skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a feeling our disagreement is largely one of terminology.

>the whole point of AI is to get to a point where computers are self-directed; where we don't have to laboriously tell the computer what to do;

There is much in between laboriously tell it what to do and having a self-directed entity traipsing in and out of computer networks. A system that is smart enough to figure out how to accomplish a high level goal on its own doesn't have to be a self-directed entity. It just needs to be infused with enough real-world knowledge that the supposed optimization problem has a solution.

>because the whole point is to develop AI's that can modify their own neural networks (or whatever internal structures they end up having) as an ongoing process, the way humans do.

I think you give us too much credit. We may guide our learning processes, but the actual modification of our neural networks is completely out of our control. The distinction here may seem useless, but in this case it is important. A supposed unself-directed-but-intelligent being would simply not have the ability to direct its learning processes. We would still have to bootstrap its learning algorithms on a particular dataset to increase its knowledge base. But this isn't contradictory to general AI, nor would it be useless. In fact, I would say the only thing we would lose is the warm fuzzies that we created "life". It's still just as useful to us if we're in control of its growth.
This list doesn't give me much confidence in mattermark's "proprietary algorithm."
A lot of folks are posting bars with similar or better macro-nutrients, but in doing so are missing the point of these bars: their primary market is the paleo crowd. All the ingredients are natural and the list is short, basic, and acceptable to a paleo diet: almonds, dates, coconut, honey, crickets, cacao, vanilla, and sea salt. Compared with the ingredients list for a MetRX bar[1] posted elsewhere in this thread, it's an obvious choice for a follower of the "paleo lifestyle", even if the macros are comparable.

Even the Quest bars, which definitely have better macros than these bars, are pretty good for someone doing a ketogenic diet, but not acceptable for a paleo diet due to the use of peanuts, milk, chocolate, and sucralose.

[1] Metamyosyn® VPP Protein Blend (Whey Protein Isolate, Milk Protein Concentrate, Casein, Calcium Caseinate, Hydrolyzed Whey Protein Isolate, Egg White, L-Glutamine),
Maltitol Syrup, Soy Protein Isolate, Fractionated Palm Kernel Oil, Cocoa (processed with alkali), Maltitol, Glycerin, Fructose, Invert Sugar, Natural Flavor, Water, High Oleic Sunflower Oil, Corn
Syrup, Fructooligosaccharides, Polydextrose, Tapioca Starch, Vitamin and Mineral Blend (Calcium Carbonate, Calcium Phosphate, Potassium Lactate, Magnesium Oxide, Ascorbic Acid, Ferric
Orthophosphate, d-Alpha Tocopherol Acetate, Niacinamide, Zinc Oxide, Copper Gluconate, d-Calcium Pantothenate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Riboflavin, Thiamin
Mononitrate, Folic Acid, Biotin, Potassium Iodide, Cyanocobalamin), Unsweetened Chocolate, Cellulose, Enzyme Modified Soy Protein, Salt, Soy Lecithin, Pectin, Sugar, Sucralose, Soybean Oil,
Maltodextrin, Carrageenan.
A friend of mine is considering starting a cleaning company and I engaged in some out-of-the-box thinking, I'd be interested to hear HNs views on the idea:

Cleaners that CCTV themselves.

It could be done with something as simple as a low-cost smartphone worn around the neck, or in the future something more sophisticated like Google Glass.

Lots of potential issues (would the cleaners accept this condition? would clients be happy to have a video of their house sat on a server?) but it's a potential solution to the trust issues inherent in the business - two main ones being 'is my cleaner dipping into petty cash' and 'is my cleaner actually cleaning'.
C# has

range.AsParallel().Select(expensiveOp);

Which is hilariously verbose, and map is called select. But it's nice to have...
People tend to think of education in America as a big
vegetable garden, where every sprout can grow to its
full potential and find its best utility on maturity.

It is more like a lumber mill that produces uniform
boards, some with more knots and bits of bark
showing than others, but all of the same nominal
dimensions that have not changed much since the 1800s.

We may see some change with the advent of MOOCs (if they spread to earlier
grades) and with the possibility of publishers being able to afford to
produce local-to-each-state textbook elements, but the combined influence
of D. of Ed. funding, Texas and California textbook approval, teachers'
unions, and ever-growing administrative inertia is a lot to overcome.
Taking down “the largest child pornography conspiracy ever prosecuted”
The obvious correct action in this case from 3taps was to pay someone else to use the site as a proxy ie. have someone else go there and deliver the goods to you.
This is crap and you're embarrassing yourself and Facebook.

You all are lucky that people are sharing this stuff with you guys for $500 instead of on the black market for much more. You're also lucky that people are doing the job that highly-paid Facebook engineers should have done. And if I read between the lines of your post, you and your team think that you're pretty clever.

The right thing to do is to cut this guy a check for $500 and keep your mouth shut, before people stop reporting security bugs to you.

I know I'm already discouraged--if I find anything, the last thing I want to deal with is a mediocre engineer telling me I didn't fill out the TPS form the right way.
I applaud the OP's intentions and I think more attention overall needs to be paid to the "oil/grease" that makes it possible to learn concepts. It's not just intellectual effort and spirit that powers learning, but the attention paid toward lowering every source of friction.

To use a higher-level example, I found learning and adopting new JavaScript frameworks was hugely more enjoyable and easier thanks to build systems that set up continuous testing/automatic-reloading right out of the box (yeoman.io, for instance). Sure, running the bash command to compile CofffeeScript and run the tests takes just a second to type and execute...and hitting Cmd-R to reload a webpage after editing the files even less, but those seconds build up, to the point where development because more of a burden than it should feel like. And, well, if I stop programming because I'm tired, I'm not learning.

So I could see how inadequate hardware would be a major impediment to learning to code. The frequency that novices fail to close parentheses and quotation marks (and the inexplicable errors that leads to) is bad enough on a good keyboard...I can only imagine how frustrating it'd be if your Shift key worked only half the time you expected it to.

That said, I disagree with the author's specific examples. His rationale for a bigger monitor, especially. If a novice is using five programs (2 chrome windows, Sublime Text 2, Evernote, and Github(???)) to do simple HTML/CSS tracing...then I would argue that she is trying to do too much and that more of the concepts should be taught in an orthogonal way.

The OP defends his student's habits, saying that instead of learning to do Cmd-Tab to switch, she should work off a 30-inch monitor. I think that's the wrong way to approach the situation, even if you ignore the monetary realities of buying a bigger monitor. Novices not only don't know the concepts, they also don't know how to learn the concepts. The pattern that the student has apparently adopted does not seem like a best practices one.

A tangent discussion could be started on how one might structure the HTML/CSS lessons so that the student doesn't have to have 5 windows open at once...but I'll stop at arguing that the OP presents a sort of false dilemma here. It's not that either the hardware improves, or the student's education will be harmed. There's also the ability to restructure the concepts so that they can be handled one at a time, and the discretion to push the student towards more efficient habits.

To use one more example: in typing class, our teachers made us cover our hands with paper...it wasn't comfortable nor what we would do naturally, but this helped enforce the concept that typing is ultimately done fastest when not looking at the keys.
More than Erlang I think what Google really wanted was Ada. Since speed (ada can be very fast with low memory usage) and programming at scale were as much concerns as concurrency (they both take inspiration from CSP). Ada trades verbosity for clarity and rarely matched safety (design by contract, modules and extensive runtime checks). While I've never written a line of it before, proponents of Ada always have interesting things to wistfully say about how ahead of its time and slept on it was/is.
> If I'm going to use Go, or any language, I definitely want to use it idiomatically.

Idioms evolve, and they evolve because they are challenged.
The optimist in me hopes this is a sign of "the law" doing its slow and steady "catching up". This was the report of a parliamentary inquiry - this was asked for and delivered to our lawmakers. If I were a business with a model predicated on geo-blocking and intending to do business with Australians, I'd be looking for a way to ensure by business model works _without_ that artificial barrier. (I'd suggest that like many consumer laws, you will no more be able to rely on click thru Eula clauses to enforce this than you can evade "fit for purpose" requirements in physical goods)
Firefighters are not cops. I'm fully in support of cops wearing recording devices. I think firefighters/paramedics wearing recording devices is a bad idea (speaking as the latter).

There are plenty of reasons, but I'll list a couple:
-This would generate _huge_ amounts of HIPAA protected data, that would be a nightmare to keep and protect.
-There are plenty of occasions where I need someone to be honest with me, without fear of legal repercussions (i.e. what drugs did you take?). A camera in their face is going to make them a lot less likely to answer truthfully.
-People call us at their most vulnerable. If someone is sick or injured, the last thing they need is a camera in their face.

I don't think there's a widespread lack of accountability in Fire/EMS. Obviously there are issues, but they are generally handled well. There's no 'thin blue line' effect. If I screw up to the point of negligence, my career is over, I face a hefty fine, and potentially significant civil lawsuits.
How many times can you use the word "and" in a row in an English sentence?

Type "Ham and eggs".

Now, put more space between "Ham" and "and" and "and" and "eggs".

Now, put more space between...
You're right. I apologize for my remark. It was crass and uncalled for.
A few ways I leverage Postgres in Rails:

- CHECK constraints. I have a gem for setting up foreign keys and CHECK constraints in Rails:

https://github.com/pjungwir/db_leftovers

- named scopes. You can include SQL snippets like this:

class Publisher
scope :with_no_books, -> {
where <<-EOQ
NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1
FROM books b
WHERE publishers.id = b.publisher_id)
EOQ
}
end

Of course you can do this with MySQL too, but it's one way to nicely incorporate arbitrary SQL with your ORM, so that you can take advantage of any Postgres feature you want.

- PostGIS: http://blog.daniel-azuma.com/archives/60

- hstore/json columns.
I think this is a very specific example of trying to learn HTML/CSS and copying a website. For someone trying to learn Python or C or Java might not require such a huge monitor.

Also, for compiled languages, coding may not be a reactive process.
Sci-Fi Author Iain M. Banks Gets Asteroid Named after Him
> The open Internet is not like any old public space. But the ruling doesn't threaten to ambiguously target people who just change an IP to get around an ordinary IP ban.

I don't see why we should sympathize with the 'ordinary' IP changers. I read a number of blogs plagued by persistent trolls. Why shouldn't the proprietors of these blogs have a legal tool available to deal with those who won't take a hint?

It comes up here from time to time. People strongly disagree with this or that poster being banned. That's fine, people can disagree. But what 'right' do you have to post on pg's site after he unequivicably tells you he doesn't want you to?
As it turns out, judges _do_ say stuff like that. Where I live, they've made it illegal to leave your car unlocked… "Car got stolen? Sorry, your fault, you left the window open."
But a member of your team was in control of the outcome and messed up. This guy really wanted to make sure that you guys saw the issue in spite of a member of your team screwing up.

You should be rewarding him, not discouraging him.

I know arguing with someone as stubborn as you is useless, but what can I say?
Ask HN: Need a referral for good lawyer for E-2 visa
We are a modestly funded start-up looking to apply for E-2 visa. Has anyone a good lawyer referral? Thanks!
This is funny, but state vs mafia comparisons are not new. In many ways the state is simply the most successful mafia organisation within a given region.
I wonder, given that Morse Code is pretty old, are there any better (for humans) codes for text as a binary stream?

I mean better in different ways - easier to learn, less error prone, shorter,..
Cool setup and best of luck with your funding! A group of us in the Bay Area got a similar setup working over cellular for a DARPA challenge last year in 2012 - the military is really into this idea of blanketing battle fields LTE apparently. (http://www.uavforge.net - we did not make the final 10 unfortunately)

What kind of frame rates are you currently getting with the beagle board? Our initial work used an ARM based board from gumstix with a TI chip for encoding h.264 but the frame rates could have been better. We tried a few other boards with varying levels of success... I can't remember if Beagle boards where among them. Are you able to talk about this "custom" video format of yours? AR drone took this approach as well but the implementation is not real fun and I think a more standard format has other advantages given the right hardware ;-)
I like this concept.

"Introduce to the west" claims aside (see http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/466721916/the-worlds-fir...), I'm generally a supporter of being able to feed the world's population in worst case scenarios.
> The language has panics. But you aren't supposed to use them.

Conventionally, you generally shouldn't use them in a way that crosses the public interface of the module in which they are used.
Go gives you Erlangs concurency model

There are a number of significant differences between Erlang's and Go's concurrency models: Asynchronous vs synchronous communication, per-thread vs per-process heaps, send to process vs send to channel.
The real insult is that the actual underlying idea, and the proof, is shockingly simple. It is essentially the pigeonhole principle: the principle that if you put more than n pigeons into n holes then there must be a hole with more than one pigeon in. Take the regular language L, and express it as a deterministic finite automaton with p states. Any string in L determines a path through the automaton; so any string with p or more characters must visit the same state twice, forming a loop. This looped part can be repeated any arbitrary number of times to produce other strings in L.

Yeah, that's how it is usually introduced to students. First you introduce them to finite state automatons, then you show them a cool trick of extending the words by walking in circles on the automaton's state graph, and only then you mention that this is basically a pumping lemma. After everyone understood the point of the pumping lemma, you write it down formally using five quantifiers, so that student can write it down concisely, as the idea is already understood at that point.

I agree that the formal statement of the pumping lemma can be very uninspiring, but it only hints to two important facts. First, it's very important to have a good teacher, who is able to introduce ideas in a way and order they work for you. Second is that in math, it's the proofs and ideas that are important, not theorem statements.
Anyone know if this company is still classifying all of its cleaners as "contractors" to avoid paying taxes?

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3846208 it was a huge topic of conversation when they got mentioned here about a year ago.
Your assertion is only correct in the near-term.

The ultimate market is the world's poor.
>>For most North Indians (speakers of Indo-Aryan languages), Hindi would probably be a lot easier to pick up than English.

Hindi is only something like marginally older than English in India. Within a few years you can almost say English is a better candidate as a common language than Hindi can even dream to be.

>>On top of that, they get to interact with a large population of fluent Hindi speakers

And where is that 'large population'? Delhi, Uttar Pradesh? and then apart from that where? That is not even 10% of India.

>>I've been in Bangalore, and the English of the majority of programmers I've met here is utterly atrocious.

Compared to the British English standards we are something like miles ahead of most Americans or probably a good part of the anglosphere. News papers, publications, magazines, essays almost in any measure India will outscore US or any English speaking country in the world

>>They butcher sentences and are incapable of constructing a single grammatical sentence

Don't get me started, Most Americans can't even pronounce words completely. Most use double negatives frequently while forming sentences.

>>Personally, I wouldn't criticize them if this hadn't been coupled with appallingly bad coding skills.

I see this pretty much everywhere. I don't know what your problem is exactly. You think the outsourcing scenario was scary? That was just the very beginning. There is nothing really stopping India's progress on the world scale, and software is just one tiny little area where India's is making rapid progress.

I wonder what is the true nature of the problem the west and in general white English speaking population has with India. If you are just pissed that a nation you ruled and looted for 200 years is just giving you back a dose of your own medicine. Sorry I can't help much on that end, as I said this is just the beginning. Much is about the come.
HD over 3G/4G LTE cellular connection? The lag would in the order of a few seconds, which makes flying FPV extremely difficult. It also means a huge data bill unless I've been grandfathered into a "unlimited" data plan.

I think I'll just stick to some of the cheaper, well respected 5.8Ghz FPV setups.
HTML framework for prototyping native touch applications, Ratchet, got 2.0
You can share an iTunes library between accounts by pointing a preference at the same directory for each account. /Users/Shared is a nice one because it alrwady has friendly permissions.
Postgres.app uses the latest stable version of Postgres (9.2.4), so I don't know what you mean.

http://postgresapp.com/
You're right. I pretty much just blurted out the first thing that came to my mind when I read about it, and what I said was equivalent to garbage. It was completely uncalled for and I apologize to everybody in this forum for lowering the level of discourse, much less crapping over someone's hard work and pride.
In the past several years Postgres and NoSQL data stores have gained in popularity and become mainstream, and Rails now supports them well. The Rails ecosystem historically focused on MySQL, but that's not the case anymore. For example, Engine Yard now uses Postgres by default, and Heroku always has.
Your product is interesting and I am sure you are on the right track, but surely you must realize the weight of the claim that it is NSA-proof.

It's exceedingly easy to make slight, but fatal mistakes in the implementation of encryption, even when using existing crypto libraries. The type of padding, the message format, and way the protocol handles invalid or repeated packets can all materially affect the security of the system.

Anybody can write encryption that they themselves cannot break. The NSA has some very bright people that will break your implementation if they discover a slight flaw. You can't really call it NSA-proof unless you have taken similar analysis measures - one inexpensive way of accomplishing this is to collaborate with the community on the parts of your code that deal with the encryption and communications. I understand that for a commercial product this may seem quite unreasonable, but so is the claim that it is NSA-proof.
There are ways around the lag issue on LTE, but you are correct, it's going to be a bit expensive for the hobby market.
Google 'Trekker' hits Abel Tasman track
Bottle (http://bottlepy.org) isn't part of Python stdlib.
Teaching someone any computer skill is partly a hardware problem. A large monitor and typing skills improve your abilities to perform most computer tasks more complicated than checking facebook.
Hacker News implements permanent IP bans on anyone that performs tasks like reloading Chrome after the 15th HN tab opened for the day's reading crashes the core of the browser. When the browser reloads tabs, 15 concurrent connections are made at once, and the IP gets banned.

This is such a trigger-happy approach that a great number of legitimate users have found themselves IP banned, to the extent that a voluntary unban tool has been created: 1) open Tor for a different IP, and 2) go to http://news.ycombinator.com/unban?ip=<original ip address>.

By extending their argument from "IP block and C&D" (something I accept may be valid here as a civil violation) to merely "IP block", the court may have just found that 1) is a crime independent of any malice or damages, among other things.

Criminal trespass is dealt with on a very limited basis by police officers seeking to uphold short-term civic order, correctively rather than retributively. If it became a strict-liability crime about pursuing criminals and punishing them with decades of jailtime, we would have an unworkable system where the harm of criminalization obviously outweighed the harm of being in a place that was technically off-limits. That is basically the case in most permutations of the CFAA. This happens to be a corporate defendant in a civil suit with an unambiguous C&D... but beware any broader interpretion of the thing while it still has criminal penalties attached.
Regarding typing, I don't know if this is an actual phenomenon, but I've noticed that some programmers I've worked with who had problems touch typing seem to have had more attachment to the code they've written, than those for whom typing is a fraction of the effort.
The law isn't some quine built out of analogies.

I beg to differ, that is pretty much my philosophy of law and indeed of mentation. I think there's considerable empirical evidence to support it.
This is absolutely it. When you're happy and engaged, it's easy to burn through 60 hour weeks, year after year. But when that passion starts to fade 12 hour days are an express ticket to burnout.
Found an appropriate DARPA problem sponsor
and sent him e-mail.
Help me buy body armour so I can safely do my job in Egypt
Comments from previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5388535
This is a fantastic idea that would be really cool if it worked... but is there a cryptographer in the room that can verify that it actually does work? There's a dime-a-dozen "secure" communication methods that aren't really secure.