skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The regret bounds on contextual bandits are O(d sqrt(T)), where d is the dimensionality of the user profile you're using and T is time (see e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.3352). In contrast, the standard stochastic bandit has regret bounds of O(log(T)), which is much tighter. The summary is you need a lot more data to explore the bigger range of possibilities you've created. So I'm not sure contextual bandits are viable for smaller sites, but Wikipedia definitely has the traffic to make them work.

Its definitely viable for smaller sites. Your argument there is about the bounds in a particular theoretical situation ("when the contexts are provided by an adaptive adversary.")

In a real world situation, your contexts are provided by the normal behaviour of your users, not an adversary. And, rather than the patterns being maximally hard to find, there'll instead be a lot of low-hanging-fruit - in terms of very obvious combinations of features that define different segments of users.

What's important is not the bound of the contextual bandit in a theoretical situation, but rather what performance it gives in 90% of business situations. In many situations, doing some personalisation to automatically find the most obvious user groups is a huge win.

And later, as the amount of data increases, the granularity of segmentation will effectively increase.

I agree with your general comments on bandits, and love what Myna is doing.
Seems like a worse metaphor to me, naturalists don't examine specimens in order to learn how to make better animals but that's precisely the reason coders are expected to improve by reading code (although I always assumed that "reading code" meant reading it over and over to get a detailed understanding but apparently that was just me?).

What is the goal of reading literature we're talking about? We're mixing up reading a book for pleasure and gaining a deep understanding of a piece of literature to become a better writer.

Reading a piece of code or a book once is not going to do anything to your skillset as a producer, at least books are specifically written to be read once for pleasure. The equivalent for code would be using a piece of software, not reading the code once.

If you want to be a better writer then you get a deep understanding of a piece of literature, the same applies to code. I have recently read a lot of code, because I was debugging/modifying a library I was using (the Requests lib in Python). It's very nicely written and I did get some good ideas from it, but it was work.

I don't think the metaphor is flawed at all. I think that this was a result of coders thinking that people would get better at writing by reading literature or that this was the point of literature seminars. I guess a lesson in understanding other disciplines at least a little bit before trying to take lessons from them?
Of course, that would be silly and wasteful. I don't think anyone would think that would be a useful solution but we need to start seriously considering Guaranteed Basic Incomes.
Or the alternate phrasing, "move fast and break things".
Do the chargers indicate when the car is not drawing current any more? Either with a light or something internet-enabled?

(Are we at webcam filter coffee time again?)
Hiking top down is the ideal, but as any description also says, you can head to the busy bottom end and hike up as far as you want. We did it with a discarded stick for support and barefoot. Barefoot hurts, so take wetsuit booties or get your sneakers wet. Doing it without a hiking pole or walking stick is much more difficult and slow. You can generally avoid getting more than knee deep depending on the season, but there can be some surprises - my wife hadn't checked ahead and ended up chest deep at one point. That was funny.

It's an interesting experience and worth doing.
>> Note that the word "claims" shows up not even once.

That word actually shows up exactly once in each episode.

>> In the first episode, they insinuate that IV doesn't pay inventors like they claim. In the second episode, turns out that they do pay quite well, but oh look! that inventor is totally a schmuck for ripping off his coinventors! (Is he really the kind of inventor that IV is paying?!)

Yes, IV paid Chris Crawford -- the one example given by IV of an "inventor" who made money -- for a stake in a patent. That's what IV does. They buy patents or percentages of patents. TAL never claimed otherwise. Crawford retained a percentage of interest in ongoing revenue obtained in court, which was distributed accordingly.

As to whether Chris Crawford is a schmuck and ripped off others, or whether the invention in question was even his to sell or was his idea to begin with, I think this court transcript from a case that he lost, speaks for itself:

---

Attorney: So the first paragraph of this document reads, quote, "This proposal, it is in response to Jack Byrd's idea to provide automated offsite backup services for PC users." And aren't you in the second sentence saying that Jack Byrd had an idea to provide automated offsite backup services for PC users?

Chris Crawford: No. What I'm saying is that Jack Byrd had an idea of me pursuing the automated offsite backup services that I had--

Alex Blumberg: Chris Crawford then launches into a rather surprising explanation for how the sentencing that this business was, quote, "Jack Byrd's idea," doesn't actually mean that the business was Jack Byrd's idea. His explanation? He was using the apostrophe S incorrectly.

Chris Crawford: As far as the apostrophe S-- and I'm still not clear if you're trying to derive a specific meaning with respect to the apostrophe S--

Alex Blumberg: Of course, what would a sentence reading, "in response to Jack Byrds idea" even mean if the S was plural?

Attorney: I'm asking you, though-- you certainly know what the use of an apostrophe S means, do you not?

Chris Crawford: [SNIFFING] As I've written documents over the years, there are times when I use an apostrophe S, and it seems like I'm supposed to use an apostrophe S. But I have to say that my grammar is not strong enough to tell you right now with clarity when an apostrophe S is used.
How can people help your new enterprise?
Could somebody with a better understanding of how Facebook works explain how this happens? Is it unexpectedly difficult to implement some sort of whitelist or something?
You can argue that anything done at a university was done with university facilities (and certainly by the individual researchers). You can also look at it from the angle of efficiency (which way of commercializing a university's research is the best way of doing more research there). Congress did both, and they came up with Bayh-Dole.

I'm not saying that this is the best environment, but it is the environment that we have, and these arguments are not outrageous. Besides, this is the environment that biotech startup are coming from, and top universities are making big dollars from royalties. That's why I said that it's really complicated.
I'd love to see some evidence for these claims. Personally, I think that .NET's type system is quite elegant compared to the JVM's, and that .NET's combination of value types and reified generics gives several concrete advantages (better memory usage, avoids many Java pitfalls such as "why can't I use a T[]?", etc.).
My understanding is that it supports both, but I may be mistaken
From https://github.com/cython/cython/blob/master/README.txt:

Cython (http://cython.org) is a language that makes writing C extensions for
the Python language as easy as Python itself. Cython is based on the
well-known Pyrex, but supports more cutting edge functionality and
optimizations.

The Cython language is very close to the Python language, but Cython
additionally supports calling C functions and declaring C types on variables
and class attributes. This allows the compiler to generate very efficient C
code from Cython code.

This makes Cython the ideal language for wrapping external C libraries, and
for fast C modules that speed up the execution of Python code.
I wonder if there is going to be a market in the future like the current SEO one that is all about masking what technology/products you are using. The idea being to deny your competitors from knowing more about you such as from using this product.
Google have reached the point where they know that every website is fundamentally dependent on them

Isn't that exactly the kind of institutional arrogance that the GP post was highlighting?

OK, some web sites might still be fundamentally dependent on Google. Personally, I'd advise against relying on a business model based primarily on search traffic for a number of reasons, but of course everyone is free to try it if they like.

However, I somehow doubt big name brands like Microsoft or Audi or McDonalds would suffer irrevocable harm if Google disappeared tomorrow. Nor would major sites like Wikipedia or Facebook. Nor would all the popular forum/news aggregator sites, or the popular source sites that repeatedly get linked from them.

Perhaps more telling, I doubt any of the much smaller niche/hobby or family business type sites I know about would suffer greatly if Google vanished tomorrow either. The big G represents only a modest share of the incoming traffic in each case, and moreover the quality of that traffic in terms of engagement and conversions is relatively low compared to most other major sources. They are often beaten on volume by at least one order of magnitude by a single link from an influential blogger in a relevant field who is genuinely suggesting that their readers visit that site, or the equivalent via Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, etc. And that's before you count the viral effect, which can bump the difference to multiple orders of magnitude. Content is king, as Cutts has often said, but in 2014 good content can be found many ways without any help from Google.

I suspect this issue is symptomatic of a serious and long-term difficulty for Google search: their foundation is still basically the idea that you can judge the worth of a page by how many incoming links it sees. I'm reasonably sure that unless they have some shady deals going on with various popular social media sites, they don't even know about probably 90% of the incoming links to most of those little sites I mentioned, nor about 99% of the links my friends and family share to other people's sites. All they've got left is the public blogs and the assorted SEO tricksters, and that's not where a lot of people share genuine recommendations any more.
Take a look: http://jsfiddle.net/7qZVQ/
Code wrapped in a json formatted meta-wrapper.

I am the founder of Crudzilla Software (see profile for link) a web dev platform.

We use jsr-223 which allows scripting engines for other languages to be integrated into the jvm. What we did was create a file format that serves as a meta-wrapper around pieces of code, we call this wrapper a "crud".

This turns out to be quite powerful as it allows the code to have additional instructions associated with it. For instance input validation, security and configuration can be specified along with the code they apply to.
There have been plenty of studies on nicotine itself, in isolation...
BitMarket - A decentralized, confiscation proof, open market system
They never showed up on LKML.
While the trademark feels abusive, gamezebo really did not pick the best example: how can one name his game "All Candy Casino Slots – Jewel Craze Connect: Big Blast Mania Land" and then pretend he did not try to take advantage of the name of famous games?
Google Quantum A.I. Lab Team: Where do we stand on benchmarking the D-Wave 2?
> The only thing that has changed is companies have realized patents are a better means to that end because copyright does not, in their eyes, afford sufficient protection

No, what changed was that the Federal Circuit invented software patents.[1]

You make it sound like companies woke up one day and realized that patents on software and business methods were a way better idea than everything they had tried before. What actually happened was that the few software and business method patents that were granted were never upheld. Until the Federal Circuit was founded.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-a-rogue-appea...
I understand IP very well, and I disagree with the whole concept.

Here I'm just making a point at how stupid the system actually is. As I stated, the government gets rights to use patents funded by taxpayer money, but the taxpayer has no such rights. The government here is actually nothing but a mediator of funds from taxpayer to researcher, yet it acts as if it paid for the research out of it's own pocket.
The Pythonista's Legacy
How much ICC compiled binaries represent ? I guess on MS Windows it's the vast majority so you're right[1] but on other platform it's probably GCC/Clang, and there neither Intel or AMD are favorited.

[1] or maybe not ? are MS Cxx compilers inheriting from Intel ones ?
or http://showrss.info
> Not even close. Thousands of businesses accept Bitcoin. A few dozen accept Doge.

Very few real-world businesses, online of off, accept ANY sort of cryptocurrency. So much so that the big bitcoin lists of businesses that accept bitcoins are mostly made up of no-name and very low level online sites with virtual goods (hosting, email, sms, games, etc). They list a few dozen small online stores that sell real hard goods. The one notable exception is Overstock.com, though they don't accept bitcoin themselves. They just added Coinbase as a checkout option ala PayPal, WePay, Scrilla, Amazon Payments, etc (so they have no pricing in bitcoin and never touch bitcoin themselves since Coinbase does a BTC to USD trade immediately on purchase and gives Overstock.com the USD).

> Ah, you mean that stupid metric when you count the number of coins transferred?

Nope. Dogecoin has exceeded bitcoin in terms of number of daily unique transactions. Nothing at all to do with the number of coins transferred or available. Dogecoin sees about double the number of daily unique transactions that bitcoin does. That's pretty astounding considering that Bitcoin just celebrated its 5 year anniversary and Dogecoin just celebrated its one month anniversary. See: http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/01/14/dogecoin-tra...

> I disagree. Most people are not aware, that's true. But Bitcoin is serious business now.

Most people that are aware of it think its a silly bubble, pyramid/pump and dump scheme, and/or semi-interesting exercise in distributed computing/trust/etc. A small percentage of the people aware of it think it's serious and have put some skin in the game. I have some BTC some LTC and some DGC that I've been given but have never actually done anything with any of them.
Religious Hostilities Reach Six-Year High (Research Paper)
I wouldn't be surprised if they had. Off the top of my head they made over $7 billion doing this and can consider the fine as a cost of doing business.
"When switched on for the first time, it was clear that the last user had little understanding of how to store files on the hard disk."

In the early 90's I was helping a high school student (son of a relative) [1] with problems he was having with his Mac Powerbook duo 210 [2].

Noting that he had no files on the desktop or anywhere I said "hmm looks like you don't use this computer much!". To which he replied a bit snottily "You mean I don't use the hard drive. I do use the computer".

[1] He is now a Physician with a high end dermatology practice and several offices. He went to a 7 year MD and undergrad program and graduated first in his class. He always had to appear smarter than the rest as displayed by his comment to me (much older and using computers for quite some time at that point).

[2] http://support.apple.com/kb/sp154
Look at what is happening in low-income countries now. You see a lot of small one-person/one-family businesses, which are effectively people buying themselves jobs (and being forced to carry equity risk of course).
The state of the world in which most people are to be employed at set wages by some company is fairly new, and not at all universal.
I don't actually think this is going to happen too much -- this is just a counterpoint to the "barter or crime" statement.
Dam'n... missed a comma, end of line 38! :(
Why are you sympathetic?

Candy Crush/Farm Heroes = Bejewelled, Papa Pear = Peggle, Bubble Witch = Puzzle Bobble to name a few. No doubt there will be loads of dupes, in the same way that people tried to emulate XXXX-Ville's success.

As people mention the way King got popular is the level of polish in their games and the use of new/innovative takes on very popular titles.

The video games industry thrives on plagiarism. Almost laughable given how much they harp on about piracy.
Maybe any program compiled with ICC should have the same disclaimer as ICC itself so people know that the program is biased.
When I worked for a game company we used the Intel compiler for a couple of versions but it caused so many issues for people with AMD we switched back to the MS compiler. In the end the performance difference wasn't enough to matter.
I think that would fall under "add more chargers."
I was in a parallel programming class where the fastest correct assignments got significant extra credit boosts. Compiling with the intel compiler with optimizations turned on (vs gcc) was often enough to make the difference in getting that extra credit by a significant margin.
Great idea, that would be a good way to have more plug-in points. Since a big part of the problem is getting a large enough electrical service to the chargers.

You could also have the amperage be higher for the first hour or so of charging and then have it drop down over time or as demand increases.

I'm not aware of any existing chargers that would support this. There isn't much innovation or price competition in this space. It sounds like a great opportunity for someone to come in and do it right.
Trust is Latent Credit
I'll try to explain my point of view. Without resorting to sarcasm.

My experience is with kudzu, magically finding new networkcards all of a sudden. Or udev, which then automagically turns these new found cards into eth12, instead of eth0.

Too often I have 'smart' systems trying to figure out what should be done, and fail miserably. Especially when trying to debug a software-problem, in an enterprise production landscape.

No, I do NOT want systemd to 'figure out for me' that I need network when I start sshd. Because sometimes I don't NEED a running network. When debugging a broken server, I don't want to have to first dive into the configurations of systemd trying to figure out all the dependencies, and stopping systemd from starting, or stopping them.
Spreading the word is hugely helpful - like us on Facebook(facebook.com/sparkfund), follow up on twitter(@sparkFunder), share our URL on Reddit and any other aggregator sites you enjoy.
Every signup we get on our site is validation that there are folks out there who are interested in this kind of investment.
Guest-blogging as a link gaining technique is dead.

Of course it's not.

Cutts seems to be under the mistaken impression that hyperlinks were invented to provide source data for his employer, and that if his employer now chooses not to pay attention to some of them then the rest of us won't either.

In reality, if there's a link in the guest blog post, people reading that post can follow it. If it's a popular blog and an interesting post on it by the guest author, probably quite a few readers readers will.
Here's the link to the port-in-progress of launchd to FreeBSD, if anyone is curious:

https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd
Microsoft researchers slash Skype fraud by 68%
Would companies start adding Datanyze to their robots.txt and would Datanyze respect that?
I drive an electric car and try to charge at work only twice a week. Although if I notice no one is charging at some point, I'll top it off, range anxiety is no joke.

Our workplace has a 2-port charger just for executives. (Naturally, it's often unused.) Meanwhile the rest of us non-executives get to slug it out for the other 2-port charger. I have discovered that Volts are excellent fodder for "charge-rage." Their 3.3kW chargers work so slowly, it's difficult to keep from thinking "they can just use gas, right?" And their batteries are so small, Volt drivers want to charge every single day. What's worse is, their charge port is alarmed. Even if the Chargepoint display says charging is complete, if you unplug a Volt it sets off the theft alarm.

Kind of fascinating to watch this evolve. Definitely need some better charging tech if electric cars are going to last.
Leafs have blinky lights on the dash that quit blinking when the car is charged. I don't know about Tesla. Conceivably coworkers could know when is safe to unplug someone else's car and charge their own. Then again, we can't even get people to make a new pot of coffee when they drain the last of it, so who knows how considerate your fellow plug-in owners will be.
Fixed version: http://pastebin.com/zBPRJGRF
HackerCare - Affordable cooperative health care coverage for the tech community
I was with you until you said "arbitrary research in which the taxpayer has no say whatsoever". The people on the NIH/NSF/whatnot panels are as a rule very aware of their duty towards the taxpayer and do their best to allocate the scarce funds to whoever deserves them most.
How are they coalescing the code snippets to look for?
Our 1 week side project is a Best New App on the Mac Appstore - what now?
Great question! Spark is the first of it's kind in terms of enabling individual investors to invest directly in energy efficiency projects.

However, we're following in the inspiring footsteps of some incredible companies in the cleantech crowd investment sector, particularly Solar Mosaic (joinmosaic.com) and SunFunder (sunfunder.com)

There are also some great teams working on impact focused energy efficiency investments offered to accredited impact investors, including one of our favorite companies, Bloc Power (blocpower.org)
That's true, the NetBurst syncope made them redesign toward efficiency, but still, the rise of ubiquitous mobility forced another inflection in their TDP curve. And they're still sweating over it since the PC market is shrinking and they need to get their foot in the smartphone/tablet market (see the bay-trail subsidize effort http://liliputing.com/2014/01/bay-trail-tablets-cheap-intels...)
Which would be why pretty much ever web server and mail server choose to implement their own logging mechanism, right?

Or perhaps its that having to bundle your logs together into a comparative handful of categories and then sort through them is less than entirely optimal.
>You're arguing that income inequality helps to eradicate poverty?

No, I wouldn't argue that income inequality is what helps to eradicate poverty, but I would argue that much (not all) income inequality is created as a result of the same process that helps to eradicate poverty.

In fact, the facts in the original article and headline would suggest that the two can in fact occur at the same time: 1) the 85 richest people are as wealthy as the poorest half of the world and 2) the world has never had as little poverty as it does now, down to a level that would have been considered unbelievable a couple of decades ago (and continuing to improve dramatically).

That doesn't mean that income inequality itself eradicates poverty (that doesn't follow at all), but it could mean that the two processes naturally happen together and that trying to prevent income inequality could also slow the world from lifting itself out of poverty.
Unfortunately, the closest this gets to describing flaws is citing the OWASP top 10 [0].

I suppose whenever someone does indeed hack into the system, we'll finally find out the specifics of the weaknesses.

[0] - https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2013-Top_10