skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> or let you know how many calories you’re about to eat by looking at your lunch.

I have previously told some people that this is the holy grail of dieting apps. The difference in ease of use between entering all of the items in your meal, one by one, and just taking a photo, would be a game changer. Of course, this is just a throwaway example in the article so they probably haven't done any of the work that would be required to make this a reality (aside from the vision processing, of course). I think it could be done with thousands of human raters estimating for you instead of a machine learning system, but I was skeptical of whether it could be profitable enough to justify it as a startup on a risk/reward basis. One day, maybe we'll see it though.
>This dynamic is why the Fed needs to break the attitude that its job is to keep inflation as low as possible.

I'm not sure where you've been the last 5 years, but the current Fed has not in any way had a policy of trying to keep inflation low. Not in the slightest. Bernanke is extraordinarily paranoid about deflation and as such has had 0 interest rates since the crisis started. In addition to that, they are printing 100's of billions of dollars and piping it to the markets. The balance sheet of the Fed is in the trillions now. This is the exact opposite of trying to keep inflation low.

Now, I'm not going to argue for or against this policy here, I'm just pointing out that they haven't been trying to keep inflation low. That being said, there is ample evidence that "high" inflation sucks. There is also ample evidence that deflation sucks.
> Clearly meant as a rhetorical question, what do you really mean by it?

I think he means, out of the establishment economists (eg: Federal reserve members, Columnists, Government economists, etc.)
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And by free, he also means free to re-distribute (attribution license). It comes with a very nice package manager (equivalent to brew, yum, apt-get, etc --- but with integrated virtual environments). This package manager BSD-licensed and free to use outside Anaconda as well.
Bitcoin is entirely unsuited to micropayments because it takes a long time to verify it (~20 minutes, rather then <1 second) and it's already having issues with the ballooning size of the blockchain. Putting another few million transactions a day through it will make it completely unsustainable.
Some would argue that Appsumo is sleazy, spammy and dark
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Feature request: Oscar the Grouch in the trash can.

I noticed that ejecting the Kid Pix disk made the machine unusable.
Weird, neither the article or the comments seemed to answer the question, "Why is broadband more expensive in the US?"
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A couple guys at DEF CON this past year brought a coin-operated Bitcoin converter -- US currency goes in, QR codes full of crypto come out.

I'm holding onto my souvenir bitcoin (worth $0.25 at time of transaction) as long as I can.
The vast majority of economics is about how to avoid past mistakes, not necessarily how to avoid making new ones. This doesn't mean the science isn't valuable. There are plenty of terrible mistakes I hope we never make again.
We see this happening every day in Canada, since the CRTC mandated providing access to telco/cable copper for Third-Party ISPs. I finally managed to switch off Rogers Cable in Southern Ontario but it took 5 phone calls, a forgotten disconnect, three offers of 15% off $132.99 as their "best offer" and a few callbacks, but I finally managed to switch to Start.ca for $94.99. With taxes, I'm saving $41 and getting the same speed, 150/10. (146/9.7 from speedtest.net but who's counting...) The best part? Rogers would lie on speed tests, using "SpeedBoost" tech they keep to themselves (a recent change) which would lie to me and show 300/10 speeds -- but instead, when downloading, 18MB/s or 150mbps, would be all I see. The best part though? Copper cable is capable of gigabit speeds and the big companies are simply lying if they say otherwise. They've plans to get things to 2gbps in a couple years and could fast track that if Google, or regulation, really kicks things off. But can you imagine how much they'd charge for such speeds? Rogers already wants $225.99 for a simple symmetric 250mbps. AT&T U-Verse will soon offer 300mbps for $199. And like Rogers, probably a modem rental fee on top of that. Oh -- see also http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-US-is-Creating-a-Mass... http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/First-DOCSIS-31-Modems-to...
Yes and they're really over-doing it with all the changes. By the time they're done a/b testing 40 different variations of something, they've exposed millions of users to a crappy interface just so they can collect hard evidence that it's crappy when compared to other ui variations.

And they do this because we're in a "Post Steve Jobs" era where every designer wants to be a Prima-Dona Jobs-successor Rockstar Diva who re-invisions all the company's products. You'd be surprised at the illogical changes and constant redesigns they make with YouTube and Google Analytics. I'm actually moving away from G-Analytics to Piwki because of the obnoxious "anti-middle-click" interface. With YouTube, Jesus... They change something every week. At least on my account they do.
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A big problem is the lack of publication access though. I happen to have most accounts through work (ACM, IEEE, etc.), but if I didn't, I'd have to find other ways to get about half the papers I read.

I think the "unschooled" approach is more appealing for practitioners / systems software. BitTorrent and BitCoin both have had papers, though of course that's wasn't their real point, and not their real impact.

If you want to prove results, it seems rare to have the motivation outside the academic community. The environment and feedback is important.

But I'd be interested in any examples of people who have done this. I recall seeing some examples of professors without Ph.D.'s a few months back on HN.

I think anyone who is proving good theoretical results will be quickly offered an academic job, and take it, since they likely won't have another way of supporting themselves.
So the seller of the home deserves to sell for a lower a price because you want to ban certain types of private contracts between the seller, the bank, and joe?
You might find these examples from LeNet interesting. They are examples of unusual styles of digits that the system correctly recognized, made of dashed lines, bubbles, and dots. Granted this system only recognized digits, but it's not exactly a stretch to jump to the character set typical of Captchas.

http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/lenet/weirdos.html
"Growth spammers" has a ring to it.
Except this is completely mis-stating it.

People love negative results. But proving something doesn't work requires proving you didn't stuff up the implementation. That is amazingly hard, and about 10x more work then showing a positive result.

For example what you're talking about with magnetism isn't a negative - you can prove that an effect is bounded by the lower limit of accuracy of your instruments. Physicists do this all the time, because it's the correct way to phrase the result. I'll not to speak to the quality of your teachers though.
According to the first article, Shiller said in 1996 that stock prices were at irrationally high levels. In 2005, he predicted a real estate bubble. Noticing that a bubble is developing, I would say, is the relatively easy part; predicting when it will collapse is the difficult part. As Keynes said, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", so there is limited value in betting against bubbles. Paulson may have made billions, but undoubtedly there have been people that followed similar shortly before he did, but lost it all. The reason we know Paulson is because of the survivorship bias.
I came here to say that and now it is obviously a major annoyance!
Well, here's the thing

The BS with the last mile happens in Germany and France as well. Maybe not as worse, but to get Telekom (the public company of Germany) to set up the last mile for some other company takes around 1 or 2 months.

Now let's evaluate what may be the issue with price/speeds:

- People outside of US/Canada use less bandwidth heavy services, because of piracy laws

- Bigger countries demand more infrastructure (and if you have countryside places with high cost/low speed this skews the average)

Now, pay 99 a month for broadband in SF? Ridiculous
How will Google Glasses & Smartwatches revolutionize the video game industry?
Good point, it's probably that no one is there anymore who cares about the long-term mission of Linkedin. Reid Hoffman is rich now anyway why would he care.

The reason for that is probably also though that Linkedin is not a passion product. It's not that their employees/founders are super passionate about connecting employees to employers, they are passionate about it making money. It's a bit understandable though, it's not easy to have a really strong passion for Linkedin or its mission.
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"Science has lost its way" is usually a statement I see trotted out by people in the media, who think that the quality of scientific journalism by the media, represents the quality of the actual science it fails at reporting on accurately.

"Scientific journalism has lost its way" would be more accurate were it not for the fact it clearly never had one.
> Copper cable is capable of gigabit speeds

Assuming you're not talking about HFC, POTS might be capable of shoving through signals into the dozens of Megahertz, yes. Maybe even into the low hundreds. That would give you a speed near enough 1 Gbps.

But over a distance of, over your typical barely twisted 0.40mm copper wrapped in nothing put some PVC and PE, maybe three or four dozen metres. And that's with G.Fast which is not even seeing any large deployments quite yet.

And if you're talking about HFC, that is a shared medium. So, sure it can do massive speeds. You can shove, over let's say the 800 Mhz you have, about 5 Gbps, sure, if there's no TV on it. But it's going to be contented across all the other users on the same circuit, which might be in the hundreds.
I too had heard that, it makes me wonder how much goes unreported, undiscovered and unresolved :(
5~7 yrs ago. I asked the same thing. She said she had a "pass" that allowed for faster crossing, and it was pretty common.
there is no data to validate either model. there are far far too many variables, and you can't test both of them side by side by definition. If one fails in a certain environment, you can't say the other would have succeeded. We've been doing keynes for quite awhile now, and it has mostly been going poorly. There is no way to say that doing the opposite would have gone better though. It might have, it might have gone the same, it might have done worse. We don't know, and we can't know, because we can't go back to 2008 and try it.

We could switch tomorrow, and again it wouldn't matter if it succeeded or failed. You couldn't say that doing the opposite would have a different total outcome.
They had me right until the end, with the quote from Timothy Noakes, who is not a cardiologist, and makes plenty of data-unsupported mistakes in his own writing, e.g. about barefoot running. It's like having Malcolm Gladwell back up your research findings.

Was this piece supposed to be science or it is entertainment-journalism? The latter, I think. (I.e. it is not the abstract of any particular research study.)

I'm not saying the anti-anti-saturated fat recommendation is wrong. I'm saying this piece is just another opinion, which adds nothing to my understanding. Obviously the vast majority of educated and well-intentioned physicians disagree with their recommendation.
>> Private funding for research constitutes the lions share of research funding, and that private research leads to the vast majority of scientific and technological advances around the world.

Please reveal your source for this belief.

>>every other product on the planet - do those mean nothing?

Breakthroughs are expensive and do not conform to our short term business cycles, as they rarely result in products, as opposed to breakthroughs. Trivial and immaterial incrementalism perfectly conform to our business cycle.
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What about the fact that there are different kinds of saturated fats and different kinds of cholesterol?
It's funny because fibre is near enough cheaper to maintain and run than copper is these days.

It's just that the copper is already there and the telco that'll say 'go capex blast-off' when you're not going to pay them thousands of dollars in some way or another is a rare telco indeed.
Graduate students already verify people's work. Because every new graduate project involves building on the work of previous science. Which by definition involves re-verifying the work to show you get the same results.

If the results are hard to replicate, or dependent on other causes, then usually that's when a project shifts or when the knowledge pool expands (for example chemistry is fraught with environmental effect dangers - fluorescent lights provide UV to reactions, your glassware has imperfections, the temperature and humidity of labs varies with climate).
Jeremy Scahill[1] and Laura Poitras[2] are also taking part in this proposed news enterprise. They are at least as impressive as Greenwald, if not more so, and less inclined to engage with internet trolls or petty arguments on twitter. There are many other journalists around the world who are not working in the English language but could be translated (for example Shayie[3] in Yemen).

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a3sAet_dQA
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-sno...
[3] http://news.yahoo.com/us-disappointed-yemen-journalists-rele...
Trusting nutritionists is like having surgery in the 19th century. Deadly.

This show was quite interesting. Makes a very similar case: http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3876219.htm
Am I the only one to see a trend in the increasing number of articles like these?

Traditionally for centuries people in India have been consuming coconut oil, ghee, etc which are supposed to be high in saturated fats and never had problems. After globalization (1992), the food industry in here changed a lot as well. The business promotion and the usage of refined oils increased which is good for business, nevertheless not for health. These days, diabetes, heart attacks and other such illness are very common even among 20+ and 30+. The Indian food industry is one in which India (as a society) failed to nurture and preserve its rich, diverse and healthy food culture.
I love this flashback, thanks for sharing. Between being a reminder that group thinking isn't the best thinking, no matter the quality of the group - and encouraging me to get out there - fail and be criticized. . . Great.
1991... that's when I was born.
But VDSL2 is cheaper AND can be done sooner, is what the review near enough headed by the incumbent telco, Telstra, will say. And that's all that matters.

Even if it does cost more simply within ten years because of the difference in maintenance.
Here is a transcript from a show that has cardiologists on the panel :http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3876219.htm
Aren't most utility poles and conduits owned by the utility companies? Look up "poll attachment."
I would very much like to see a demo of NeXTSTEP working!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9272

Was a great response, IMHO.
Volume snapshots are a better way. The only filesystems I know of that support them are ZFS, BtrFS, and HAMMER. I'm not sure if snapshots are implemented using hard links or if they are more fundamental.

Another way, which is worse, is block-level deduplication. All of the above filesystems support it, as does NTFS.

I wish Apple would adopt HAMMER for Mac OS. It is BSD-licensed and more suitable for a memory-constrained environment than ZFS.
I'm much older than you, since I was born in the 80s. And by 80s I mean the 1880s.
Thank you very very much! Sorry I haven't replied earlier, because I'm such a new account it stopped me from posting for a bit. Really appreciate yours and everyone else's support during all of this.
That means he was at least partly if not mostly wrong. As far as markets go, you have to be right in both direction and timing. He was 4-5 years early, and frankly 2002 prices weren't that insane. Especially compared to 2006-2007 prices. He was really early, and if bet against housing at that point, he likely went bankrupt before the crash.

That's really neither here nor there though. What's the famous saying, something to the effect of "economists have predicted 10 of the last 3 recessions". Somebody is always calling for a crash, and somebody is always calling for a bull market. After the fact you can always find someone who was right about it, but that doesn't mean they were right about the why, and it doesn't mean they are going to be right about the next thing.
Krugman, Schiller, Roubini were the prominent ones.
True. Let's call 5gbps over cable a last ditch attempt to offer fibre-expense plans to places cable companies have no intention of upgrading to fibre. They'll start by using fibre as a way of raising prices across the board, of course ... and that's what we really rebel against. It's not the bandwidth available as much as how there's a line in other countries (as shown in those graphs) of 100mbps speeds for under $40. We'll never see that for a good 10 years here... if ever. They do want to say that "today's speeds are good enough" -- read as: we're not dropping prices anytime soon for current speeds.
ZFS solves the hard-link problem spectacularly well (and adds a whole bunch of data-integrity verification on top of that) with snapshots.

What I don't like about that solution is it can't dedupe (ZFS dedupe just ultimately doesn't work very well). Hence my interest (and if anyone checks my post history, my constant spruiking of) bup - which does efficient dedupe and output of git pack-files. Stick that on a ZFS volume with snapshots, and you've got block-level checksummed, versioned and deduplicated backups.

What it's all missing of course, is a pleasant interface to use it with (one which doesn't fallback to the thing I see way too often in a lot of these scripts "don't worry, we're just going to stat your entire filesystem every 20 minutes).
I've said it before on HN (and was attacked for it), but I will say it again.

LinkedIn is not a tech company, it is a bunch of business people who hired technologists to build a website.

Sure, lots of good tech has been open sourced by LinkedIn employees, but none of them sit in decision making capacities (or Intro would not exist). THAT is the culture problem.
> and totally irrelevant when considering consumers.

That's the most important part, and the mostly often ignored in HN discussions

It's the same with the difference between the Apple I and Appple II
Ah, you think Germany is bad? In Australia we have the choice of Telstra for phone.

Well, in Germany Deutsche Telekom used to run HFC as well, until they were forced to sell it off by the EU back when they were privatised.

That didn't happen in Australia. And so we have the choice of Telstra for HFC as well.

There's another HFC network that was built by Optus, with the anticipation of Telstra overbuilding about 22% of it. Telstra overbuilt to a level of 80% dual coverage.

So that's pretty much killed Optus' HFC network, which is about to shut down, NBN or no NBN, quite soon.

No wonder then, given all that, that last time we moved it took about 5 weeks just to get the phone line in. In fact, it's a shitfest every single time anyone moves in Australia. And the newly elected Coalition's thing is not likely to be going to fix this, at all.
The shady part: The way they implemented it allows them to read every single email you send and receive, and that is not obvious to the average user.

The spammy part: They toss LinkedIn ads on your emails to other people after you hit send.
Oregon has roughly the same population density as Sweden, which has some of the fastest and cheapest broadband connections available.
As a matter of fact, society has not a single valid reason to allow concentration of excessive wealth on some kind of restricted group or "elite" (as, by the way, also promoted erroneously by the idea of the "American Dream"). Here are a few facts to explain that this concept is not sane at all:

- Excessive wealth is usually hoarded (in bank accounts), not used: But if you want the economy to work the most (creating jobs, etc.), you need to make money circulate as much as possible (which is not what rich people usually do).

- Excessive wealth ends up being used for corruption (famous example: the Koch brothers), simply because it can. You can not get rid of corruption without getting rid of excessive wealth concentration.

- Excessive wealth could "morally"/"ethically" only be justified by the existence of "really free will" (a concept which we can never reasonably take as a basis, given the fact that this concept is of religious nature, not rational thinking): Free will -> free decision -> merit of the better decision -> excessive wealth. As noted, this is how society excuses the existence of excessively rich people, and it's completely flawed and wrong.

- Excessive wealth will always has the tendency to become even more excessive: it gives its holder an "unfair" advantage.

- A part of excessive wealth will always be used to protect the "unfair advantage", thus eliminating equality even more.
Ask HN: Backup plan(s) for a CS major?
I'm an undergrad at UC Berkeley, and the reason I chose it was for it's outstanding EECS program (electrical engineering and computer science). However, there are lot of people back home and in other places who view the current demand for programmers as a "tech bubble" and they don't expect the "dreams" of Silicon Valley to last. I know programming itself will always exist, but how do I adapt as/if the bubble collapses? Any suggestions on other career paths that would find my CS experience valuable?

I love programming in itself, but I don't want to regret my major choice because I blindly followed the crowd with no backup plan.
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agreeing to not hire from the group of companies in the deal is not 'not breaking the law' it is the crime in question.
I have a mix of "friends" on Facebook, mostly I have met them in person or know them through assorted activities where we've maybe crossed paths but not met formally. Occasionally, I go through and prune / reorganize the list if the mood hits me. There have been times I've dropped 30-50 people just because I was going more personal w/ updates.

That said, the most "amusing" defending I noticed solely on a lack of status updates was over a religious debate. I shared something that apparently struck a chord around a particular holiday, yet it was a meme in current popular culture. When I noticed the unfriending, I just rolled my eyes and went with it.

Sometimes things just don't mesh even when you've known someone for years (as was this particular case). Online day to day antics are no replacement for in person relationships.
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That's kind of curious logic. If a student is so accomplished that it's plainly obvious to everybody that they deserve a PhD, then the degree itself is just a formality. What's stopping that student from leaving, if they want to?

I'm sure it makes sense in the context of European academia, which illuminates the contrast with the US.