skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The researchers claim the animals ran on the wheels because they enjoyed it, which could be a little bit of anthropomorphizing, as no one has been able to prove that animals other than humans experience emotions.

Is this really the state of the art? I thought the entire animal rights movement is rooted in the idea that animals can experience emotion

This is pretty great research, seeing a slug in a running wheel is particularly silly
Ignaz Semmelweis came up with his germ theory after observing a strong correlation of infections with whether people performing certain tasks in hospitals washed their hands or not.
Why would I sell my house when I can get somebody else to rent it and make my mortgage payments on that house for me?

I'll just buy another house at my new location. In the end I'll now own two houses I do whatever I want with and my renter will own nothing.
Well many of the diseases we had are relatively recent on an evolutionary timeline, coming from our domestication of animals. Concentrated populations of humans living in cities is also relatively new. Diseases wouldn't spread as easily before that.
I would imagine that the sudden appearance of food and new environment elements would set the mind of any animal in a "run around and explore" mode, especially for species living near humans.
And the only things a renter can do to reduce their monthly housing burden is downsize or move to less desirable location.

A homeowner's monthly burden is either static or reducing (if they're paying down the principle early), and they have all kinds of things they can use to offset that monthly housing burden, like rent spare rooms out, or use part of their home for a business.
Time-saving tips every linux user should know
Principles to follow using Lean Startup Methodology
>Now, when the program executes, it's obviously possible to monitor it and watch what's being done.

That's the trick. It isn't. Let's loosely stick to your example.

if (var == op)
{
do this
}
else
{
do that
}

This, when compiled for the hcrypt VM, turns into something like

0 La var //look at var
1 CMPa op //var==op?
2 BEQ 5 //yes
3 <do that>
4 JMP 6
5 <do this>
6 <continue>

The obvious question is: How do you hide what branch is taken? The hcrypt VM (as all processors and TMs) is a state machine. The states essentially are the status flags (zero result, addition overflow, minus result,...) and the program counter PC. In line (address) 1, the machine decides, whether op is equal to var and sets the zero-flag to 1 if this is the case. The comparison is an implicit subtraction, so if the two values are equal, then the result is 0 and the zero flag switches to 1. In the next machine cycle (PC is 3) we want to branch. The branch operation is just a simple assignment (PC=address). The assigned value can be expressed bitwise

PC = ((branch AND zero-flag) XOR (PC+1 AND !zero-flag))

Case 1: var==op

PC = ((5 AND 1) XOR (3 AND 0))

Case 2: var!=op

PC = ((5 AND 0) XOR (3 AND 1))

Thinking in wires, this is the implementation of a demultiplexer or selector. This is the essential curcuit for the hcrypt VM and oblivious to an observer. The most basic application is the command selector. Assume, we have the opcode in a register OP and the operands in OP1 and OP2. The ALU then operates like

res_add = OP1 + OP2
res_sub = OP1 - OP2
res_mul = OP1 * OP2
res_div = OP1 / OP2
result = ((res_add AND OP==ADD) XOR (res_sub AND OP==SUB) XOR (res_mul AND OP==MUL) XOR (res_div AND OP==DIV))

Since all the operands and registers (this incudes the machine opcodes) are encrypted, the observer does know, she's looking at a branch selector or an encrypted ALU but she cannot decide what branch is taken or what operation is executed.
Exactly. Why intentionally obscure stuff with math if you don't have to? What a silly bias.
I love Bitcoin Payment Protocol (except for its reliance on the "old" system of CAs), but I am not sure what is the use case here.

Is it just for payments where both sides use Coinbase? That sounds ridiculous, but that's what I see on the picture. And I still don't get which side needs to use Coinbase.

By the way, Bitpay already uses BIP70 - if your mobile application supports it, you just scan the barcode and the URL is included.
Completely superfluous comment, but those are one of the nicest slides I've seen. I really dig the extra-wide format.
The HN community collectively hasn't ever been able to grasp this concept; apparently if a corporation has any possible benefit from an action, it MUST be the motivation behind the action. It's a particularly delightful cop-out because any positive action (including philanthropy) can be dismissed as a PR move.
Often the the shell companies don't actually own the patents, they just license them from the parent company. This way when the shell company loses and goes bankrupt the licenses is automatically revoked and there is nothing left to claim.

Patent trolls might be evil, but unfortunately most of them aren't stupid.
I'm not sure. It depends on how it's done. Poisoning the intended schematics would probably be discovered, although I'm not entirely convinced by that, but It seems it would be almost trivial to introduce hardware MITM components which would be invisible and go unnoticed by most people in the fabrication process.
When working in labs studying brain function, the oddest thing I found was the huge resistance in what or what not an animal can do. Even in the face of years of research by big and small names, even with video, even when you train an animal and show them. They couldn't even provide a good hypothesis on why it was not so. It was argued circularly like trying to talk a paranoid schizophrenic out of their false world-view. Very frustrating. I would usually just tell them that if they could find a reason it wasn't so, they could easily get a nature paper out of it.
You don't have to apply the CBC mode to complete files. If it is secure for a 1 MB file, I don't see why it would be insecure for 100 parts of a 100 MB file.

If you manage to merge small files into the same blocks, you even gain some privacy because the server can't even tell the number of files anymore.

[1] also has a discussion of the trade-offs of the different modes of operation for whole disk encryption. That seems related here because nobody wants to rewrite the whole disk after changing the first byte.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_encryption_theory
Its so trivial to set up a shell company that we can assume the trolls are running one per patent. If a shell goes bankrupt they only lose that one patent, which has been shown to be worthless anyway
Why the housing bubble tanked the economy and the tech bubble didn't
What about anti-monopoly legislation? I didn't see that mentioned in the article, did I miss it?
> This is pretty great research, seeing a slug in a running wheel is particularly silly

I think having some (seemingly) humourous bits in research is a great way to make it presentable to the public. Personally I found if very funny.
Re math -- this is largely a work of interpretation, how to understand various results and place them in a common framework. Much of the work he cites is full of math and would probably be much more appealing to you, but he's not trying to build a new model. There's still plenty of philosophical groundwork to be done in the cognitive sciences.
Neo900 Progress Update – May
Object.observe() live in Chromium: native data-binding
That's a very interesting view and the closest thing that I've seen to date for a practical, workable solution to the current mess.

I really like that.

How are RBLs and other useful internet institutions that work on the basis of IPv4 addresses along the way with their IPv6 adoption?
Buy a reliable cheap car that's easy and cheap to maintain and repair. Pay it off as quickly as possible and run it for 10+ years. Your operating cost per mile over a vehicle lifetime like that gets measured in fractions of a dollar per mile.

My almost 13 year old car costs me something like <$.30/mile right now and getting cheaper the older it gets. So far, I've never had a repair that cost more than $300 and gas mileage is comparable to some hybrids. It cost me $12k new and I paid it off in 2 years so my actual purchase cost was something a bit higher, but I didn't let the financer recoup even half of their expected interest off of me.
The Man who invented the now-legendary banana slicer
What's your service? I'm very interested in deploying docker containers at the moment, and having a nice abstraction over deploying to multiple different providers would be fantastic.
Facebook App Knows What You’re Hearing, Watching
> But how well does RMS' model scale to our modern, global and interconnected society?

It doesn't. But it isn't supposed to. Stallman is consciously upholding a moral ideal that most in tech are not.

The goal is not for everyone to be like RMS. The goal is to sway the companies who build tech for everyone to be like RMS.

Consider for a moment how much open source software Google, Microsoft, and Apple use in their proprietary products. Is it ethical to use that much free software for the corporation's own personal gain?
Rackspace is another company that stands up to fight Patent Trolls. And they run OpenStack. (Double the Awesome)
I don't know. I think the one of the best things about Angular for example is that you often see straight away what's happening because of it's declarative nature. With normal event handlers you don't know what's going on until you specifically search for the id/class/tag in all the JS files.
The wheel was there for 3 years.
> I detest articles that use the word "cure" and "cancer" in the title. They are without fail so breathless about the clichéd achievement that they are exploiting in the headline that they either fail to acknowledge the real magnitude of the problem or gloss over it with practiced sleaze (not sure which happened to the writers here).
> There is no "magic bullet" that cures every single cancer, just like there is no "magic antibiotic"

This.

People need to stop thinking cancer as a single disease, but as a constellation of disease. Just like you cannot "cure" the Internet from computer viruses with a magic program, you cannot cure cancer in with an unique solution.
Is the argument here that there is never inconvenience or downside to home ownership? That sounds rather naïve and one-sided. The flip side of all this is that as an owner, any sort of problem is YOUR problem. And there are a lot of potential problems with a building.
Engaging in unprotected sex with multiple partners while pretending otherwise with each is akin to playing Russian Roulette... with someone else's life.

Man or woman, yes, that sort of behavior deserves a beating.
Under Obamacare, your annual out-of-pocket maximum would be $6,350. You still have to pay the Obamacare premium on top of that. But the end result is that you would only have to pay about 10% of the $92,000 annual list price of Gleevec.

Note that grandfathered plans are not subject to the out-of-pocket maximum until 2015.

P.S. Remember to vote in the 2014 and 2016 general elections if you live in a swing state.
I actually view the thin / thick content issue as a strong proof that Google's search engine is incredible dumb.

They have to constantly write edge case scenario algorithms because the overall of their search system is of very low 'intelligence.' They're whittling their way into a corner in the process, because they don't know any other way to deal with problems than to further narrow what's defined as the good with another specialty algorithm that someone inside Google hacks together to buy another day against spam winning.

The situation is: Google can't tell what's a good answer and what's not based on the content. They have to try to figure out what's good or bad based on every other measurement except the actual content. So if the ideal answer is a mere 47 words long, Google is too stupid to know the difference and understand there are many instances where short & concise is better than seven pages of verbosity. In the not so distant future, this is going to be laughable.

My opinion might be scoffed at today, but I think Google's search platform is little more than state of the art junk that scales well. It's the best junk we have right now, and that's not saying much.

Killing Google search should be on PG's list of hard things that someone should be tackling. They're a dinosaur.
I guess this covers what he thinks of government involvement? "Hell no, this is America. We’re capitalists and we’re fighters, and today’s David is tomorrow’s Goliath."
Direct links to videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5gI1joaCxI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNaZvGZubvw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KnbD1dmJzk

Not sure why the video were wrapped in another player.
The quickest way to gain mass adoption to IPv6 is if facebook, twitter and google+ collectively decide to disable their IPv4 and leave only IPv6 as a connection option.

I figure the subsequent avalanche of user pressure on isps will solve the problem in a week or so. Added bonus: during that week productivity will be at an all time high.
"In a simulation, the research team confirmed that the new technology improves the writing speed of SSD by up to 300% and reduces power consumption by up to 60% and the number of write/erase cycles by up to 55%, increasing product life. Because, with the new method, it is not necessary to make any changes to NAND flash memory, and the method is completed within the middleware, it can be applied to existing SSDs as it is."

Promising news! Essentially removing fragmentation on the fly instead of just accepting it as a done deal on SSD
Is that a 9 or 6?
YOYO Holdings Snags $1.3M For Its Prepaid Mobile Consumer Survey Platform
The fastest Node.js module for resizing JPEG, PNG, WebP and TIFF images
You seem to think that the landlord in a regular rental situation is making you pay their taxes as well.
Although at the moment the EBS setup will allow you to run just one container per instance, whereas this lets you run several.
My understanding has been that we live longer because we get kids through childhood (vaccinations against diseases they can't yet handle, antibiotics for the particularly nasty bugs) and are now much more effective at treating acute trauma, cancers and such.

How much your armpits smell doesn't really have a lot to do with longevity...
Let me know when America has a free market in ISPs.
Great post. Definitely important to follow these. We're trying them on our side already but thanks for the info.
Using OmniAuth to Authenticate for Doorkeeper
I've been studying HMMs lately. I think getting an initial estimate of HMM emission and transition parameters using Segmental K-means training (or Viterbi training) before applying Baum-Welch re-estimation should result in the latter converging better. That's what the HInit tool in HTK does. AFAIK, it's done in the following way:

- Divide all examples (observation sequences) uniformly into as many segments as the number of states.

- Cluster the observations corresponding to each state, and estimate the GMM using the cluster set so that each cluster corresponds to one multivariate Gaussian.

- Do this repeatedly until convergence: get the Viterbi alignment of all examples, use it to get new segments, and estimate the parameters again using the previous step.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. Also, I have two questions:

- What kind of accuracy increase should be expected if using both Viterbi training and Baum-Welch re-estimation, instead of just the latter?

- What kind of accuracy should be expected if only using Viterbi training?
I like the advice proffered by Ask The Headhunter: http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/habuildvalue.htm and Liz Ryan: (pdf) http://www.humanworkplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Wha... myself.

Note I am a hiring manager for a small tech team outside the startup space.
Are you restricting rent to "living with roommates"? And not allowing for owning to be "rent out to others"?

In San Francisco, owning is incredibly expensive. But so is renting an equivalent piece of property. So I'm not grasping why the options are limited to rent or "move away". (aside from exceptions such as renting under rent control)
Wormhole Time Travel
I wonder if this reduces durability as it inhibits the NAND block rewrite balancing or whatever it's called
> > The researchers claim the animals ran on the wheels because they enjoyed
> > it, which could be a little bit of anthropomorphizing, as no one has been
> > able to prove that animals other than humans experience emotions.
> Is this really the state of the art? I thought the entire animal rights
> movement is rooted in the idea that animals can experience emotion

Indeed. That statement surprised me too, since I remember reading a number of sources stating that research pretty much confirms that some animals do experience emotions. So I headed over to wikipedia[1] and saw that although some (most?) research does lean towards confirming this, the scientific community is not convinced, yet. Interesting stuff.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_in_animals
Rents tend to increase in normal markets at about the rate of inflation, in crazy NYC/SV markets they increase faster while mortgages will stay the same (or can be reduced or offset). In the long run, $4100/mo in 2014 dollars will still be $4100/mo in 2014 dollars 29 years later. Meaning they'll be a fraction of of 2043 dollars via inflation. The mortgage then de facto goes down while rent will continue to increase at least with inflation (or at least it does historically).
There's proof and proof. No one has managed to prove other humans experience emotions, or even exist. Given a hypothetical model of a continually manipulated memory and consciousness you could even argue that you can't prove that you yourself have emotions (you might merely have the mistaken belief that you experience them).

To take a more pragmatic approach to proof (good enough but not absolute) Humans and some animals experience emotions. At the very least most Mammals. Probably not all animals. A trickier proposition would be whether all vertebrates do, that's a different level of debate entirely.

If you can't take things like the Monkey fairness tests as a sign of emotions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg&feature=player_d...

then you have a standard of proof that a lot of humans wouldn't meet.
> I thought the entire animal rights movement is rooted in the idea that animals can experience emotion

I thought it was rooted in people's knee-jerk anthropomorphic emotions, science be damned...

(Not saying they're right or wrong; they may well be right - but pretty much everyone I know who is involved in that movement does so for un-scientific reasons)
Including the US, for now. Under Obamacare, there is a $6,350 annual out-of-pocket maximum. There is also cost-sharing for people with low incomes.

However, Obamacare is guaranteed to remain in effect only so long as the Democrats retain control of the Senate and the Presidency. If the Democrats lose one of them, then it will depend on whether certain vacancies open up on the Supreme Court. If they lose both, then that's the end of Obamacare.
At the last Startup Weekend Honolulu 2014, I introduced my approach towards solving this problem; The Open Patent Foundation (Non-Profit). Similar to concepts such as Creative Commons, and Open Source Software Licenses, the idea is to create Open Patent License(s) that standardize a method to share intellectual property with the Community. While this does not directly solve the problem, I think it is a necessary first step towards realizing that we (as a Community) can leverage the existing broken Patent System in a way that favors us (the Community). Not only does this have the potential to accelerate innovation, it will also prevent Patent Trolls from claiming ownership of innovations, and that's a big deal. These Trolls currently use a Licensing approach to extort people (pay our Licensing Fee or else we will sue). I think it would be ironic (and awesome) to use the same approach to effectively null Patent Trolls. Considering how ineffective Legal Reform is, this might be our best bet; To come together collectively as a Community and decide that we want to take a stand and start using the System in a new and different way. It would be a double win, accelerate innovation and null Patent Trolling. If this sounds interesting, the website is http://www.openpatentfoundation.com and I recently moved to Mountain View, so I'm looking to spend more time on this and see if we can get some Community Support.
[1405.1283v1] Casimir Energy of a Long Wormhole Throat
While this sounds stupid if you're using a password manager with very complicated passwords, 99.99% of ebay users are probably random moms with very simple passwords. Making sure they don't copy/paste something wrong must really cut the number of support requests.
I vaguely remember reading about some philosophy where there was no such thing as a selfless act, as you always get something out of it, even if it's just a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

That's just one example of why I find most of philosophy to be a complete waste of time.
Perhaps the brain just provides a place for the patterns to live? Perhaps it is not so much searching for patterns of activity which allow it to predict the future, but allowing the patterns of activity induced by the world to grow and evolve together. Then all it has to do is modulate this evolution when the organism gets something it likes. Reward modulated hebbian learning I believe it is called. I've not read the whole paper, but it seems overly complicated and unnecessary when you consider the above conception...
Wait another ten minutes till the Alibaba IPO?
i wonder if this is something similar to USB Supercharger [1]? i personally used this back in the USB 2.0 days to make running Firefox Portable bearable from what was already the fastest 4k random flash drive [2]. The write speed increase was truly astonishing, there was nothing like it on the market. If you look at their CrystalDiskMark screenshots, the 4k random goes up from 0.01 MB/s to 10MB/s - no joke. On my faster drive the increase was only a mere 100x.

[1] http://easyco.com/usb-sc.htm

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Xporter-Boost-Flash-PEF8GUSB/d...
We're 7 years in on a home. Originally we had a 30 year mortgage, a couple of no cost refinances later we're on a 15 year mortgage with a <3% borrowing rate which is almost free money. We've been paying down the principle as well and our monthly mortgage is now about 50-60% of the comparable rents and dropping while rents in my area are rising at 5-6%/yr. We're on track with paying off the loan inside of 2 or 3 years after which we'll be living in a very nice home effectively for free. We're even thinking of doing some basement modifications and renting out the basement as a separate apartment (we never use the basement for anything the house is >5000 sq ft.) which will completely cover our mortgage while it's still required or will bring in income after the house is payed off. Every one of these scenarios would be impossible if we were renting, all of the money we would have payed in rent would have disappeared into smoke and we would have been helping somebody else make their mortgage payments or making them money.

And oh yeah, our downpayment on this house was covered with what we made in appreciation on our previous house, plus we payed off two cars with it.

We've already made some money on this house as well despite the housing crash. It's recovered the original value and is in the black now.