, I would second Berkeley.
When GitHub is down, the thing I actually miss is the issues. You can't seem to clone them. Are there any public issue trackers that can be easily replicated?
While I strongly object to jokes and mindless comments on serious topics, there's really not a lot to say or any interesting discussion to be had on this particular subject.

Lightly mocking that doesn't really detract from anything, not on this post.
One suggested solution is to remove all patenting on drugs. That way, competition will force prices down, and result in two things. In countries with national healthcare such as the UK, the NHS bill could be drastically reduced, and the government could give grants to drug companies for R&D purposes. In countries with no healthcare system like the US, the general population will have much more money, and so taxes could be increased (hopefully not all the way back up) and grants could be given again.

For those who think that drug companies need high prices for recouping R&D costs, their marketing budgets are far greater than R&D budgets, so this isn't really true. In the UK they aren't allowed to market to end-users, so the advertising costs are generally much lower here.
Haha, nice one!

@elliott: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#downvoteart...
Previously submitted by ColinWright with the canonical URL:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5570457

The source from which this was submitted (sorry, Colin) is a crap source, a propaganistic op-ed column in the Washington Post that has previously been caught by participants here on HN omitting important facts from guest columns on education policy issues.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3315028
> the Obama administration Justice department created the Miranda exception

On the contrary, they did not "create" it. They did, however, "invoke" it.

Things start to get murkier in 2002, after the FBI bobbled the interrogation of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th 9/11 hijacker—the one who didn’t get on the plane—former FBI special agent Coleen Rowley wrote a memo pleading that "if prevention rather than prosecution is to be our new main goal, (an objective I totally agree with), we need more guidance on when we can apply the Quarles 'public safety' exception to Miranda's 5th Amendment requirements."

That would be the Justice department "creating" the use of the exception as a result of a screwup. Clearly they expected to screw up again, and wanted an out.

Then the Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was apprehended in December 2009, before he could blow up a plane bound for Detroit. The FBI invoked the public safety exception...

So they used the out. Once government gives itself a right, either party is loath to relinquish it.
Have you tried reporting impersonation? You can do that here: https://support.twitter.com/forms/impersonation
That was my thinking as well, this post is light enough that we can all unwind and joke around.
How can the top bar color change be of any use?
Show HN: Hosted IRC for Teams (my first startup)
This is a very good explanation but there is another side to this issue. (I`m talking about HTTP DDOS)

Basically, DDoS Attacks can be (roughly) divided in 2 categories:

1. Attacks on your server (which usually target your server IP or some other part of your network infrastructure)

2. Attacks on your site (which use bots to flood your site with fake HTTP requests)

As explained above, Network attack can only be countered with strong and flexible infrastructure. The most common solution is a combination of several high-powered servers and load balancing capabilities.

HTTP DDoS attacks are trickier because they're best mitigated by visitor profiling, a technology that can help identify bots from humans and block them while still allowing providing full access to all legitimate visitors.
Developing and maintaining such technology is arguably more complicated, simply because it's a software you need to create, not a hardware which you can buy.

Standard profiling solutions include CAPTCHAs and Delay Pages but these will also repel legitimate visitors. (because no one likes CAPTCHAs or waiting for 5-10 extra seconds for page load).
Advanced profiling solutions use a combination of behavior and signature recognition, coupled with seamless challenges (i.e. checking for JS support).

CF and Incapsula (where I work) both handle Network DDoS in a similar manner but we have a somewhat different approach to HTTP DDoS.

And yes, while under DDoS (or even without it), dynamic resources can be the "weakest link".
This is why WAFs are so important.
>>>This feels akin to exploiting a mental vulnerability that exists in a portion of the population to earn money

Ermmmm, that is what some advertising and marketing are all about, creating insecurities in people and then selling them the "cure."
Pretty scary this new trend. They could create a replication bot and get seemingly original content avoiding deletion for spam from twitter, but still being able to inject spam in some of the tweets.
Lunch with the FT: Kim Dotcom
When the FBI released the photos of the two suspects, I kept wondering, "Why do they need the publics help when I'm sure there is facial recognition software to help match the suspects' faces?" Well I guess this article somewhat answers this, but I am still in disbelief that our government does not have better software.

For how long it took to discover their names, the two suspects had TOO much time to escape. They had about 48 hours to book flights out of the country, flee to another part of the country, do more damage, etc. The lack of facial recognition software could have ultimately led to this case being unnecessarily longer. This is an issue that CAN and NEEDS to be fixed quickly--in fact, I hope the government is working on a more sophisticated facial recognition software right now. Ideally, the facial recognition software should be able to crawl through the web to search for faces.

Now that I think about it, a good hacker could build a search engine that allows people to post photos and the program will run an automated search across the web (Social networks, Google, etc.) to see which pictures match it. Hell, Facebook even has facial recognition to some extent. A more sophisticated one cannot be that difficult for the government to build and put to use.
My big questions is why were the suspects faces in the database? Why would a 19 year old, never done anything face be in the facial recognition database?
Who you gonna believe, the Guardian or your own lying eyes.
To be fair, it's not exactly a new trend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439129
Day 129/130:  Product Page Design, Features & Benefits
Now I can't help wondering how many other things this "Get them coming and going" idea could be applied to in games. Is this as unprecedented as they make it out to be in the article?
The older brother had been questioned by the FBI before.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57580534/fbi-interviewed...
Sit down, have a drink, and think about what you are saying.
Their R&D budgets are still pretty huge.

And how exactly do you compete when your competitors can clone your product with ease?

And the NHS spends < 10% of drugs, most of which are already available as generics, so there is not a lot of scope for cost reduction.

I'm not saying that aren't improvements that can be made, but people need to wake up and realise that there are no simple answers.
Postscript was around my 9th language[1] and I find Factor pretty easy to read. I might be a special case as I hate reading Python and every time I try an S-expr language I really never get the hang of it.

Thinking about Python, looks wise it is kind of the opposite of any of the stack languages. I get the feeling that you can like one or the other.

1) various 8-bit BASICs, 6502 ASM, Modula-2, 370 ASM, C, Ada, foxbase, SQL, Postscript, Forth, Objective-C (weird listing it out)
Best random guess: Something related to him being an alien and becoming a naturalized citizen
Australia's National Medicines Policy aims to 'meet medication and related needs, so that both optimal health outcomes and economic objectives are achieved for Australians'.3 In response to the rising cost of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), the Australian Government has introduced policies to encourage the use of generic
drugs. Probably the most significant of these to date have been the Brand Premium Policy (1990) and the Brand Substitution Policy (1994).4 Under the
Brand Premium Policy, pharmaceutical manufacturers were allowed to set their own prices for the different brands of the same medicine. The PBS subsidy was determined by the lowest priced brand, the
so-called 'benchmark brand'. Patients must pay the difference between the price of the dispensed drug and the benchmark brand. The Brand Substitution Policy allows pharmacists to substitute
bioequivalent generic medicines without seeking advice from prescribers, unless otherwise indicated on the prescription.

http://www.australianprescriber.com/magazine/27/4/80/1
Apparently the final level was recently increased.
Reverse Kickstarter – shows real sales stats
a substantial part of their R&D budget is "market development"
There is a lot of money being put into facial recognition software by law enforcement and the military (including DARPA), so it's certainly the case that it's being worked on. But it's a hard problem, especially to do robustly at a large scale. What they do have is almost certainly the state of the art— in fact much of the current commercial state-of-the-art is itself based on stuff developed in older DARPA projects.
Completely agreed. Tenuously on topic, if Hacker News had - shudder - badges, then today I would have earned something like "Lightweight: posted something of sufficient triviality to attract a joker".
Such is the dangerous appeal of (neo)Lamarckism. Epigenetic changes by mechanisms such as imprinting can lead down that primrose path easily.

While reading this article I was reminded of my reading of a science fiction novel sometime in the past, the author of which escapes me, where it was noted that interstellar travelers could identify which planet they were on by its distinctive smell for a short time before it drifted into background sensory experience and disappeared. If I remember correctly in this novel, Earth had an odor similar to excrement ;-)

I wonder if it has any basis in reality, like for example if long-term residents of the space station notice smells differently briefly upon returning planetside?
That's what I figured, thanks ;)
Ye Gods! Do you mean to say that this is not an implementation of x in Javascript? [1]

[1] Values for x might include Linux, the XBox, the Apollo Guidance Computer, Intercal, Apache, the French language, the Haskell compiler, Hacker News, Call of Duty, iOS, and Javascript.
For the problem you describe - computer missile guidance - I could imagine a program that analyzes when the missile reaches its target and when it doesn't as a function of some external parameters (weather, temperature, obstacles, etc.). It could detect when the target fires a counter measure (e.g a counter missile) and act accordingly: by doing some tweaks on the missile trajectory and the number of missiles fired at the same time, an ML algorithm could learn how to avoid various counter measures...

So, while it would obviously benefit to have some human brains overseeing the process, such a program could run almost autonomously most of the time. So we let the computer do the "ground work" while we focus on "high level tasks". Today the ground work is the basic calculations, tomorrow it will be part of what is done by humans today, such as adapting the trajectory of a missile as I just described above, the point is that the computing power should allow humans to focus on higher level tasks.

So I don't see how the backward movement described by Asimov can help with anything. Did he just want to warn the mankind against forgetting how calculation works?
Step 1. Make your server more responsive.
"Nobody I know feels the danger of a police state, therefore there is no danger of a police state"
Does anyone have detailed knowledge of startups in this space?

I know of Lambda labs but I personally haven't use their solution post Face.com.
Facebook only has to distinguish among friends of the uploader. And it's not perfect. This man was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. He would not have been identifiable out of the tens of thousands of people at the event, matched across the (probably) millions of people in the database.
He's 19, so he likely has a driver's license or other state-issued ID photo on file.
I'm going to venture to guess that either a) the officer was talking out of his ass to make a quick point or b) someone, somewhere massively scraped every social network they could think of for anyone with ties to the area or the event. That being said, I don't really like the sound of it either, regardless of how true it is.

--pre-submit thought: perhaps it was the older brother? Our background is rather limited but it would not be surprising if he had had prior run-ins with the law. Even a minor offense will get your mugshot in the file.
Everyone who enters the US is photographed and fingerprinted (e.g. tourists, visitors, etc).

Everyone who applies for a US visa is additionally photographed and fingerprinted.

Everyone who applies for naturalisation is additionally photographed and fingerprinted.

The suspects did all three of these things. The US government has almost every foreigner legally on American soil in a database.

Plus then you have the DNV on top of that and or passport office.
Maybe save it for an example in your book? Your blog already has enough great material to establish your place at the forefront of modern philosophy. Now it's just a question of marketing. Kickstarter campaign for your book sounds good. And to those who have down voted Mr. Church I can only say, how dare you.
I love that they published a paper on this. For most of us, this is one of those things that surprises you once and then convinces you not to use Excel for genomic work in the future, since no magic should be applied without explicit instructions from the scientist. For them, they realized that this Excel/gene name error affected almost everyone at least once, probably reasoning that journal referees would be quite sympathetic despite the otherwise bland nature of the story.

The type of auto-conversion that's going in, as mentioned in the article, is e.g., DEC1 (text) to 1-DEC (date), etc.
It's one of the greater hurdles for teaching kids to code, in non-English countries. Everything is in English, which greatly impacts their ability to figure out most things for themselves. And you can't really expect kids under 12 to meaningfully decipher English (there's exceptions, yes).

That's the first reason I clicked the link--I thought the "visually" part in the title would perhaps be about something doing away with written language entirely, but alas :)

Anyway, if children are important in your audience, please consider (a support framework for) localization. In the technology world, you can usually expect people to be able to read and communicate English, it's the lingua franca. Most software gets diminishing returns for each language you add, many people even prefer English interfaces over their mother language (because so many industry-words are English--looking at you, Photoshop/GIMP). But with children, for every new language you add, it's like opening up an entirely new can of audience that simply wasn't able to work with your software before.
I am the author of the referenced article. The problem is matching surveillance camera images (like from Lord & Taylor's) is impossible because of the steep down tilt angle of the cameras plus their low resolution. Smartphone images could be a little better as the angle is more head on and the resolution is higher. However, even those images tended to be in a wide field of view which means low pixel density, hurting matching performance. Last, but not least, the caps and sunglasses hurt recognition as well.
Reddit can manage the volume if they get rid of the legacy media content. I don't see that happening with Conde Nast running the show though. Subreddits aren't as diluted by corporate content as /politics or /worldnews are, but reddit is kinda like the yahoo of news: lots of categories and that doesn't scale so well as we all know now.

Between corporate content, categories and so many human moderators it is going to be a battle as a viable business. My ad testing also showed a non-trivial percentage of their audience and traffic is <14 y/o.
As the original article points out, these two kids achieved something that the worst of the World War Two bombing of London was not able to do, which is to shut down a major city for a day.

Rightly or wrongly, terrorists will view this as a spectacular success, in some ways greater than 9/11 since it only took a couple of kids to pull off.

I don't know if that kid feels victorious but you can be darn sure that his peers are throwing high fives all around.
How does SPSS compare? I've mostly used Excel and SPSS back in college.
I tend to get really pissy if I'm interrupted while programming.
What am I missing, why are we seeing so many articles about Excel???
I wish there were a way to overlay it on Craigslist listings, redfin, etc.
And the linked paper for this claim: http://www.csdassn.org/software_reports/gnumeric.pdf
At 404 you get Not Found.

At 501 you get to go home.

At 666 you get a calibration score. (As in Evil, Google Being? Ok, I tried.)

At 1024 you get a non-reserved port number.

At 32768 any 16-bit hardware you have is personally signed by Paul Graham.
Looks similar to what I've tried to do with Modelian [1].

With Modelian, I went the route of developing a Domain Specific Language designed to be simple to learn (which has an interpreter built all in JS). It has things like case-insensitivity that I think make learning simpler.

[1] http://modelian.com
How hard would it be to throw off facial recognition by simply wearing very high quality makeup and prosthetics to alter your facial appearance (ala hollywood movies)? If I were the boston bombers, I would have first learned how to make myself look completely different. It's unbelievable to me that these guys didn't realize they'd be captured on tons of cameras that day.
Really good to see the testing experience get some attention.

An area that has caught me out many times has been when my naming hasn't quite matched the conventions. Because ember provides default implementations at runtime you don't know if your implementation has actually been picked up. Is there any way to enable some logging output that would show whether the default or custom implementation is being used? If not this would be a great addition to the development experience.
3D Printed Music: 3D Printer Plays Music & Prints What It Looks Like
The one thing I wish had more transparency is the inconsistency around reply-delays. Some people get less time than others.

Between the "average karma" statistic (I used to care about that and avoid posting non-primaries; now I don't care) and reply-delays, HN penalizes nested discussions, and that's probably a good thing for most discussions but it does have drawbacks.