skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the point is that colonialism isn't the only variable that exists, then we are all on the same page. That was explicitly stated in the thread.

India was colonized and India has access to better technology and medicine compared to the original industrialized nations during their time to industrialize. Both are facts.

Regardless, India does not have an incentive to care about Ireland's or anyone else's path to industrialization. This is important if you want to convince India to adopt emissions standards.

About your argument, it is very easy to assume you are implying something very sinister. You mention that two countries had roughly the same colonial past and gained independence at roughly the same time, but one country is 30 times more productive per capita.

It is reasonable to expect someone to assume you are implying that one country's people are 30 times better than the other's. That is obviously putting words in your mouth, but you left a lot in your argument to the imagination.
Has anybody ever played Jagged Alliance 2? You lead a band of mercenaries to free a country from a dictator. You start in the north and everyone is starving, then you eventually end up fighting in the south where the politically connected live, and it's all tanks in big white mansions.

I felt that matches up pretty well with North Korea.
The NSA needs to put people back at ease, to make the Snowden story go away. What better way than to have Microsoft, Google and others make a statement like this?

Before using any Microsssoft product again, remember the parable of the Indian and the Snake: http://instereo92087.tripod.com/indiansnake.html
leeoniya's law of bitcoin headlines:

"Any statement about bitcoin's value is outdated by the time it's published."
Do You Know What Metrics are Driving Your Performance?
I'd say the ethical considerations are much greater in the latter case, since building drones is also putting people out of work (it's well known that poor people enlist in greater numbers than other social classes).
I think these debates tend to dramatically overemphasize the size of group one, to the point of being misanthropic ("grow a spine"?). A fundamental fact of life is that people have vastly diverging belief systems and that those in the ivory tower don't always know what's right or best.

There's a tangential group to this, which are the people who work on something they don't consider unethical, but may change their minds when they learn the true scale of what they are part of (it's unlikely many people in the NSA outside the very top have full visibility on all the programs detailed in the Snowdon leaks, and it's very possible that each, viewed in isolation and with the right context can be quite defensible).

The second suggestion overemphases just how attractive hanging out with judgmental purists actually is. Today it's NSA, tomorrow it's people who work on social gaming, the day after it's finance and the next it's ads. These sectors are already shunned by (some? large? At least they're vocal.) parts of the tech community that considers themselves and their endeavours morally superior, yet they thrive just fine.
Yes, often in research when there is a hot topic like this everybody tries to jump on the bandwagon, and now the term is so widely spread that attaching "deep learning" to anything makes it sound cool.

What I meant is that at least this has some specificity, in contrast with terms like "web scale", "big data", "machine learning", "2.0", that are so broad that can be attached to anything.
For me I think part of the problem is that I cant just go to sleep it takes me almost 30 minutes just to relax into a state where my mind isnt thinking.
It is possible that I wasn't following the guidelines at least in some cases. But I vaguely remember is some of the cases where a simple paraphrase of a sentence would have been enough. Questions were simply closed wasn't allowed to edit and a link to TOS violation without any specific reasons what I did wrong.

Its been a while since I asked questions over there. Haven't logged in for a long time but I do find useful answer through google search quite often. I just don't ask questions. I think its a major annoyance when you spend decent amount of time writing questions only to get your question closed with vague reasons. Maybe I had some bad luck and things might have gotten better? Who knows.
I used to think working for the NSA would be fun, interesting, and in the service of my country. I don't think that anymore...
Wait...

can't they just tell the banks that they can't deal with bitcoin businesses in the future???
The problem with the whole premise of this analysis is that libertarianism is some kind of idealistic belief to appeal to the pillars.

This is wrong. Libertarianism is about pragmatism, and a basic income would simply drive up costs of all basic things needed to survive especially if any of those are scarce. This would likely hurt those just above that poverty barrier the most as they would no longer be able to afford basic shelter even though they are gainfully employed. Because of this, those people will find it better to move out to land no one cares about and just 'do nothing' as decreasing costs is the only way for them to live decently. These people will not provide value to society, resulting in net loss of value (read: happiness, whatever you want to call it) for all.
mbox can't be implemented properly, it is an inherently broken format. Or rather, a family of almost compatible broken formats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox

Sounds like Mail.app exported in mboxcl2, which breaks mail readers expecting the mboxo or the mboxrd formats.

I recommend people to use IMAP for extracting the mail, and to store it in something outside the mbox family.
...except you can't buy heroin with penny stocks.

'Platypus typing', maybe?
This is very interesting especially for those users more interested in running deep neural nets than programming deep neural nets. I was initially disinterested because it is missing several important features (at the moment) such as auto encoders and convolutional neural nets. A quick peek inside the example folder revealed the fact that you can specify what you want computed using YAML instead of specifying how to compute it in code means that as long as you're using something Hebel does implement you can quickly experiment with structure and parameters without worrying about programming errors. Very useful for a researcher more interested in playing with the structure of a deep neural net.

It also serializes the model and results to disk by default. This is great for loading up the model later on another, possibly less performant, machine and performing your classification / etc...

Of course PyLearn2 covers this feature set and more, but isn't as easy to get started with.

I'll make an effort to use this when I can, unfortunately my two current projects involve a convolutional neural net and an auto encoder. :(

TL; DR: Specifying structure using YAML instead of coding neural net. Working at a higher level than other libs such as Theano.
Ask HN: Speculate on whether Amazon will enter the search engine game
Amazon A9 is now a decade old. Amazon has really been doing a good job at ads lately too - contextual ads that are very good and rival Google AdWords in terms of connecting with users' wants and needs IMO. So the question is, "Will Amazon ever make A9 a full-fledged search engine outside of Amazon and market it as such?"

If you go to A9's home page today, the answer seems to be "What? That's a search engine?" It's not marketed - or at least, in the US, I've not seen any ads except "Powered by A9" on a Amazon page. The home page is "Uhhhh - what is it?"

But... the engineering is there. The ads are there. Could Amazon make a go at Google with it?

http://a9.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com
> Android devices will always be able to beat Windows 8.1 devices pricewise because the biz model for Microsoft is that device manufactures pay something in the high $XX for a Windows license.

My understanding is that right now it costs most manufacturers either as much or more to use Android versus Windows, since nearly all of the big handset companies have patent licensing agreements with Microsoft on a per-handset basis.

So it's either pay Microsoft $15 for a Windows Phone license, or pay Microsoft $15 in patent licensing fees if you go with Android. It's less a cost issue so much as a market demand for Android (versus WP).
Bug-based backdoors offer full deniability as part of an ass-covering strategy. All software has bugs, all software therefore has backdoors.
Dayton, Ohio. We talked about a lot of interesting topics, like Whistleblowing (particularly relevant nowadays) and what sort of ethical obligations you have, in addition to stuff like "dont cut corners, dont be lazy, etc", the normal engineering things.
Here's a wikipedia link; maybe someone else will give a better description http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_gr...
Step 1: compile to local binaries.

There is no step 2
Presumably this needs to be done at link-time? (And you'd have to disable it if you're planning to load code dynamically)
I think there is usually something else to optimize before this becomes a problem. And if it becomes a problem you need a low-level language anyway?
After the liquidation preference the founders
(probably 1-3 people) are likely to get 90%
of the remaining proceeds and the staff –
those engineers that the acquiring company
so desperately wants – would ordinarily
receive a very small proportion.

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/05/13/the-corrosive-...

Hopefully Ptch employees were making market wages, because an acquihire certainly won't net them much of anything.
Not an Apple or Google product? Gotta be awful! Love how people treat competition as something awful when it doesn't follow their own brand loyalty.

Edit: It looks like the authors snark isn't as obvious to others as it was to me. I'm all for cross platform development and doing whatever makes sense your company/brand in terms of development, all my side projects use tools that make them as portable as possible.
...you must have missed something in basic training...

Enlighten me, since you apparently took comprehensive notes.

Soldiers that are not killers are called civilians.

Really? I thought they were called intel analysts, medics, chaplains, cooks, mechanics, electronics repair specialists, drill sergeants...etc etc etc.

I must have missed something else in Basic Training, I guess. Maybe I was all hopped up on adrenaline, while I was running around trying to stab people with my bayonet.

Perhaps you should re-check that filter between your brain and keyboard, son.
Point out your objections, don't personally attack the guy.
I agree with most of your post, but I disagree with the salute-the-troops attitude. Were the parent from any profession other than the military, no one would take any issue with downvoting his tirade. If you really want to 'support the troops,' stop making idols of them and start treating them like people.
All of my GPU resources are OpenCL based. The only place I could run it is on AWS. Someone really needs to make a CUDA compiler with an OpenCL backend.
for gaming
This reminds me of 'windcatchers' that humans have been using for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher
damn, I was hoping people on HN would comment on this one. More specifically, electrical engineers.
Ping me (b@kaggle.com) if you're interested in running this competition more formally on https://kaggle.com.

We've run hundreds of machine learning competitions & offer a real-time leaderboard to encourage competitive participation, a very active community of data scientists, and many other features that simplify running this type of challenge.
The Java Hotspot VM can still optimize for this case, if the virtual call leads to only a few classes most of the time. Several virtual methods can be inlined, but of course there's still an extra step compared to static dispatch: the classes of the current object and the inlined methods have to be compared. If no matching method is inlined, control needs to be passed back to the VM.
I have heard of some sites using GPUs for generating dynamic images.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL
Its been a while, I don't remember specifics. But I think most of my questions where related to server admin stuff. I don't remember which email I used, I might have to open a new account and see if things are better now.
Running a startup in a low margin business is one of those things that seems like a bad idea till it's not. In this case the definitive counterexample happened 19 years ago: Amazon.
If you execute the code shown in the README it should run an experiment against the MNIST dataset[0]. If it performs as well as other deep learning examples[1][2] you should see a test error rate of less than 1% on classification of handwritten digits. This is pretty impressive, especially considering the fact that the collection contains a few digits that I cannot even recognize myself.

[0] http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/

[1] http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/lenet.html#lenet

[2] http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html
>Both of these are fine, but they're opposing goals. Most economists agree that you want stability in a currency; that is the currency should act as an accounting measure only. It is a means of storing value at as close to NET zero gain/loss as possible, with it's real value being the ability to transact goods indirectly.
I'm not sure what values Bitcoin endeavors to hold, but if we're using duck typing, it looks a lot more like a speculative investment than a currency.

I tend to agree that Bitcoin acts more like a store of value than a primary medium of exchange. Theoretically if a lot people started to use Bitcoin the volatility should decrease. Even still I think we may see the development of an alternative cryptocurrency that's supply is able to inflate dynamically to offset deflation...
I have to disagree. Resorting to "keep it legal" removes any moral obligation. There are ethical decisions to be made, some easy, some not so.

Should IBM not have worked on Computers? No.

Should IBM not have sold to Nazi Germany? Most likely yes.

Should the guy working hard all day to make the Zyklon B have refused to do so? ABSOLUTELY

Back when I went to school, we had one (or two?) hours per week of "ethics class". If there was one thing to take away from those lessons, it's that you can never just refuse to exercise moral/ethical judgement. Acting ethically is one of the central responsibilities that a citizen in a free society has.
Looks good!
What performance gain could be expected when using GPU vs CPU for Deep Learning? It'd be great to get some figures.
I think we're in the same camp, but I disagree that existing organizational structures will be able to compete with a decentralized, consensus-based network. I know the analogy is wearing thin, but I think of working within the current banking system as a bit like trying to lease time on a university mainframe circa 1980–difficult to access, and totally out of reach for anyone that isn't already on the periphery. You could send email and post to usenet, but you couldn't build an Amazon, or an Airbnb.

Of course banks can zip arbitrary amounts of cash all over the world, but I'm not a bank! The public internet created an economy where a clever and dedicated person can teach themselves all the skills necessary to pull down an income that was previously reserved for highly educated professionals. I believe cryptocurrency will have the same democratizing effect on finance, and open up opportunities for autodidacts that were previously only available to ivy-league MBAs. Most people will consider me an idealist (or a lunatic, if other commenters are to be believed), but I believe that we are on the verge of an unprecedented explosion of commercial innovation. Consider how long it took for the internet to filter from early adopters to the mainstream, and compare that to the growth of the bitcoin network. Last time it was decades, this time it was years, with exponential growth in just the last few months. I do have some bitcoins, and I wouldn't complain if they made me rich, but the exchange value of one particular unit of measure isn't what I'm excited about. There is just no way that top-down, private organizations can out-innovate the general public given access to a platform with the same capabilities and trivial barriers to entry. I'm especially hopeful that the ease of access and equal treatment of micropayments and massive wealth transfers will bootstrap parts of the world that are currently completely dark to the global economy. I hope that the speculative greed that is currently dominating the discussion around cryptocurrency won't overshadow its long term potential. Exciting times ahead!
I think any recent book on OpenGL worth its salt would cover shaders in detail. I've just picked up the OpenGL SuperBible (6th ed.) and it's got several hundred pages dedicated to shaders.
To play devil's advocate: Let's say my morals aren't bothered by killing members of the Taliban / Al-Qaeda / Enemy Of The Week, as I consider them a bunch of fanatics and a threat to western civilization. As such, I work on guidance systems and weapons to try and improve their effectiveness and accuracy, making them more precise, and less likely to kill civilians and cause collateral damage when employed.

Now what? Where do you derive your morals, and what makes them inherently correct, and mine reprehensible?
Your argument is invalid. That there are features of "authoritarianism" currently missing doesn't in any way show that we're not "swinging towards authoritarianism", any more than not seeing redwoods outside your car windows means you're not driving towards California.

Being in a place where "authoritarianism" is one bad actor away is not a good place to be. If you feel that we 1) are not in that such a place, and 2) are not likely to be any time soon, then feel free to make that case.
When I did Operating Systems in University (in a group), I remember distinctly only 3 bugs that we had difficulty debugging:

* re-using a loop variable from the outer loop in an inner loop (damn you `int i`!)

* putting a char[256] on the stack when the stack size was only 256 bytes and getting stack corruption (this one wasn't me, thankfully)

* signed vs unsigned code being passed between user mode and kernel mode causing problems (no idea why it was causing issues; i just made it all unsigned and the issue went away)

In hindsight, -Wall would have probably caught everything and saved a couple hours of "wtf" at 2-3 in the morning.

Often the simplest things are the hardest to discover.
I thought I'd provide an anecdotal supporting example to show that there are valid exceptional use-cases that don't practically fit into a pre-existing 3D engine -- specifically, a 3D visualization of a space-scale procedurally generated universe with trillions of stars and planets.

Several times I tried expanding an existing modular 3D engine (OGRE) towards my goal of displaying a huge virtual universe of planets and stars. While I got it rendering 3D planets after some work (where I basically had to implement manual rendering code anyway, since the engine didn't support the odd use-case of spherical terrain), contorting it to support massive coordinate spaces, huge view ranges, dynamic loading/unloading etc. was just far too messy to even hope to attempt in that engine.

After several attempts to cleanly implement a space-scale engine as an extension of an existing engine, I started over from scratch using pure OpenGL (WebGL). And this time, I managed to keep the code reasonably tidy while supporting trillions of stars, planets etc. as I had originally planned [1].

Would I have been able to do the same thing in OGRE if I kept trying? Probably... but likely with far more ugly code, terrible hacks, bloated engine, and slower loading times.

To be fair, I'm not advocating always "rolling your own" 3D engine. It's usually a huge task, and using a pre-existing engine will in almost every case be the smarter choice. But with some people trying to argue "you can make it fit in [Unity/OGRE/etc]", I thought I'd provide at least one anecdotal counter-example.

1. Kosmos: A virtual 3D universe in your web browser (https://github.com/judnich/Kosmos)
;)

Found it from here: www.youtubedocumentaries.com
However, making false blaming statements isn't going to help your cause.

The OP quote was: "Soldiers fight for their own people but untimately [sic] end up killing other HUMANS."

I'm assuming the word was "ultimately", which is incorrect. Not all soldiers ultimately end up killing.

The statement was wrong and offensive. I will not apologize for getting in OP's chili about it.
Wasn't App.Net a pay-only social network before? What happened to that? Is this new model a pivot?
MyClean offers services in one domestic market (NYC). Homejoy offers services in 31.

edit: link to source https://www.homejoy.com/cities
I have this same issue and am forced to run all my experiments on AWS. Once you get a workflow down it is pretty easy and the AWS resources provide an acceptable level of performance. Though I suppose if you're just toying around / exploring it can be discouraging to go through all of that and incur AWS fees.
Now I can do text analytics. I wonder who I write most often to at night?
Agreed, for almost all code it doesn't matter, but for the remaining small fraction it's worth thinking about these things. It sounds pretty insane to go with a blanket approach of removing virtual calls throughout an entire codebase without understanding which ones are the problematic ones. Especially since some ways of solving the problem could potentially lead to other problems like increased compiled code size.

I've seen plenty of software (especially systems software) that does spend much of it's time in tight inner loops. Pulling out all the optimization stops there can give measurable gains. I've personally seen measurable gains on real applications from tricks like reordering branches so that the more predictable branches go first.
What do you wish you had done the summer after graduation?
I am very passionate about tech and will be joining the valley in late August, but how should I spend my summer? A couple thoughts 1) join an intensive code school 2) travel asia 3) work for a startup in India. Any insight would be greatly appreciated
> This is wrong. Libertarianism is about pragmatism

What libertarianism is about has been a subject of debate between libertarians for decades. There are others who see it as an idealistic belief.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're getting sufficient amounts of quality sleep at night, there is no reason why you should need 20-minute "power naps" in the middle of the day. (There may be exceptions, such as extremely demanding manual labor, but I think we're talking about white collar jobs in this context.)