skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I couldn't agree more. I have long though Scribd was toxic and a terrible idea in an age where browsers render PDFs flawlessly and that was before I knew of the find issues and DRM font. I have avoided Scribd links like the plague as every time I have accidentally go to their website I have found navigating (scrolling) the PDF to be nearly unusable and I despise how small the view port is. To be honest I have no clue what other content surrounds the document which I attribute in part to "Ad blindness" and I won't be checking now because I don't want to give them the page view.

As for Quora it is Experts Exchange 2.0. Hiding community sourced knowledge behind a login is shameful and disgusting. Especially since, if memory serves, they started out allowing you to see all the content then later added the blurring and popup. Thankfully I didn't pay much attention to Quora prior to this change and so I don't have any knowledge of mine locked up in. If I had I would delete my responses and repost the question and my answer to the appropriate Stack Exchange site.

I'm on mobile right now but once back at my computer I plan on adding both of these sites to my hosts file as I refuse to be an accomplice to or support their shady practices.

Thank you for highlighting what I have long thought about Quora and fully opening my eyes to the sins of Scribd which I have long disliked but lacked the interest to fully investigate.
Sure, but even if he's kept away from society for life (which is far from guaranteed), he still gets to enjoy a decent standard of living.

http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1989083,00...
http://www.middlecoin.com/

Assuming PC gamers have better-than-average graphics cards, the pennies here could be $500+/mo depending on how many people got fooled by this.
it's unreasonable. NULL isn't a value, it means, "the value can't be known". If a primary key of a table has part of it that is unknown, you've designed your schema completely incorrectly, and you should brush up on normal form: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization#Normal_f...
Domainey – Domains Made Simple (iOS App – Coming Soon)
well, giving birth in the bed is relatively new phenomena

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1647027/pdf/amjp...

and this quote is just sick:
"If most women viewed pregnancy as a normal,
natural event, then the surgeons' services would not be
required. If, however, pregnancy was seen as an illness, then
their presence might appear more appropriate. "
Interesting. Solar-powered roads is an appealing concept.

However, one has to wonder whether it is efficient enough to be worth doing. Are roads really the best place to collect sunlight at scale? Current solar farms are set up in specific places at tops of hills or what have you in order to maximize energy production, whereas streets have no such guarantees and require special resources and engineering to withstand the forces involved with supporting cars and trucks. Doesn't sound so ideal to me.

Even more concerning is that they never address basic feasibility questions like this, or say how much it costs or could cost if done at scale. All that their crowdfunding campaign seems to say is "Wouldn't it be cool if we could put solar panels in our roads?" without any analysis of whether or not we'd actually WANT to do that. (Hint: We probably don't because it's probably massively inefficient.)

It's obvious to me that this idea has very little potential and that this family is putting on a show to extract money from green, eco-friendly types who lack critical thinking skills.

Think about that before you give them another cent.
Yeah, but you use different mining programs based on the GPU vendor, and then there's the configuration for each card that makes it efficient. Is the code smart enough to look up the GPU vendor and run CUDAminer/cgminer or a CPU miner?
That list of former and current uses of the law is pretty grim. Wow.
I don't personally agree; the summary strikes me as dodgy, and the paper is hardly specialist literature. But this is a borderline call, so we'll go with your way and change it back.
would love to see this for the world cup.
Completely agree. There seems to be much more focus on punishing people than changing them into productive members of society.

Sure, there are cases where people will never be able to integrate and that can be dealt with. But there is so much cognitive surplus being wasted here.

We need all hands on deck for the coming decades. We need to grow up.
Should we really look back on the Roman Empire as just consisting of a bunch of child rapists?
Best prank commercial ever, for watch_dogs
Imcache Next Release
Imcache will be released soon, come on and contribute to it.
A good and performant alternative to CSVs are Google's protocol buffers: https://code.google.com/p/protobuf/
even when there is no evidence that imprisoning more people has reduced crime by more than a small amount.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Violent_crime_rates_by_gen...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Property_Crime_Rates_in_th...

The ny times editorial board is either living in a dream world, or is willfully lying and actually wants a return to the levels of property and violent crime from 40 years ago.
Mattermark (YC S12) is hiring a frontend developer
I think that giving an evil person a decent standard of living is worth it so that all the other people who eventually enter society again are properly rehabilitated.

Also, like the article pointed out, I'm not sure many people really appreciate how harsh prison is. Even with cable TV and AC, it's still prison.
We have that for sex offenders. It's basically a scarlet letter. Your name, address, and photos are put online.

Has it reduced those crimes? I have no idea.
Given a significant number of companies are most cost effective than AWS/Azure/Google/Etc with relatively stable workloads, I think you are completely nuts.

AWS's calculator and the assumptions the threw into it pretty much proves they aren't cost effective except compared to other cloud providers. They basically 'made up' the self hosted numbers. At $DAY_JOB, our self-hosting costs at a colo facility are something like 33% the cost of using AWS.
The application is fun, I spent the last 10min playing with it. I found a PNG file that makes it crash though.
Through The Twisties Of 211
Caudit – Easy performance monitoring
Do you want to monitor your performance, come on try it and better improve it.
Because no fraudster can prop it up indefinitely. Gotta lock in your profits before the crash.
And so what? The prison sentence is not punishment for him - it's protection for the rest of us. Punishment has no other function than being petty revenge. I guess you could make an economic case for simpler lodgings, but the prison wasn't made for him - It would probably cost more to alter his cell for the worse than just keep it standard.
All of those exercises demand explosive strength from the legs. Which is what the deadlift is very, very efficient at producing.

Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrLVlbgwcW8#t=80

This guy is doing a 47 inch box jump... out of a pool. This is what deadlifting does.
> Topics appropriate to HN include anything that gets enough votes to make the front page.

That's definitely not true, as the guidelines make clear. Otherwise the front page would consist of controversy, gossip, and fashion, probably in that order.

HN has always been a blend of community voting and moderation (also variously called "curation", "editing", "censorship", "manipulation", and my favorite, "thinly veiled aggression") based on the site's values.
Does anyone know why the P and N regions conveniently show up as different colors on the photo? Is this due to different oxide thickness?
Not curious at all. In Shenzhen and many parts of east Asia many young guys are really find of computers and hardware, and they are fighting hard for their daily bowl of rice.
I think it's worth clarifying a few points here - this is a fairly naive view of deep learning being put forward.

In particular -

1) what does 'automatic trend discovery' mean? We've been able to do change-point detection, linear regression, etc. for hundreds of years. If you're talking about automatically learning a feature representation, then there are other algorithms that can do this, in a much simpler way. If you're arguing that it produces better representations, then make that argument.

2) This is almost _completely_ false, and indicates a substantial lack of experience of ML beyond deep learning. Other machine learning algorithms (SVMs, LR, even some decision tree algorithms) are _much_ easier to train in parallel - this is (partially) because your objective function has certain nice properties that allow you to combine partial solutions together that are produced in parallel (convexity, separability). When you're using gradient-based methods on an incredibly ugly non-convex function from a multi-layer neural network, you're in a completely different world.

Granted, there have been techniques coming out for training in multiple address spaces, but these are _hacks_ to get around the ugly structure of the problem, not the principled approaches that exist for other algorithms.

I don't have any perspective on your deeplearning4j library, but I'm skeptical of its utility given the existence of existing well-tested deep learning libraries written/contributed to by renowned experts in the field (e.g. cuda-convnet, caffe, torch). This stuff is a) very tricky to get right, b) very tricky to debug, and c) very performance sensitive. Just a quick pass through shows zero references to CUDA/GPGPU programming, so I'd suspect performance is going to be significantly worse than the aforementioned libraries.
Alcohol as a social technology to check the trustworthiness of others
Nice graphs, but where is the evidence linking those trends to higher incarceration rates?
This does not need an article. "It leaked out of Satan's pustules." is plenty.
You'll have a professional do the corporate taxes. Briefly, you'll expect that for the first several years of the business, possibly continuing through exit, the business will have negative profits. Accordingly, your income tax bill for the corporation will be $0 every year. You'll expect to continue booking tax losses as an asset on the balance sheet against that day in the future when your business actually has profits. You will likely pay many taxes which are not founded on income, most prominently California franchise tax for YC startups, which has a minimum of about $1k a year or so.

The fact that the corporation received $120k from YC or $10 million from angel investors is immaterial. Those flows of money do not represent revenue/profits. They are not subject to income tax (nor any other tax that I am aware of).

The approximate runway of a company with $120k in the bank and 2 co-founders at ramen wages with $1k a month in OpEx is ~18 months as of the current moment in time. Napkin math: $6k to pay both founders ~$2k salary plus pay direct costs of employing them, $1k in OpEx, divide.
"Let's not project, either."

hehehe

Well, I was just speaking from what I remember as a 20 something... I doubt I'm unique in this regard but probably it doesn't apply to everyone.
Unleaded gasoline/Abortion, and for the part where violent crime is caused by a large minority there is still a massive population that is just incarcerated for no good reason and will not contribute. That population is huge. Save them.
I've heard this so many times! The elite has billions and although you can buy and sell many times working around the market cap of Bitcoin, I don't think it's practical to transfer tens and hundreds of millions as the low liquidity will drive prices up and down crazily. Plus, I have friends in China with money, there are no practical limitations of moving money around as the Bitcoin propaganda portrays it, only because it serves it well.
I agree with the person you responded to. The advice I've received from "certified trainers" on deadlift and squats has been far inferior to 1) looking up proper form online and 2) comparing that against my form in the mirror, or video I took of my lift with my phone.

Save the money, skip the trainer, watch some of Rippetoe's videos, record yourself, and improve. Of course if you have the money to spend, and will feel more confident with a trainer, then by all means do that. But be responsible for your own health and still do your own homework.
I signed up, spent a day on it where it would keep trying to force me to select categories to subscribe to, and then I could not delete it. Sent them an email, never heard back.
Though kinda unlikely(too much trouble imho), it could be possible to scrape this page to pull the best command line for known hardware... https://litecoin.info/Mining_Hardware_Comparison
No. It'll happen either way if the app is popular enough.
Pro-European Billionaire Claims Victory in Ukraine Presidential Vote
Call me old fashioned if you will, but I support the idea of just punishment as a deterrent in violent crimes such as murder. I wouldn't call it revenge, rather justice: the idea that you are held to account for the harm you cause others.
I find the Dunning-Kruger effect article on rational wiki rather ironic.

Many of the articles on that wiki is written by people with only rudimentary knowledge of the topic that they're writing about, yet the authors claim to be experts, and "debunk" and criticize things without even doing any research.

Take http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scrying as an example.

There have actually been quite a few real scientific studies on scrying, and while there may be little evidence of psychic powers, there is good evidence that staring at a point, for example on a crystal ball or the surface of water, leads some people to see dream-like hallucinations at the point where they are staring. See for example http://books.google.com/books?id=am9NAAAAYAAJ&q=crystal+ball...
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a major use-case for SQLite a database for embedded systems?

What makes you think that? It is used in many Desktop applications. E.g. most browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari), Skype and apparently even Apple Mail, iTunes and the Steam runtime use SQLite. Do you want to store complex indexed data in your desktop or smartphone application? Maybe something like a music library? Then you usually use SQLite. Even if you store relatively simple data you may use SQLite: no need to invent your own data file format. SQLite runs virtually everywhere and has bindings for virtually every programming language.

And as someone else already said: applications get updates that add features and need to update their DB accordingly.
What about soldiers? They kill people too, with all of the careful planning that goes into 1st degree murder, and they even get training on how to do it. The only things that makes what they do not murder is the uniform and the orders from the government. (You might also include an ethical/moral basis for the orders, but that's arguably present in a lot of murder cases too.)

Getting soldiers back into civilian life can be challenging, but no one questions that it's something we must try to do. People who are convicted of murder did what they did for many different reasons, and making a blanket statement that they're all monsters and should be denied even the chance to rejoin society is wrong. Sure, some of them are lost causes, but not all of them, and therefore we have to give all of them a chance at redemption.
Jesus unholy Christ, how many Yanomami 13 year olds do you even know? let me guess. NONE

Go look up research on how long adolescence has been extended in the past few hundred years - now in the past 20 they're saying it has extended into the 20s. Suppose that makes most of us rapists.
DevOps and Enterprises, it's a culture thing
Inability to repair is not planned obsolescence.
Can someone :help me?
I'm very interested in whether or not manual transcription is pedagogically beneficial.

I personally write a lot. I certainly find it useful to do that.

However, I would not normally recommend Zed Shaw "Learn Code the Hard Way" type of method of writing out over and over again. I think it probably works and you can do it yourself, but I think it's quite inefficient. I don't need to type 10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10 more than once to get a good sense of what's going on.

I think you most of all benefit here from the time you're forced to put in. If you can understand nothing, there's really no other sensible thing that allows you to concentrate for the time you need to make decent progress.

However, I don't think this means transcription is pedagogically ideal. IMHO building something for yourself is more effective; getting expert tuition is more effective: in terms of time spent vs benefit received.
I like doing a 'git stash' or 'git stash save deleteme' instead. That way if I realize a moment later that I needed anything, it's still available (if I haven't done a 'git stash drop' yet).
From: http://essays.biochemistry.org/bsessays/042/0075/bse0420075....

>"Strength training has been shown to improve insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in both healthy elderly individuals and patients with manifest diabetes, and likewise to improve muscle strength in both elderly healthy individuals and in elderly individuals with chronic disease."

>"Low muscle mass is correlated with not only lower functional capacity, but is associated with a higher risk of falls, fractures and mortality."

>"Despite the fact that ageing is associated with a decreased muscle oxidative capacity and a reduced muscle function, a major part of this decline can be counteracted by physical activity, especially by resistance training."

Basically: muscle eats glucose. High blood glucose is bad for you. More muscle = less frail in general. It's a damn good idea for him to be doing strength training at his age.
Sunscreen Cartoon
Yes, just go. But you should add that the traveler must be ready to let things go, when traveling in deep China without knowing Chinese. And to be confident. Then serendipity will not be just another trendy word.
Eh. The regulations are improved but when this happens:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/08cafa70-e24f-11e3-a829-00144feabd...
"The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority fined the British bank £26m on Friday and reprimanded it for nine years of lax controls for its failure to rein in an options trader who in 2012 drove the gold price lower to avoid paying £2.3m to one of the lender’s clients."

They were caught once in 2012, but its pretty clear the fact it took two years to catch them at it means they probably got away with it for as long as Mt Gox did, given the environment that enabled it lasted 9 years.

That doesn't count LIBOR, etc. When the incentives to break the system exist, it will get broken from time to time even with regulation. Regulation just reduces the frequency and generally requires multiple bad actors to truly manipulate the entire system.

And when 'breaking the system', basically gets you fined [not put in jail for 5+ years], you can generally calculate the degree of risk you are taking and effectively have a chance of just breaking even if you get caught...:/

Mt. Gox wouldn't happen, but the type of people that ran it would have found a different way to 'cheat'.
You need to read Freakonomics!
Easy: Put a server process in front of it and route access to the DB through that. :P
Working on The Witness, Part 10: Interpolation
For those interested, here is the section of the study that discusses "The Crime Prevention Effects of Incarceration."

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=18613&page=130
Well recently a lot of work has gone into using NNs for natural language processing. Typically it's trained to do something like predict the next word or character in a sequence. Using that you could possibly create a far better generative model than markov chains, and create more realistic sentences. Perhaps you could even combine them (NN gets the output of the markov chain to help make it's prediction.)
Between you believing the deadlift has no athletic benefit, and thinking machines are more effective than free weights, I'm wondering what your background in fitness is. I think the debate about safety is reasonable though.
I wonder if you could add a condition to a document's license, CC or whatever, forbidding it being hosted behind any kind of pay- or signup-wall?
Anyone in a Hippy Hop Mood? ....Play this
Taken from Unsigned Artist ModestLand's Debut Album
You need to do what many Western European nations have been doing for years now: build a huge commission of experts (as broad as possible with as many voices as possible, but all not too political, the more scientists – criminologists, sociologists, … – the better) and let them decide on it. That defers responsibility, but also prevents easy attacks. It shields politicians.

Some find this disgusting and antithetical to democracy, but I’m actually quite ok with it. The politicians only set the broad guidelines and figure out how to pay for it.

Of course there are controversies and of course it is occasionally very possible to score political points with “hang them higher” rhetorics, but not all that often.

All’s not perfect, too, obviously, but at least it’s a bit better.
Scribd is one of YC's flagship companies, and rightfully so I think. People forget how painful PDF viewing used to be: the viewers were slow to load, crashed browsers a lot, and spread viruses. I remember how some forums considered linking to a pdf without adding something like [pdf] after it to be a form of abuse (more technically sophisticated forums just added that on their own).

Scribd, and things like google viewer that followed, helped get us through a rough patch until browsers started implementing better pdf viewers on their own.
> Probably because "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

People consider different things as simple. For example I often consider very abstract mathematics as very easy to understand (since I always thought in a rather abstract way - thus this kind of explanation is very natural for me), while most people consider my kind of explaining things as "unnecessary complicated".

Don't tell me that I haven't understood the topic. When talking about topics that I understood worse, I often tend to give much simpler (and better understandable for "ordinary people") explanations, since I haven't understood the complex connections and thus I'm unable to give a much "simpler" (in my terms; "more complicated" in terms of most people) explanation.
Aye, if I wanted to publish my pdfs, Dropbox would be a bad choice.

Sharing to a select group of people (e.g. a link in a mailing list, or on a small online community - it's perfectly valid in my opinion.
> the other female anthropologist who was mean to the kid.

Not that I didn't find her behaviour reprehensible, but in the interests of accuracy, she was "the wife of a very prominent anthropologist."
Another potential option is DocumentCloud: open-source, with support from major journalistic outlets.

http://www.documentcloud.org

An example from Minar's post, the Elliot Rodger 'Twisted Life' document, has been uploaded there by a NYDailyNews reporter:

http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1173655-elliot-rodger...

Perhaps a bit easier to read than the Scribd version, with a 'text' tab for accessing raw copyable text, and a download link for the PDF original.