skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These kinds of systems almost always use an n-gram model to generate text. It's a fascinating and surprisingly effective tool (the surprise is that implementing one is extremely simple).

Basically, it's based on collecting data from a corpus about probabilities of word transitions -- the probability of the "next word" given the n preceding words. So n-gram models often produce sentences that appear correct in small areas of a few words, but as a whole don't make much sense. The higher the "n", the more the generated sentences come to resemble the writing in the corpus. Once you get to quadrigrams, usually the model simply produces exact sentences verbatim from the text because the data becomes very sparse (how many times do you see "then I turned" in a corpus of tweets, for instance?), unless you have a very large corpus.

Like many NLP models, the n-gram model has seen many variations and tweaks that have differing levels of effectiveness, where often different tweaks produce more believable results for different corpora or variety thereof.

The math is quite simple. Let's take n=2, also called "bigrams", also called "Markov chains". In Pythonic pseudocode (because math notation doesn't work on HN) you could create a frequency distribution with:

for i in range(1,words.length):

model[words[i-1]][words[i]] += 1

assuming that "model" is a nested dictionary where keys have a default value of 0. then normalise:

for prior,words in model:

n = sum(words.values)

words.values.map(lambda x: x / n)
What's the roadway recovery ratio in cities?
>> The upper class pretty much had a consensus that this was necessary. It started off as industrialization rapidly kicked off nearing the end of the 19th century (especially in the USA), and a way to breed a trustworthy yet disposable workforce was in order. It then went downhill from there.

The 'Upper Class' have nothing to do with it any more and what some people said well over a century ago has extremely little bearing on the aims of modern state education.

>> "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

Which he said over 100 years ago, and which again bears absolutely no resemblance to what we have now.
Bromeliads and many succulents absorb CO2 and release O2 at night using CAM photosynthesis. They're tricky plants, opening their pores only at night to prevent water loss. The actual conversion is done during the day (in the light) using a sort of batch-mode conversion.

I suggest caution when surmising what millions of years of evolution can't do : )
There are plenty of reasons XMPP succeeded where it succeeded and failed where it failed.

I don't recall if this made the HN front page, but there was some news this week of interest: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/4/5173726/you-have-too-many-...

edit: ugh, jer beat me to it by hours
Cool! This was my approach to form validation UX on iOS:
https://github.com/benzguo/BZGFormField
My hand cannot do 9 the way you describe. My pinky is too stubborn.
Anyone care to share their experiences with OnTrac and amazon prime?
Is there a real danger from combining vaccines? That's something people keep mentioning but I've yet to see any data on it. Is it actually safer to spread them out, or is that just another myth?
They're right that people don't like creativity or dissent. There was a good post on Less Wrong about this [1], and about how the rejection of creativity, the rejection of what to you, is blindingly obvious, is key in the break between the creative person, the independent thinker, and their trust in society's expectations and sanity [2]. Seeing the things that the established process missed requires valuing finding a better idea more than how many people you might piss off along the way. It make take several ideas to get there, but you have to learn to reward your brain for producing ideas, and you can't expect society to provide that reward. You have to produce that reward all on your own, until you find the right idea and succeed with it. Then everyone shuts up for a moment, before talking about how they knew you'd figure it out all along, and they were starting to think in that direction just the other day.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/
[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/qf/no_safe_defense_not_even_science/
why Navy is building submarine launchable drones instead of building submarine drones?
This might be a good time to ask - are investors in general comfortables with notes vs. doing a priced round?

I understand the advantages of notes, but I found that many investors don't like it. We had many who agreed to a modest priced round, but absolutely wouldn't do a convertible note, and yet Paul says most YC startups make do with the notes. There is a disconnect somewhere here.

So am I the exception from the norm, or is YC the exception?
No, my point is that "handheld camcorders" are nothing like multirotors.
Santa Tracker in USA will have fighter jet escort this year
Another good test is http://isnotspam.com/. By sending an email from your app to check@isnotspam.com, you can get some good feedback on spam triggers.
Ranking Historical Figures: Skiena and Ward's "Who's Bigger?" Reviewed
"It has a lot more actionable advice than this Slate article."

I enjoyed the talk, but I don't really see how actionable the advice is. Or, rather, I think it's either wrong or what he says is incomplete. As he sets things up creativity is unleashed in sessions where you have "open" mind and you do the more mundane work in sessions with "closed" mind.

This bifurcation, at least as he sets it up with (e.g., "set aside at least 1 1/2 hours for your open mind session"), doesn't really fit with how creativity gets expressed. In many endeavors -- e.g., music, acting, sports -- the opportunity for creativity comes about only because of huge amounts of practice, in which the endeavor is developed to a point where it becomes second nature. Then, when placed in a situation where you have to perform, creativity comes out. I can't see how this fits with the process of switching from open mind to closed mind, as Cleese describes it.

I also have problems when I think of how creativity comes out in process of writing, whether it's writing fiction, non-fiction, or software. This process of getting work done is much more fluid than Cleese describes. People don't brainstorm for ideas for an hour or two, then sit down to do the mundane work. The work gets done in sessions that are better described by the concept of "flow", where if you still want to use Cleese's concepts of "open mind" and "closed mind" then it is best said that you drift frequently perhaps imperceptibly between the two.

Cleese's characterization in the talk is much more like brainstorming, where you just ponder, daydream, think things up, for an hour or two to find a right "answer", then go to work with "closed mind" implementing your answer. That doesn't seem to me to be how creativity happens, at least not for wide variety of different "creative" endeavors. Creativity comes out when you're in the flow, getting work done in single long session that is not characterizable as an "open mind session" or "closed mind session".
Competition is a Secondary Concern
Facebook explores adding 'sympathize' button
I think I found their first customer: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005
> there is a very real danger of a reaction when you combine so many vaccines

[citation needed]

I'd like to see the studies that say that combos are worse than individual. I'm not trying to be a dick, but when you make claims, you gotta back it up with data.
Anyone else notice Yahoo's new Global News Anchor Katie Couric is one of those helping spread doubts about vaccines, the HPV vaccine in this case[1]. HPV is responsible for more than 25,000 cancers in the US each year[2] and around 6,000 deaths[3]. Worldwide figures are probably 15 times greater.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st...

[2] http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/hpv/statistics/cases.htm

[3] http://www.kegel.com/hpv/deaths/
Not the only one - I just read this - and it fitted so well into some stuff I have been playing with using multiple micro processor boards and sensors - that now I just have to dive into it and see where it takes me.
What does that even mean? Who is dependent on what in that scenario?
Deion Sanders[1] played professional football and baseball at the same time.

Interesting little tidbit: On October 11, 1992, Sanders played in a Falcons game at Miami and then flew to Pittsburgh, hoping to play in the Braves' League Championship Series game against the Pirates that evening and become the first athlete to play in two professional leagues in the same day. Sanders ultimately did not, however, appear in the baseball game that night.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deion_Sanders
Does that include all indirect costs as well? For example, does it cover the taxpayer cost of buying and maintaining fleets such as police cars and heavy equipment?
There's so much "Yes!!!!" in your post, I wish I could upvote you 100 times. The only thing I'd add is that you've glossed over the cost a bit. If I want to use Python, for example, in production at my established 100+ person company, the cost is $0.00. If I want to use C#, the cost might be zero as long as I'm willing to put up with missing features (Express Edition, Sharp Develop). If I want the full IDE for with Visual Studio 2013, I have to pay $600 for a standalone copy, or $1800 for MSDN, etc. And guess what? In a year or two, the new version will come out and I'll only get a 25% discount to upgrade (VS2012 vs. VS2013). And those versions don't include lots of the team features - that's just the basic IDE.

And don't get me started on the never ending stream of TLAs coming out of Redmond that get hyped for 3 years and then discontinued later for another TLA.
I really do not understand who the heck thought this was acceptable.

Brainwash those kids early and get them desensitized to war?

Why not have Santa go through a TSA checkpoint and require a grope check?

"military escorts for Santa are necessary given “the proliferation of air defense identification zones."

Are the freaking serious? Injecting politics into Santa for kids?
OK most hosts will be running mod_php or fcgi and not pure CGI. I just mean CGI as a shorthand for this approach. It doesn't make a difference from the developer's perspective on a shared host. It's still just "here's a file I created, now point your browser at it".
I really appreciate what YC does in this regard. I raised venture capital from a large angel investor, and his team relied heavily on the YC documents ( http://ycombinator.com/documents/ ). I feel like it made the process a lot easier overall.
Firstly, how do you know they aren't?

Secondly, a drone sub has vastly different mission capabilities than a drone aircraft.
In that case my opinion would go from "fck apartheid" to "fck the system analogous to apartheid". I would support the Americans in their fight against Arabs (never thought I would live to say that!). I would still not condone hurting innocent people and feel that a punushment would be justified.
There are some possible dangers of combined vaccines but none that I've found for any of the standard vaccines you get in your childhood. If you want to educate yourself about virology and vaccines I suggest the following podcast.

This week in viruses

http://www.twiv.tv/
Only sick people are disease vectors. So, in a normal outbreak they track who infected whom with a fair amount of accuracy. Granted, nothing is perfect but the legal system is designed for an imperfect world so that's hardly a problem. Also, if for some reason your child can't be vaccinated due to say immune issue well that's a reasonable exception, but trusting in herd immunity while failing to contribute to it is not.

Edit: As to why it's important, not vaccinating your children risks their heath, but the larger risks are to society and not you. So, much as vehicular manslaughter is far more serious than a simple speeding ticket if you take the risks and someone dies then it's your fault. Because, despite the fact thousands of people may do the same thing without issue, if you do it and someone dies then your responsible and they where unreasonably risking others lives end of story.

PS: Personal responsibility anyone?
Business visa Requirements:
1. One completely filled out “Visa Application Form, which you can down load from my attached PDF file. It needs to type with computer then print out. Don’t leave any blank, write “N/A” in any item which not suit for you.
2. One recently taken 2X2 in. photo showing entire face and without a hat on. Please affix the photo to the application form. Photo should be light background, and taken within 6 months.
3. Original passport with at least 2 blank visa pages and valid for at least 6 months beyond the date of application.
4. Invitation letter from the company or university in China
5. Your company or college in US's letter for proof.
6. Fee:
Embassy: $140/per person for single, double & multiple entry in one year
Service fee: $35.00
Postage: $22.00 for local people pick up by themselves, +$7.40 for others
Total: $197.00 for local/ $204.40 for others.

Make your check paid to: Chinese Service Center .

Lucy
Chinese Service Center of Greater Albany, LLC.
2394 Parkville Place
Schenectady, NY 12309
Tel:(518)346-0555
Email:CSCAlbany@yahoo.com

EDIT: formatting
Army Ants Trapped by Their Evolutionary History
>it's 25% of everything listed, if I remember correctly

You don't. If you tried to live on ensure complete (which they seem to only sell in the US?) you need to add potassium, choline, more fat, more calories in general, more fiber, more sodium and chloride, but unfortunately not in the ratio they are found in salt (that was bright) and you now have diarrhea all the time from the magnesium. All that and it is more expensive than soylent. This crap is precisely why people are stoked about soylent, we've tried the existing products and they suck.
I have fond memories as a young child, cops escorting us of a beach because were were not supposed to be there.
It's funny too that upload functionality is mentioned here in your base requirements, because that alone is a whole bunch more steps when deploying to a PaaS like Heroku. You don't have a local filesystem, so you have to find and use gems like carrierwave, signup for Amazon S3, create a bucket, configure it in your Rails app, etc. etc.
Yes I am. I never physically handle the item-- Amazon ships it to you.
Your comparison is invalid and irrelevant.
You're comparing writing a simple PHP script on a remote server to deploying a full Rails app. Please do the same comparison with Rails vs Symfony/ZF and then we'll talk about it.

When I used to be a Ruby developer, every time I heard that "PHP is easy to deploy", I made a less-than-one-minute demo showing how to create a Sinatra app from scratch and deploy it on Heroku is just few commands (any Sinatra dev here can do it).
I don't think this exactly right -- an evil node can't send a false nay because it would have to be able to forge the conflicting transaction, the signature prevents that.

Bitcoin already essentially does the 2PC that the author is asking about for unconfirmed transactions. The problem being solved is that the Byzantine Generals problem is unsolvable for anonymous actors, as a malicious participant can create a majority of evil voters, winning any dispute resolution by 'Sybil attack'.

The proof of work system allows a newly joined node to determine the current consensus even when it's disputed, without having any idea who is on the network, so long as it has at least one link to the true hashing-power consensus. It also acts as a commitment protocol -- once you've signed your winning block to the network, it's nonrepudiable even by you.

With an alternate source of identification, a pseudo-anonymous 'Infocoin' ledger should be able to function and scale just fine without all the PoW expenditure--or in other words, you must have a system of making identities expensive, and Bitcoin's is Proof of Work.
Show HN: I made a SaaS that helps keep freelancer's pipeline full - with no code
Another significant benefit to not having actual debt is what happens if the company has been operating at a loss at the time the debt is converted. The IRS treats debt that is converted as "debt relief" which is equivalent to income, which is taxable. In the case of my company, when we raised our Series A, I converted from a single-member LLC to a C-corp, and wound up getting a tax bill for around $50,000(!) for the "debt relief", which was ultimately paid out of the proceeds of the money we raised, which in turn came out of the company's pocket.

So, in the end, we wound up paying a "convertible debt tax" to the government. I'm actually surprised this comment hasn't come up yet; I would have thought the convertible debt tax would be somewhat common.
Why would you want to pay for them? :)
This is actually what I was thinking since a lot of the same motifs are used. Obscure literature quotes, cryptography, mythology and red herrings.

wouldn't be surprised if it was revealed he was working on cahoots with whatever person or organization is running this. With stuff happening all around the world, you'd expect some intern or low level employee would spill the beans sooner or later. I'm surprised nothing has really be released yet on who or what is running this.
The vaccination program here in Spain seems fairly simple and straight forward. Vaccines at 2, 4, 6, 12, 15 and 18 months. Most of the vaccines are booster shots for the initial sets. Here they are 2 shots for each step. 1 combination vaccine and one for Meningitis.

They only give the Hep B vaccine if the mother is positive for Hep B.
Doesn't this almost guarantee profit, as long as the average price doesn't come down too much? As in, buy when it's [low enough] and sell once it's [high enough]? Of course, if the market is filled with these algorithms it will get harder, but low-risk investments and trading over long periods of time should turn to notable profit, no?

Weird stuff, machine pushing the man out of business.
For the test they landed at a nearby base. They don't address how an operational weapon system would work in the article.

I'd propose to wipe their memories and land them at a reasonably friendly if not secure location. (Order is important.) barring a safe landing spot, crash them as best you can. War is expensive. The last number I saw for a C5 was $5000/hour, and that was a long time ago.
Second one.
> Extreme and stupidly ignorant of how vaccines actually work... no vaccine is 100% effective - the MMR vaccine is claimed 95% effective with 1 dose and near 100% with 2. But the MMR vaccine is one of the oldest and most effective.

Your kid is unvaccinated, should have been, and transmits something to somebody else who is then injured? You should have some degree of liability.

Your kid is unvaccinated, could not be vaccinated *(too young, or had an existing medical condition that made it impossible) , and transmits something to somebody else who is then injured? Well, that's a shit situation, but there is not much that should be done in that situation.

Your kid is vaccinated, catches something anyway, and transmits something to somebody else who is then injured? Well, that's a shit situation, but there is not much that should be done in that situation.

These complexities are not intractable.
Winston?
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html
Some of those attacks are just awesome. Pretty scary as a web programmer
Whenever someone tells me they are "a gamer", I think of posts like these and my opinion of them drops a little.
Of course it is, (sustainable that is), it is just more expensive. I don't believe there is anything currently cheaper than a pouring fresh out of the mine coal, down a chute into a burner, which is making steam to drive a turbine. And there are a number of plants in China that seem to be just that.

You can pre-process the coal (remove impurities, create more uniform pellets, etc) to reduce random by products, and you can post process the exhaust plume through particulate and catalyzing filters to remove pollution by products. Much like a modern automobile a modern coal plant does all of that and more.

The down side is that it is more expensive to build, and to operate, and to fuel. Which is why generally government regulations are used to enforce it.
I find it amusing to see articles like this that are up voted because the title paints the US in a bad light, but upon reading casts Europe in a bad light and therefore gets flagged.
You’re here because of a robot
I spent most of my life in PHP, and now spend most of it in Ruby/Rails and mobile development. Believe me, people can make utter messes no matter the language. This is not as strong as an argument as you think it is. I've seen my fair share of terribly coded Rails apps as well as PHP ones.
I saw this years ago on 4chan.

I stopped at about 2nd riddle. (Basically because I googled the solution and found all the results posted on some pastebin, deducing that somebody surely found the results first, plus, I am not THAT smart and good with riddles.)

Who cares, basically.
How to use Foundation’s advanced features 
Last time we covered our bicycle enthusiast’s page, we built an entire basic page in less than twenty minutes flat using the magic of Foundation. Today, we’re going to take that magic even further, and without touching a single line of jQuery or CSS, you’ll learn how to upgrade your site’s functionality with the following techniques
The quick answer is no, there is no cross-sport prohibition in most sports leagues. The long answer is that almost anything can be negotiated and that player are usually willing to make concessions in these deals in turn for more money.

Many modern sports contracts have clauses in them that protect the employer if an athlete is injured doing an athletic activity outsider of their normal training. A good example might be a football player blowing out his knee playing pickup basketball. These clauses usually give the team the ability to withhold future salary or even go after previously paid wages. Although these clauses aren't always exercised depending on the player's relationship with the team, the severity of the injury, and the activity that caused the injury. A team doesn't want to risk alienating a player or their fans unless there is a huge gap between the financial impact of the injury and the player's future perceived value.

There are also various sponsorship agreements that players and teams have with companies that have restrictions about supporting a competitor. For example an NBA player sponsored by Nike might not be allowed to wear an Adidas shoe during a game.

Considering these precedents and that Riot appears to act as some combination of a sponsor and team/league that employees these eathletes, I think this decision is pretty reasonable.
Every time you see a YouTube video embedded on a site, contact the owner and ask them to change it to Vimeo. Give whatever justification you want, such as Google's real name policy. Just make sure that they know their audience doesn't want Youtube. Retweet their stuff if they switch.

Instead of bitching about YouTube, we should start a giant campaign to get people to migrate and create the tools to make it easy.
Wait....this is the largest outbreak since 1996 and all that happened was one kid got pneumonia and one woman had a miscarriage? These things happen every day. Seems like a lot of money, work, and debate over a relatively minute issue.

Even in that larger 1996 outbreak nobody died.

And we've got people comparing vaccine refusal to child abuse! If that's child abuse, you're going to have to take a serious look at every parent of an illiterate grade schooler. And while you're at it, your child abuse radar should be going crazy whenever you see an obese toddler.
Tulpa is cheaper, and it's limited only by imagination ;)