skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a pretty old post of mine (2007), and I was a bit surprised to see it on Hacker News this morning! For those of you who find all the Haskell impenetrable, let me summarize:

1. As raverbashing points out, the key takeaway here is "removing the impossible and normalizing is equivalent to Bayes rule." This can be represented in a programming language using a "die unless X is true" instruction and some magic behind the scenes. It's nothing more than a trivial generalization of McCarthy's "AMB" operator for LISP with some weights attached to each possibility.

2. The nicest thing about this approach is that it makes it very easy to reason about probability correctly. For example, the Monty Hall problem, which is known for being counter-intuitive, can be stated very clearly with all the assumptions visible.

3. The original audience of this post was programming language designers and people who understand Haskell and monads. For everybody else, I'd like to apologize for the notation. "Simple" is relative, and in this post, I take a lot of background knowledge for granted.

4. To implement this idea, you can choose between several approaches: explicit enumeration of all possibilities (which explodes exponentially), particle systems, or weighted particle systems. The latter two would be ideally compiled down to GPU code for big problems. Unfortunately, you can't use either Kalman filters or modern Bayesian network solvers, which somewhat limits the usefulness of this approach. Basically, it will scale to lots of data points, but not to complex Bayesian networks.

5. Dealing with different false-positive and false-negative rates would add a couple lines of code to this example.

If you'd like a more detailed writeup of this idea, see: http://www.randomhacks.net/darcs/probability-monads/probabil... I'll be back online in a couple of hours and I'll be happy to answer any further questions.
Another example of a well-designed gov't site:

http://www.consumerfinance.gov/
They won't need to show mens rea (criminal intent) because it will never go to trial. They'll beat her over the head with the potential of a felony conviction until she agrees to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge. It would be great to see a decent defense lawyer pick this case up and take it to trial.
http://www.manchester.gov.uk/info/200028/council_tax/5615/ge... 404 - not so sure
Because it improves people's lifes. The main purpose of governent is to improve people's lifes.

But minimal websites doesn't have to be ugly of course.
Design is nice, but "baaaam" too much for what the page is and for who the page is. Why i have to click to open the services? Better show them directly.
How come this and all .gov.uk sites mentioned in the comments include Google Analytics scripts?

I would imagine that the sharing of the data collected on government websites with 3rd parties be rather strictly regulated. Especially when it's collected as a part of a tracking infrastructure that spans beyond said sites.
At the same time that I think it's important to complain, the post seems too much like a spoiled complaint.

"Don't move your startup there"? Is the poster aware that several startups work with internet worse than that? Internet quality is one important factor, but it is not the only one. I'd even say there are more important factors.

Complains about D-Telekom but offers no alternative? (and that's why government monopolies are BS)

Disclaimer: I may be moving to Germany in a couple of weeks so I may still regret this post
The German government just talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk. They will rely on voluntary agreements of the Telekom and this will be it.

The current government just don't care about the net, acts even hostile against it.

They could just issue a mandate in the kind of "every citizen shall have 6MBit and no less" like they did with ISDN back in the 90s, but I don't think this will ever happen with CDU/CSU/FDP.
and cable is also available almost everywhere.
Git: Using a subtree merge workflow to manage nested libraries
I applaud the change and thinking outside of the box, but the Manchester City Council website looks like a $45 Wordpress theme off of Themeforest. The slider appears to offer no value to the site other than taking up a massive amount of room without really justifying its existence. I'm not a designer, I'm a developer and I am struggling to understand the reasoning behind that slider.

While I agree that the trendy look of the site is better than most Government sites, it tries too hard to the point the change and potential this site could have had is gone. The reason Government websites are usually ugly is not because Government's are afraid of change or can't justify the cash it's because there are content accessibility guidelines to adhere too. And when you've got to make your content accessible to people with disabilities well your options can be somewhat limited (especially colour use).

This is the perfect example of everything wrong with modern web design. Instead of thinking, "What can we NOT add to this site design" designers seem to be thinking, "How many full screen images, rounded corners, parallax effects, CSS animations, Javascript effects and large amounts of custom fonts can we cram into this site?"

I can foresee a lot of issues for people with eyesight problems on this site, aren't Governments supposed to adhere to WCAG rules and a lot more stricter than non-Government websites do? The images don't even have alt tags on them, Web Developer common sense rule #1 — Always put alt tags on images, especially when they're being used as icons in content sections, wow.
It's just like tinyurl.com, but in reverse :)
This is the most good-looking gov. web I've seen.
You should be glad your urls are so intuitive that they are easily hackable. Keep it that way and don't change them (breaking stuff is bad). Nobody really ever follows links with REST anyway. That idea is nice in theory but it's just too much work in practice.
I find the whole "threat of physical violence" thing objectionable, personally.

Sure, men are generally bigger than women, but culturally, men are trained to not raise a finger against women, whereas women are trained to have no such compunction.

Apocryphal, I know, but I have never, ever, ever, and never will, raise a hand or my voice to a woman, yet have been on the receiving end of domestic violence more than a few times. I'm not a small chap, at 200lbs and 6'3", but:

I've been stabbed in the leg by a stilleto (a heel, not a dagger), for accusing a girlfriend of cheating with my housemate (she was).

I was given a fractured eyesocket by another ex who pushed me down the stairs while she (and I, admittedly) was drunk, "because".

I can cite plenty of other examples of woman-on-man violence immediate to me, but shan't, as my point isn't one of "oh but women are the perpetrators", but one of "humans are the perpetrators".

In a world where practically anyone can lay their hands on an object that in any hands can become a weapon with ease, I don't think it's valid to say that "domestic violence is a result of men, and women, specifically, are its victims".
I somewhat disagree with this article, at least from my experience. From my experience internet has always been cheaper, faster and more reliable than any time I have had a connecting on the US. I have mostly had experience with Kabel BW and Telekom.

For example in the US at the moment it costs me ~$80 for a reasonable cable connection from comcast 20Mb/s. I can expect my connection to go down for a few seconds/minutes about once a day and once or twice a month it'll be out for longer. I have had this and similar issues up and down the east coast in 5 different locations.

Maybe the experiences with Telekom in Frankfurt and with Kabel BW have been above the norm, but for I never/rarely had connectivity issues and it has always been much cheaper.
Larger screenshot from the Github page: https://raw.github.com/wiki/bmatheny/memkeys/misc/screenshot...
Seriously? Ubuntu has the best font rendering of any operating system that I've used.

Mac OS X is perfectly good, but it doesn't tend to feel as nice as Ubuntu. Especially when you get to things like Indic scripts.

Windows' font rendering (I can only speak for up to Windows 7) is still quite nasty, especially at larger font sizes. The lack of vertical antialiasing ruins it for these cases.
Yeah, she has a formed a notion about the event even before attending it. Based on what - one negative high school experience?
In the context of how others scored I would say 17% is fairly decent as well. However, most Hacker Newsers make up a small percentage of a standard "UK consumer." I thought this number was incredibly low given that most people's interaction with Google would be as the organisation with the stated intent "to organise the world's data" - not as a corporation that makes money from advertising.

With that said, Google & Starbucks have been front and center in the mainstream news a lot lately in the UK with regards to "tax avoidance" claims.
Git: Automatic Merges With Server Side Hooks (For The Win)
Its not really as bad as this article claims.

- In my city (not that large, about 200k residents), i have access to 16-50Mbit DSL connections or cable connections of up to 150 MBit/s (uncapped). Its the same in many other bigger cities

- i hardly know anyone who cannot get some type of broadband. My mom lives in a VERY rural area (one neighbour and then a half a mile of NOTHING) and she still gets 3Mbits DSL, not great but ok.

- the situation in the US is even worse, still alot of people on dialup in rural areas

- traffic caps are a step backwards i agree, but its just one ISP doing this right now and there are many other countries where this is common practice as well
Ask HN: In which cases you would have liked a PDF to be editable?
Here's an example that is not sexy but is at least functional: http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/940-how-to-repair-a-b...

Also note Clay Shirky's belief that the most disruptive tech initially appears to be a toy to most.

I have to admit, I have the same problem with 3d printing and think that some of the newer materials (stainless steel for example) will really improve the functional designs, especially as the cost decreases.

Disclaimer: I work at Shapeways
Population density is a problem in Germany. In contrast to, for example France (?), the state does not nearly enough to bring internet to the countryside.

Broadband access is defined as 380kbit/s and customer service is terrible.

By the way: T-Mobile is part of "Telekom".

But if you choose the right street in the right city, getting 100mbit for 50euros (flatrate) is not a problem.
> In the year 2013 this question is so lazy, or ignorant, it is effectively biggotry. Or perhaps trolling.

No it's not. It's a valid question that must be asked and answered and can't be ignored just because people get tired of hearing it.

The far bigger plague is the way honest, legitimate questions get met with shaming and ridicule instead of knowledge-enhancing answers.

Also: ignorant is almost never a valid accusation to make against someone asking a question. Asking a question by definition means that one is admitting some amount of ignorance. Calling it out is exceptionally rude and counter to the spirit of honest debate.
Well, it's not so good if you're trying to use laptop on battery power.

Having said that - I wouldn't mind websites charging me automatically fractions of cents for reading their contents
On my screen size and browser chrome, the little girl's eyes are just above the bottom of the browser window. With the rest of the picture out of focus, it looks positively creepy.
Thanks for posting this, cschmidt! Those are some of my favorite Shapeways products as well :D

Disclaimer: I work for shapeways
Heat and sound. The difference is between me working on my laptop on a lecture, and me having to shut down my laptop because the fan is going crazy...
It would be great available from outside the US. Instead of going through the trouble of international shipping, one could use this service to send to US residents.

At least that's what I use iCards for now.
Rewriting my Web Copy to Attract More Clients
Germans love complaining. It's the national addiction.
I believe Patrick always posts at least a complete transcript of these talks on his blog.
Thanks for the link. I loved this quote.

Seeing the world through the lens of Bayes’ Theorem is like seeing The Matrix. Nothing is the same after you have seen Bayes.
I totally love that there is a link that says "Report dumped Rubbish" on that site! That is fantastic. I am not sure if the preteen girl was thinking about adoption or the adoptee, but otherwise I think the site is great.
Somehow we came to believe that women can be as good
employees as men

men lost their natural advantage in the workforce

To be able to make these claims so boldly .. you must have no shame whatsoever.
Support OpenCL on something other than Windows and we can talk about how I feel. For now I feel I've wasted a lot of money on expensive silicon die area that I can't put to use.

Edit: I mean OpenCL that uses the GPU. The last I looked Intel had OpenCL for Linux, but it only used the CPU. Its a big world, someone may even have a use for that.
It's very obvious that English isn't your first language. I'd suggest finding a friend who could help tidy up your content. Especially since your app is intended to parse English - not a terribly good indicator of app quality.
Yes, LessFilms recorded all the talks. No idea what the turnaround time will be. IIRC, last year it took 6+ months to get online.

MicroConf was AMAZING. If you haven't seen Patrick speak, you really need to. And you still have a chance to this month in Philadelphia: http://baconbiz.com
I had 5 yrs. Telekom with 350 kb/s.
Frankfurt is a huge city, game is different than outside these kind of cities.
Agreed. The article's a rant with little content (the Telekom 'no flatrates anymore' move IS crap, but only mentioned once).

There are usually good options available and usually you're up and running quite fast. I can recommend NetCologne (local, dsl/fiber), UnityMedia (cable) and 1&1 (Vodafone reseller) as providers of very nice, very dumb pipes.

The author obviously is frustrated and annoyed. That's okay, it happens. A rant might even help. But I wonder why that ends up on this site here: The internet in Germany isn't going away and is, frankly, quite usable and widely available.
What does paying taxes and drinking lattes have to do with building a website? Yes you pay taxes to the government, and yes they're in the process of updating their websites (and largely doing a fantastic job of it), but your taxes don't enter into it. The government allocates a certain amount of money towards the process, and that money gets spent on building new websites. That's it. You don't pay for it directly. Please don't pretend that you are.
That was 15+ years ago. 40 years ago, if we go by shows like Mad Men, the whole world (West included) was definitely extremely sexist by today's standards. We're in 2013 today, things have, thankfully, moved forward a bit.

I think if you look at the world today, there are still definitely some issues with institutional sexism, but I do not think they are any more salient in technology than anywhere else. If anything, I'd say tech (at least in the UK) has a pro-female bias, because there are fewer women in the hiring pool, and so if you don't make a deliberate effort to keep your team balanced you'll end up with a sausage fest. In the case of GrantTree, that meant making a deliberate effort to advertise in places which are not predominantly male, and to tweak the wording of our job ads to make it clear that women are very welcome to apply.

Last but not least...

This is sexism by any definition, presumably perpetrated mostly or entirely accidentally, and not by "jerks".

You can be a jerk unconsciously. Surely, most people are - I don't think anyone actively wants to be a jerk. If you look inside your mind and you spot a belief, especially one that you've acted on, that "women can't be as good as men at X", where X is any kind of activity practiced by a large number of men and women, then there's a bit of a jerk in you.

There are differences between men and women, and some things men are naturally better at on average (for example, world-class competitive sports where the amount of testosterone in your blood simply makes a big difference in your ultimate performance), but no job I've ever seen advertised touches on anything quite so extreme. Even oil rig workers don't need to be world-class weight-lifting champions.

Everyone has some aspects of their mind that are "jerk-like". What makes someone not a jerk in the long term is the constant re-evaluation of otherwise accepted beliefs (usually handed down by their parents) in the face of new evidence.

Again, however, that's not at all specific to technology...
So FreeType font hinting functionality was disabled for years because software patents held by Apple, and now Apple is using FreeType on iOS. Amazing.

I live in the EU and I've been using freetype-freeworld package for years before the patents expired. but still... amazing :)

EDIT: patents have expired
Thank you for a great plugin. I've used PrettyPhoto before, but yours looks much nicier. Can't wait to try it in new project!
Which in turn agrees with the point of the original article. ATMS use BASE not ACID as it's more profitable to be available.
Nice. What is your hardware setup? Is it some fancy automatic machine, or do you fold the card, seal the envelope and add the stamp per hand?
Whats wrong with a $45 wordpress theme ;-P
The Shep Diagram and Data in the Digital Age
> Rails 4.0 removed the assets group from Gemfile. You'd need to remove that line from your Gemfile when upgrading.

Can anyone explain or provide a cite to more on this? What the intention is here, what one is supposed to do with gems only used in asset compilation but not needed in actual production app environment?
Taking a page from FB's playbook.
> Those icons are confusing. Click expand to see the whole list together. What a mess! Ideally they should be using glyphs with much bolder lines, or if they're really set on using the current ones, place each on a solid white circle. Right now they blend in with the text and seem to add to the overall visual noise.

I always prefer iconic interfaces as compared to the ones with just text. Try to think of one thing that you would like to find and go to gov.uk and then to manchester.gov.uk. See which one is easier to find

Icons vs Labels vs Both: http://edwardsanchez.me/blog/13589712
EFF report slams Apple, Verizon, MySpace for not protecting users
The only useful line to me is the second bottom one. It says the packet loss is more than 4% as opposed to less than 2% the article claims.

Still a nice tool, though.
Shocking! I had no idea... It does not fit Germany's image. Portugal has most cities covered with fiber, at prices of around 30eur/month for 50mbps and about 40eur/month for 100mbps. Smaller cities are covered with coaxial cable, with last miles at 30mbps. Only in remote areas do you get stuck with ADSL (speed varies wildly with distance to POP). No traffic capping, and I'd wager the first provider that introduces capping will disappear from the market. ISDN is not common at all for individuals.

I guess the big difference here is that monopoly regulation went rather well. Many providers appeared in the late nineties, protected by laws mandating that Portugal Telecom rented last mile loops. Nowadays, the market, while not perfect, is competitive enough.

(fiber and coaxial networks are private, these are not the public debts you are looking for ;-)
Now were we talking about Pascal or everything that vaguely looks like a Wirth language? Delphi, alright, Ada, okay, but the others? Meh. None of them had anything fundamentally innovative or were just too obscure from the beginning.
No, but you should assume that your ISP will choose it's fiber/DSL/whatever rollout strategy to maximise it's own profitability.
It would be interesting to hear how much cheaper we are talking here about. E.g. here in Lithuania (Eastern Europe) I pay about 15$ for 100Mb/s (for 30$ I could get 300Mb/s).
Fuzziness is subjective. iOS uses a similar font rendering method to OS X, without subpixel rendering. See:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-...
Almost anywhere besides my place of living (which happens to be Munich, but we have alternatives here) or big parts of eastern Germany (where friends of mine live) or various rural parts of Bavaria (where parts of my family live) and so on.
It is related to interest, but not to genuine interest.

I'd argue that the biggest driver which keeps women out of tech is other, non-tech, women. I see my female employees bullied by client female employees simply because they're "geeks" (and I come down on the clients like a tonne of bricks in said circumstance, regardless of gender). I've seen girls and women who've had an astounding technical competence and interest be talked out of it by their mothers, peers, and others, as "you'll never find a nice man if you're working in a basement with a bunch of disgusting nerds".

Girls drop out of maths and tech classes not because they lose interest, but because their peers ostracise them if they do not do so. I remember the two girls who started A-level Physics at the same time as me at my school both dropped out in the first term, as they ended up shunned by their peers who were all studying drama, art, and english lit.

The issue is cultural and generational. It's not going to change, with any amount of inward hiring bias or positive discrimination within the industry, until womens' own opinion of themselves, and their place, and their abilities, tallies with the reality - which is to say, gender be damned.
The article is about an upgrade to the Freetype library, more specifically to the CFF rasterizer. It has nothing to do with TrueType fonts (most of them, probably).

I've been using Arch Linux as my only OS for more than 5 years, and the only certain applications have given me font-related trouble. Firefox somehow doesn't select the correct alternative (even though fontconfig works fine).
Each time I need to open Photoshop, modify, and print to a PDF File...
Hi.

I see you're new here. "I agree" is a contentless response that adds nothing to the topic at hand. Feel free to post if you have something interesting to say, but "+1" is discouraged here.
this. I have had a minimum of 16Mbit in germany since 2006 and in the meantime have moved 4-5 times to different regions/cities.