skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
isnt that criticism thr exact point chomsky was trying to make in his proxy discussion with norvig from google ? i found the exemple given in the article excellent though. it's another reason why computers won't be able to solve grammar mistakes 100% correctly (at least in latin languages).
And no plans to provide one either… :(
Shopping for a Robot Army: AUVSI
Exactly.
Now, you can find just 3 groups of people:

* single and DINKY hipsters

* super rich with kids

* very poor with kids (no option to leave - basically stuck)

The problem with structure like this is that, when the next recession hits (and it will hit), the first two groups will leave the city immediately.

I have feeling that solution for SF is to make it more "kids friendly" because people with kids tend to be more involved in community and they are less mobile.
19 True Things Generals Can't Say About the Afghan War
Ask HN: Hetzner vs OVH dedicated
Currently a Hetzner customer and has been very satisfied so far.
Saw good deals on OVH, now wonder whether I should switch.
>the first is not. If you are not doing research efficiently, then you should not be doing research.

My point, and perhaps I could have been clearer, is that funding is shrinking, while the quality of proposals is increasing or getting better. Funding rates for grants are now in the 5-10% rate, which means that even excellent, efficient, outstanding labs that are leaders in their fields can starve due to random chance.

It ha nothing to do with being entitled to research money. It has everything to do with the US spending research money efficiently and not capriciously. A research lab is not like a startup in that the intial time investment is quite long, and cutting that off inappropriately is wasteful. Additionally, it is incredibly inefficient to spend most of a researchers time churn through good proposal after good proposal, and no let them do research.

US science is shrinking dramatically right now, and rebuilding it will be a slow and long process, an if we lose the crown to China in the interim, the US may never be the bastion it once was.
Pretty good work. My thoughts on the visualization:

Criticisms:
1) The moving around over the city skyline is slick and fun, but I doubt it conveys much useful information. I'd rather see the growth of new building over time. In visualization, motion should convey some meaning. Here it doesn't seem to.
2) It's important for visualizations to convey both anecdotal information (achieved through the before/after snapshots). But it's also important to convey quantitative information, magnitude and directions of changes. I don't detect anything like that here, even though there is quantitative information embedded in the text (e.g. "Population is up 2,000, but 600 poor people have left"). Numbers are good, visualizations that artfully convey the magnitude and direction of relevant numbers are even better. It's rare to have news narrative that can't be improved by conveying the quantities involved.

Things they did right:
1) The before/after snapshots are useful and pack a punch.
2) Inclusive. The visualization includes a a variety of changes and doesn't get sucked down a narrowly focused rabbit hole.
3) Simplicity. It's not a data dump. The visualization does a decent job of conveying single themes without including unnecessary extra. It may go too far with this though (see criticism #2 above).

Overall, I look forward to more visualizations like this from NYT and other media outlets.
Google from the Command Line
Ask HN: What do you wish you knew when hiring for your first startup?
I'm about to start a startup.

I'm technical, I have a CS degree and I've been doing web development since 2006... but I've only ever worked with close friends on my own company of which I've done one consulting.

I've also worked at one later staged startup that grew into a mid-size company.

How, besides looking for friends who are good of course, do you go about deciding people to pick?

What do you wish you knew when you got started?

Thanks
Tolerance is great, but safety should always be the primary concern.

A significant amount of homeless people are homeless, sadly, because of mental conditions. I'm not saying that most homeless people are going to attack you in the street, but things like schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder can be extremely dangerous if they go untreated.
That's not fair - you can look at this algorithm as doing nearest neighbor interpolation. No matter how you look at it, (bi-)linear interpolation will be more accurate, whether gamma corrected or not.
Cyc-type approaches are useful for narrow, well-specified domains, just not AGI or actual "intelligence."
as a developer if you want to develop in windows go for dell xps 13 with FHD or else with out a doubt go for MBP retina display :) its awesome with the new processor and new retina display .....
Now that Peter has apologized for what he wrote, what about the people that wrote the sleazy and occasionally reprehensible responses?

Will they acknowledge that they might have gotten caught up in heat of the moment and said things they shouldn't have either?
I don't think you are being fair on the Turing test, or on the intelligence of its creator.

In describing the setting of the test, Turing first describes an imitation game where a judge must tell apart a man and a woman. He writes "In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary." So the text format is out of the practicalities of defining a workable test, not because Turing thought 'intelligence is how well you can write and read'.

Your other objection is that there are humans who can't form written sentences. Well, they could use the intermediary, if they cant write.

But, even if you mean that they can't put a verbal sentence together, the test is framed such that a machine that can pass it can be considered to think, not so that any machine (or human) that can think is supposed to be able to pass the test.

Again, from Turing's paper: "May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does? This objection is a very strong one, but at least we can say that if, nevertheless, a machine can be constructed to play the imitation game satisfactorily, we need not be troubled by this objection."

In other words, passing the test - succeeding at the imitation game - is designed to be a sufficient test to demonstrate intelligence, but not a necessary one.
He won't make it out of the primaries for either party. The state setup at the start works against him, as he has received a lot of "the crazy NYC Mayor banning something else" pieces.
"Just finally got off a late night call with Ray Kurzweil. He yammers on like he’s going to live forever."

:)
If You Can’t Hide From Big Brother, Adapt
It is important to understand that violent crime is one of the many tools at Mafia's disposal. You could be living in a New York today that does have Mafia but similar levels of crime.
The Psycology of Febreeze: How P&G Brought Febreze Back to Life
> I wonder if the best use of AI research is to get computers to solve problems that a person could easily solve

That's pretty short-sighted. These "easy" problems are stepping stones to much more difficult problems. For instance, you cannot tell a machine something like "build my website" without it being able to solve the easy stuff first.
Some of his original arguments were that X is worse than Y because X does Z, so pointing out that Y also does Z actually does negate the argument.
I'm with you that it was mostly flashy without useful information. I actually hadn't really noticed just how much new construction had been going on in my neighborhood. I would have loved if the NYT provided something that I could actually interact with and form some conclusions of my own. It seems like good journalism has taken a back seat to flashy visualizations -- with most of these stories there hasn't really been much of a story.

If they provided something like that, I would actually actively look at their site again, rather than follow the occasional linkbait there.
The way you talk about "the easy road" implies that you think that their are "roads" to begin with. While you think how I live is an "easy road", that is only your view with the value you have assigned to actions. Camus would posit (and I would agree with) that from a universal perspective, there is no easy road or hard road. There are no roads. Nothing has intrinsic meaning and the universe doesn't care what you do. As far as I'm concerned, a rock sitting at the bottom of a ditch is taking the "hard road" and Gandhi took the "easy road".

You have to ask yourself why you perceive one road as being better or more noble than another. Once you reach the root of this question, I believe you will find that you have no reason to believe that one is better than the other and you have your beliefs for no other reason that "it is what it is."

As Wittgenstein said:"At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.”
> One might argue that the homeless people wouldn't be there if the fabulous wealth weren't also there. That they can even be there should be a testament to the city's tolerance.

Hmm, I see it more as SF, or society in general, being irresponsible for the homeless rather than being tolerant of them being there.
In fact, this brings up another point I was talking about with someone else. That when people say "the homeless problem in SF", they don't actually care about the homeless' well-being. They only care about how the homeless disturbs their daily routine.
The governor of Arkansas deals with both rural and urban issues and has a good cross section of what makes up this country.
That's very cool, but also very complicated. I created a demo for my app recently[1] and I used intro.js[2]. It was very simple and only involved you changing html tags. This seems way more customizable, but also might be overkill. Still cool though.

[1]http://www.streakflow.com/demo
[2]http://usablica.github.io/intro.js/
I just do this (in zsh):

setopt autopushd pushdminus pushdsilent pushdtohome pushdignoredups

Which automatically pushes (unique) directories I've visted into $dirstack.

Then I have an alias:

d () {
local dir
select dir in $dirstack
echo $dir
break
done
test "x$dir" != x && cd $dir
}

That gives me a list of directories to jump to in my history:

~/src/git/emacs-prelude $ d
1) /home/kelvie/tmp/typhoon 3) /home/kelvie/src/git
2) /home/kelvie/tmp 4) /home/kelvie
?#

So I just type 1-4 to go back to a directory I've previously been in.
Aren't you forgetting GIF? Not a great format admittedly, but in photoshop there's even a "lossy" slider.
Did 'The Witcher 3' Just Cross The Uncanny Valley?
I would suggest it could still work fine for a General. They are experienced in leadership, logistics, and dealing with budgets.
And the Mafia has largely been involved in white-collar crime (stock scams like pump & dumps, running boiler rooms, etc) since at least the early 80s. The Mafia hasn't really had much impact in violent crime statistics in an incredibly long time.
Object Oriented Programming Tutorials in PYTHON
It was misogynistic? I don't remember him complaining that SF needs to get rid of women or anything.
All roads lead to nowhere.
Great! It's a smart idea just to store locations in simple text files. Thank you.
CJDNS is a darknet for regular people
The Lernstift smartpen checks your spelling as you write
This whole article, and [I think] Levesque's IJCAI article, seems to think that artificial intelligence is just about language.
AngelList Tells SEC New Fundraising Rules Will Kill Startups
I disagree. The quality of proposals is getting worse. There's a horrifying cycle of cronyism, lack of managerial skill that is going into science. People are promoted into research positions based on the impact factor of the journals they publish in, not the quality of their work. High impact factor journals publish things that are more likely to be scandalous than solid. The most important aspects of scientific success (versus excellence) is "were you your PI's golden child", and "just how lucky did you get"?... etc. etc. etc.

These trends are reflected in the proposals that I see getting pitched.

1) Who cares if "we" "lose the crown" to china? 2) I'm not worried about china, anyways, the scientific culture there is miserable and dastardly, and deeply entangled with the cultural value of "face" (I'm east asian, I think this applies to Korea and Japan, and troubling - increasingly in the US - see Hellinga, for example) and values Feynman's "extra integrity" less.

If you claim it has nothing to do with being entitled to money, then perhaps you should rephrase. Cutting and pasting what you said,

"First, the researcher has run out of funding ... the first is a travesty"

Which implies that a researcher running out of funding is a travesty. In the general case, as implied by your use of the indefinite article, that is not true.
You are quite right. Oddly, I think there's a distinction between the mass-media version of what a Turing Test is and the actual imitation game.

Drifting culture impacts what counts as "passing" too. Way Back Then, everything was slightly more formal, proper, and precise. These days, I have SMS chats with some people who rarely reply with more than one or two words (or maybe an emoji if they're feeling really communicative at the moment).
This is brilliant.

First you have to come up with a way to automatically generate these questions though. If we have to make them manually, the machines can just remember all the answers.

Creating the questions seems much harder than answering them.
Midol is sexist.
Its because lots of young people don't want to live in Silicon Valley proper (basically Santa Clara County to the south). Santa Clara County is heavily suburban, with some very poor areas mixed in with some very affluent areas (Los Gatos, Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills). I find it hard to believe that rent is higher in SF than Sunnyvale, for example-young people just want to have their cake and eat it too-high paying tech jobs AND living in SF.
One of the best responses Ive seen on here in a while
It's interesting to contrast the evolution of NYC with the (lack of) evolution of SF.

This article cites a net increase of 170,000 housing units from 2000 to 2010. I can't find an exact comparison for SF, but it looks like SF has less than 25k net increase from 2000 to 2012.
The biggest city in Arkansas is less than 3/4ths of a million people. To say that Arkansas cities gave Clinton experience with urban issues in America is roughly like saying that the sum total of NYC's parks and gardens give Bloomberg experience with rural issues in America.
The GIF format is not lossy. There is no "quality" option in the format itself; just a color depth option, same as PNG.

Photoshop uses the same tricks for "lossy" gif that this article uses for PNG.
Transforming code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python
Solving questions a human could easily solve is a first step, don't you think?
You make a great point, but would you agree with the following?:

There are tons of Finance jobs paying around 80-100k in NY. That salary, in that city, puts you firmly in the middle class.

Is this now (perceived as) middle class?
There's a Java applet comparing various high quality techniques here: http://bigwww.epfl.ch/demo/jrotation/index.html
If I knew of a well run non-profit organization that would strategically and practically invest in San Francisco, I would donate.

I can't really think of any that aren't highly political (and thus, not practical). Anyone know of any?
This part:

>5. 49ers

>No, not the football team, they're great. I'm referring to all the girls who are obviously 4's and behave like they are 9's. Just because San Francisco has the worst Female to Male ratio in the known universe doesn't give you the right to be a bitch all the time

As a person who went to a university with a stilted sex ratio, then lived in a city with the opposite sort of ratio (aka, the good way for me), I'm guessing the guy just isn't adjusting well to moving west from an eastern city (NYC). I actually warned a friend of mine about this when he moved there.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/04/21/business/econ... for comparison

Small overall imbalances lead to LARGE imbalances in singles at younger ages.
If you are on a system with BSD stat like OS X you can get the same with

function marks {
(cd $MARKPATH && stat -f"%-10SN%SY" *)
}

Even better with column

(t="$(printf "\t")"; cd $MARKPATH && stat -f"%N$t%SY" * | column -ts"$t")
Yes, thanks! It's awesome.
Well, given that NYC is ~10x the population of SF, SF is doing pretty well!
10 Personal Branding Tips
This comment with the original article reminds me of a quote from Dijkstra on how pointless it is to get AI to do human work, but instead to enhance human's abilities. For instance, my intelligence combined with a computer + terminal + any REPL >>> my intelligence otherwise.

Does anyone know the precise quote from Dijkstra?
However, this is part of the typical cyclic trend: artists / poor people move into a cheap neighborhood, make it trendy, then get forced out when the rent goes up. The starving artists move to another more affordable neighborhood, and the cycle starts all over again. Trying to stop the cycle by preventing development is just delaying the inevitable.

I partly agree, but artists move to an area partly by choice. Poor people are often born there, and then forced to move because the area has become trendy underneath their feet.

it's hard to argue that the changes haven't been beneficial from an outsider's perspective.

The city might be better off in the aggregate, but the poor people presumably ended up in other places, which are slightly worse off.
New discovery may make encryption ‘exponentially easier’ to break
Hnwatcher.com adds trending charts for Hacker News keywords
Can an alligator run the hundred-metre hurdles?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjslsKZYXQ8 (Can alligators jump and climb? Yes, they can!)

http://www.animalquestions.org/reptiles/alligators/can-allig... (many have thought was a myth, it is true that alligators are in fact able to climb fences.)

These anaphora questions are better solved through natural language parsing, for example turning them into predicate logic. The article is right when it says that big data algo's have a problem with these sentences. But that is not to say they can't help. In the article:

The town councillors refused to give the angry
demonstrators a permit because they feared violence. Who
feared violence?

You can use big data to calculate the semantic closeness between "town council" and "fear violence". If that is closer than between "demonstrators" and "fear violence" you can make a good guess.

From the Wikipedia article on anaphora:

We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were hungry.
We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were ripe.
We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were here.

A quick Google search for "bananas were ripe", "monkeys were ripe", "monkeys were hungry" and "bananas were hungry" and counting the results will solve this.

Using semantic closeness can also work against you in the case of ambiguity:

The robber sits on the bank.

Is "bank" a furniture here? A money bank? A river bank? Semantic closeness might picture the robber sitting on a money bank. A second or third pass is necessary: calculate the chance that a person will sit on a building vs. the chance that a person will sit on furniture.

This is a decades-old hard problem that is close to philosophy. Is the robot inside Searle's Chinese room intelligent? Is it really understanding what it is saying? Or is it "faking" it?
> We also have a version of MongoDB in which we've replaced all the storage code with Fractal Trees, we call it TokuMX [5].

What's the deal with TokuKV? Is it a working drop-in replacement for BerkeleyDB and similar key-value stores?
Android becomes Windows' equal as a target for hackers
Me too - even sport a Sisyphus tattoo. I'd recommend Myth more than I would The Stranger - only if for a clarity of meaning.
Travelers Beware: Google Play Might Delete All Your Books
> (~$2-$3k for a studio in downtown Manhattan!)

Pretty sure even parts of Brooklyn have that type of rent, such as Williamsburg, DUMBO, maybe even Prospect Heights.
I see this as a cautionary tale of how careful you should be with social media, especially if you are in a startup.

I give Peter the benefit of the doubt and believe that the original article really was meant to be a humor piece. And unfortunately for him, his writing was interpreted by a great deal of people for cruelty rather than satire. (Don't quit the day job, Pete!) Sucks to be him.

Then, rightly or wrongly, people attacked his startup as well. I can understand why. One reason is that our personalities, whether we like it or not, are deeply imbued in our startups.

But a closer reason is: if you touch a nerve, some people will find a way to lash back at you any way they can. And calling your startup out is one way. (For an example, look at the tragic case of the Adria Richards/SendGrid and PlayHaven firings.)

Think twice before you blog/post/tweet.
Talking Back Lessons: Retorts To "Copying Is Stealing"
As an aside, some folks would say that the J-O theaters actually served an important function in our community and that with their closure, something is lost forever.

Samuel R. Delany wrote a really good book about this and his experiences called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Not a book to read if you are at all homophobic or squeamish reading about sex acts though.

Many, many references to Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Sorry, I normally hate nitpicking but since I saw it three times: it's Turing, not Turning.
Sorry for the long delay in reply. Unfortunately, this "experiment" didn't reach a conclusion. The company ultimately folded.
Hey, I'm the maintainer of HTTPS Everywhere.

Last night we released a Chromium update that had a critical bug that broke the browser. As soon as we discovered this we removed it from the Chrome store temporarily until we could release an update.

We just released an update that fixes this bug, and it's back in the store again: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/https-everywhere/g...
Not only that but leasing an expensive car can actually cost you less than the value of the car you lose for using it.

I remember checking how leasing a Porsche for 3 years would cost me less than half of the value the car would lose in that time.
It was one of the main talking points after 9/11.
FTR the original title is from this Michael Pollan tweet:

https://twitter.com/michaelpollan/status/368771855064133634

"Tyrone Hayes, embattled scientist critical of Atrazine and Syngenta, loses his lab funding at Berkeley"

I had shortened it to "Scientist critical of Atrazine and Syngenta loses his lab funding at Berkeley". Though I pretty much expected the HN title change.
> Essentially, the article accuses AI researchers of searching for their lost keys under streetlamps.

As fas as I understand the history of AI research, people have also searched for their keys in the dark. They just haven't found them.
I love PNGQuant. Linux users with GNOME and Nautilus may enjoy this small Nautilus script that will let you call it from a right click in Nautilus:

https://gist.github.com/ronjouch/6258621

EDIT: screenshot of what it looks like: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/368761/bugreport/pngquan...