skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm of the impression that concepts only have fundamental meaning to us because we can relate them to sensory input. For example, initially a child is taught what a boat is by seeing pictures, it eventually learns that boats, cars and bicycles share common characteristics and can be grouped together as vehicles. These common characteristics are all understood and identified by seeing, hearing, touching or smelling.

It would be impossible completely describe a concept such as "horse" to a person with no knowledge of animal physiology, without recourse to pointing at a a horse or impersonating a horse noise. Resorting to analogies with other concepts - "a horse is like a cow" - doesn't work because the person has no knowledge of the other concepts. This person could be a young child or an untrained computer, and they can be taught fundamental meanings of concepts by feeding them information in the form of sights, sounds, smells etc.

I haven't thought about this very deeply but these are the thoughts that always come into my mind when this topic comes up. Concepts have no meaning without relating them to sensory input. Humans learn by connecting the two. Why can the same not be applied to computers?
Lol my code base is fine thanks. Maximizing productivity and writing maintainable code are not mutually exclusive.
> Is there even a meaningful distinction to be made between beeing able to identify a concept and understanding what a concept actually means?

How would you define “understanding” and “actually means” in your question?

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
After all, there must be a reason that there's even A SIGN for it!

http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploa...
Cool, New Gaming gear
You should add sarcasm tags otherwise we'll think your serious.
"There's no good reason to send a drone into Iranian airspace in the first place when you have things like NRO's Keyhole satellites to get imagery for you"

There are LOTS of reasons to send drones to other countries airspace.

Satellites have lots of constraints, they fly at a given time over an specific region, and very high, you cant make them stationary like drones(unless the country is in the equator, or you you use very oblique angles that make you lose resolution). Drones are thousand of times more flexible, and they fly way lower than a satellite.
Dijkstra's point was, in case you did not get it, that it could have gone wrong just as easily and that the NASA people completely agreed with that.
Being a "Programming Master" has so little to do with coding, but the ability to analyze and automate real world processes and make them interact intelligently for the benefit of the user. Solving puzzles and memorizing algorithms it's taking someones project and giving it life.
Edsger W. Dijkstra Archive, Transcriptions
I've seen that more from guys that "start from scratch" than guys who cut and paste... most guys who cut and paste also annotate and comment... most geniuses can't be bothered to both code and comment...
Ripple hit by dispute over founders' initial stake in the currency
I have to admit that I (also?) was expecting the shaded region to give something like the standard deviation about the mean, not the confidence in the mean.
If fictional media is anything to go by, the single defining aspect of human intelligence is love. This is the last bastion of human understanding that is incomprehensible to evil, machines and aliens.
The person who posted the linked legal demand is Jesse Powell, an ex board member of Ripple Labs, who resigned yesterday.

Complicated story. Here's some background.

Ripple is known as a digital currency and currency exchange network, although that's a simplification. Some of its functions are comparable to Bitcoin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_%28payment_protocol%29

Three founders of Ripple Labs, Jed McCaleb, Chris Larsen and Arthur Britto, gave themselves 20% (20 billion units), of the currency (known as XRP or Ripples) which is used by the Ripple protocol [1]. McCaleb's share was 9 billion XRP. A few days ago, McCaleb unexpectedly announced he will soon start to sell what remains of his share. As 9 billion is more than the total amount of XRP currently in circulation, the price of XRP fell 40%-50% after his announcement, cutting about US$30 million from the total value.

At the price today, the money supply of all XRP in circulation is worth US$28 million. The value would be $370 million if calculated for the total of 100 billion units of XRP that exist.

About Ripple Labs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_Labs

[1] Jed McCaleb's announcement that he is selling: https://xrptalk.org/topic/2629-selling-my-xrp/

Jed McCaleb on Reddit: http://reddit.com/user/Swamp12

Jesse Powell on Reddit: http://reddit.com/user/jespow
"The charge accelerator circuit has two modes of operation. Apple mode and Android mode."

Still not 'any', but quite a bit more.
in case someone wants a more mature parser: https://github.com/koles/ya-csv
(Mill team)

We started with 6 planned talks; it has since grown to 9, and shows no signs of stopping there :)

So if you have a subject you want us to explain, or you want to invite us to give a talk at your uni or workplace (no promises!), please just ask (here or on the Mill forums http://millcomputing.com/forum/the-mill/ or mail me: will at mill computing dot com)
The first google result suggests that IDEs and code-coloring might help:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/9657/programm...

Out of curiosity, does she not have a problem reading (or writing) physics papers?
This is about as far from the point as you can get.

What I'm saying is that you can have different goals at different parts of your life, and those goals rarely match up perfectly with what will actually make you happy.
Being young is the state of having less experience living your own life, and by definition you have less information to use when trying to match up your 'conscious goals' (I want to do X sometime in the next Y years) with things that actually make you happy.

Specific to the taxi driver example - children are not allowed to drive taxis, they don't know whether they'll enjoy being a taxi driver or whether they're capable of being passionate about driving a taxi and they probably don't know someone who is both psychologically similar to them and has also been or is a taxi driver - whatever judgement they make about taxi driving is probably based on how the culture they grew up in treats taxi drivers, in general, and not on any analysis of whether they themselves would or could be happy driving a taxi for a living.

EDIT: you also live in a country where the analysis you gave for the distinction between 17 and 19 year olds doesn't hold, most Israeli kids are coddled until they finish their mandatory service and often until they finish university - most of the undergrads at the technion (and most universities) don't work 'for a living' but rather depend on their parents or the state to a large degree to provide for them, they cannot get to the state of being homeless or starving and they are definitely phased into adulthood over almost a decade between high school and working.
A lot of times you are going into existing, older markets where there isn't just a "set of requirements" to be defined by a good PM. Commercial real estate is a great example. The existing processes in renting are extremely case-by-case and specific. You need to go in and first define how you will start to standardize things, and get buy-in from the industry around that process. So you start with the manual, and then automate as you find fit.

This is different from creating enterprise software as a vendor. When you go to one large corporate and they want software automation added around their process, they usually have a process to be standardized. So then you can just figure out and write up the requirements. When you are building a more generalized, SaaS-type product for an industry as a whole, no one yet even has a vague idea of what the process and requirements are.
نتيجة الصف الثالث الاعدادى محافظة الجيزة 2014 برقم الجلوس
>"A group [1] of volunteers is undertaking to transcribe the EWDs and
other documents to simple HTML files, in order to make them both
searchable and accessible to the visually impaired. If you might be
interested in lending a hand in this effort, please read this [2]."

It's great to see efforts being made to increase accessibility (if you
pardon the pun).

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/transcrib...

[2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/invitatio...
Yep, it was MegaMek. Man does it feel like a lifetime ago.
"The user selectable mode dynamically converts any USB port to optimize the charge speed by signaling your mobile device to safely draw the maximum amount of charge possible."

So, your laptop claims it can safely give you 100 mW, but this device tells your phone "go ahead and draw 500"?

I doubt that is safe. There will typically be some room above what the laptop claims to be able of, but it may also decrease power to other plugged in devices ("my USB disk is unreliable when I use this charger") and might even fry your laptop (I would expect modems laptops to have guards against that, though)
Metaheuristics are blind methods that make very few assumptions about the structure of the solution space. If you already know some of the structure of course you can find a better optimization algorithm. Better yet, you can find a better representation or mutation function that will massively shrink the search space. Or a fitness function more likely to lead evolution through the correct path. Or even seed solutions that give the algorithm a head start.

>On the other hand if you prove a theorem stating that for this types of problems, if you let GA run for this amount of time you are going to be close to the optimum with high probability. That would be phenomenally useful.

>At its basic, GA is a parallelized and randomized exploration of the space. Tell me why is that particular way of randomization and parallelization the right thing to do, or for what classes of problems is it the right thing to do. Without this, they are anecdotes.

That's pretty much impossible. If you already know so much about the problem space to the point of being able to prove theorems about it, then you don't need metaheuristics.
> They are like automated lawyers seeking loopholes.

That means we're getting there. This sounds like any toddler that I've ever met!
I woulnd't hold my breath too much:

> But before that, as the First of April passed into the Second, and then to the Third, our delight turned from scientific wonder, to greed, and finally to suspicion concerning the amazingly prolific haul of gems from the abyss.
Google.com HACKED.BY.JAPTRON LOLOLOLOLOL :X
Actually, you can see how a soviet-dominated world would look today by looking at ex-communist and USSR-influenced countries - there's a distinct pattern of shit buildings, bad organization, corruption, oppression and a pessimistic attitude that is most evident closer to Moscow (Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria) or their own capitals (Latvia, Poland, Slovakia) and fades slowly as you move away. Belarus, for example, is too far gone, it's still a soviet-style country with big problems that no one talks about (because no one cares as long as they stay in their place and shut up).
Is it really that difficult to get plain text versions and diff them?
I will disagree with your copy and paste assessment. While it will hinder a junior programmer its a godsend to the senior developer. Someone who can quickly recognize what the code is doing and integrate it into the final solution.

There are more than enough APIs just on the platform I work with daily that I can imagine how much fun it must be sorting through all those available to Windows developers must not be a joy. Well Google lets me search quickly for established solutions and combined with my knowledge I can quickly identify which if any will do what I want to do and adapt if not drop into my coding style.

TL;DR

Copy/Paste might not be good for new programmers, but time savings for experienced programmers warrants its use
This is the Whois/DNS system working as it should, please don't post nonsense.
That gives an indication, but not if it sometimes does TCO but not always (like gcc for C).
cpuid:
ACTUALLYMILL
This doesn't surprise me, much. We were approached by officials from Qatar for an SaaS of sorts, and we learned all about their culture or perhaps, more specifically, their funding. There's so much money in Qatar and so much of it being spent on putting them on the map, a nationalistic software push was bound to happen eventually.
How to get milliseconds since Unix epoch?
Heh, times are different, get on with it - that's so easy to say... The problem is that it takes a lot of time to fix and/or undo things, just look at Eastern Europe, or China for that matter.
Ought not this prompt carriers to leverage their existing networks to deliver a similar product. In Australia Telstra delivers 3G via 800mhz - I've been in the middle of buttfck nowhere and still been able to get 5mbit downstream. I'm not aware of any technical reason why existing carriers couldn't deliver a competitive service -ie. rate limited and tiny upload / download qutoa- for dollars per year.
Human generation update? :-)
A lot of IT professional people I know here have never heard about the book.
Apart from knowing if your environment supports TCO which could be an issue.
I might be mistaken, but the second field in the first record looks invalid in that CSV. You'd need """x""" for that to work (quoted field and escaped quotes inside).
Sure, no particular instance of a function will be so utterly random, but I think you are probably missing the point of the parent comment. All that NFL says is that if you fix an optimization algorithm and average its performance over all possible measurable functions, no algorithm will be better than the other. The average is with respect to the distribution you described. However, if you skew the distribution so that certain class of functions are more likely than others, then an ordering will be imposed over some of the algorithms. Some algorithms will be better than others.

Therefore, trying to design a fully generic optimization algorithm is a fool's errand. On the contrary, a specific objective function will have specific properties and in that case it would be valuable to use specific algorithms suited to its properties. To follow the argument forward, it would be very useful if it was characterized what is exactly the class of objective functions that EA, GA, swarms, ant colon algorithms handle well. Under what assumptions is their specific randomization and parallel evaluation the right thing to do. These are resource intensive procedures, so such a characterization will tell us when is that effort well spent.

One uncharitable but plausible way to read the tail end of your comment is that just because a particular function is not random, it will violate NFL and magically make EA, GA style algorithms appropriate, that is not true. Glad that you were able to reword it before the edit window closed.

Edit: replying here because this thread is becoming nested too deep.

Hi @Dn_Ab I think we may have talked passed each other, so clarifying. Of course a bias / preference will naturally get induced over algorithms when you select objective functions non-uniformly. No magic there. But that is not going to make a particular choice of an algorithm (in this case EA, GA et al) magically appropriate for whatever specific nonuniform distribution over the objective function chosen. The choice either has to be deliberate (in which case we would need to know a measurable description of the class where these algorithms work better) or one has wait to get wildly lucky, the latter is about as productive as playing lottery except that the tickets are pretty expensive when we play EA, GA etc.

@sampo > have very specific mathematically defined meanings here, and those meaning are probably very different than what a casual reader might expect.

Good point, upvoted, now I understand your previous comment better.

@sampo > I also like your "snake oil" metaphor, and I was happy to see your top comment on this topic.

I expected it to be downvoted out of existence given a few snarks that I yielded to.
I moved from Gmail to Fastmail too but I am not that happy. And no, Fastmail does not protect you from the NSA since Australia is one of the Five Eyes:

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

I moved from Gmail to Fastmail because my personal CRM's mail integration depends on Apple Mail. Gmail and Apple Mail do not go well together because Gmail is not IMAP (and Apple Mail has some issues too, even with the latest improvements). So with Fastmail's 'real' IMAP implementation, that issue was resolved. But Fastmail is lacking in comparison to Gmail in many areas, just two examples:

Filtering: Spam, phishing etc. filtering cannot compare with Gmail. And for your own filters, you cannot create them directly from a mail and see immediately the result as you can in Gmail. You have to create your filters via the setting menu and have to manually check if they actually work …

Security: I use 2-factor authentication as often as possible. Gmail has a very balanced approach to 2-factor authentication. Fastmail on the other hand does not allow you to use 2-factor authentication as a general security measure but only as an _additional_ login. And the configuration is not user-friendly. And since it is only an _additional_ login, you do not get (or need) backup codes or another backup way for your 2-factor authentication like SMS.

Fastmail works fine as a very traditional mail provider but that is not far away from what hosting providers offer anyway.

Your mileage might vary of course. If you are looking for a traditional mail provider with reliable IMAP support, Fastmail is certainly a great choice.
The lesson of Levison is that privacy assurances by email service providers are not necessarily trustworthy. Levison balked, but most wouldn't want to shut down their businesses.

For now the best bet is either to self host (it's not that hard, especially for most folks reading this) or to use something like ProtonMail where the content can't be routinely exfiltrated and the provider can't give the inbox keys to any third party.
Very related: Conjuring An Evolution To Serve You: http://lesswrong.com/lw/l8/conjuring_an_evolution_to_serve_y...
> Then I'll throw them all away and code my own. Possibly it will share a lot with one of the answers, what I would consider a good approach

So basically you're in the business of reinventing the wheel all the time. I feel sorry for your employer.
Can MySQL be a 12-factor service?
Fastmail and other Australian mail providers are not protected from the NSA, on the contrary, Australia is one of the Five Eyes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
> Copy and paste doesn't help you at all with this. In some cases it may prevent you learning essential lessons and hinder your improvement.

It annoys the heck out of me too when people apply for a programming job and cannot implement even trivial CS methods (like integer => string conversion with base N), then point out that they would just Google for a solution if they needed something like this.

But to be honest, a lot of programming wisdom is buried somewhere on the web as well as inside libraries that do not warrant reimplementation. Much of this googling and copy-pasting simply represents the fact that our traditional programming library approach isn't sufficient anymore for distributing correct implementations of particular functionality - probably too much overhead. SO is much like a large library with mediocre code, imprecise interface specification and without working imports, but it also contains many solutions to trivial problems that competent engineers should be able to implement straighforwardly...
What Can An Earthquake Teach Us About Database Design
Terry Tao has written an excellent (if mathematically advanced) post on Benford's law that is worth looking at for a more rigorous presentation.

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/benfords-law-zipfs-...
How big is the Mill team, by the way?
Again -- I didn't discuss or even think about US' military (or other) options for Iran. That is a totally different discussion to what I wrote about.

(I don't have enough information to have an opinion. E.g. something like the bombing of Serbia's infrastructure would be cheap and really bad for Iran, afaik. For a good answer you probably need to ask the military in "relevant" countries.)

And again, for the third time -- this has nothing to do with my point, so you guys can vote this comment down too now, since you obviously just can't give a relevant counter argument. 1/2 :-)
Fastmail seems to support IMAP Idle only. And IMAP Idle is not an option for mobile devices since the mail client has to keep the connection open all the time, so there goes your battery …
The transcriptions of a lot of those EWDs are here:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/transcrip...
Young Minds in a Critical Condition
There's game companies doing very profitably whose basic business model is - localization. [1] Word games work easiest for this case.

Localizing international game is also a non-trivial task (especially from western to asian markets), but it can easily lead to ten-folding your profits. [2] [3]

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Fugo

[2] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130423/191019/And...

[3] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130717/196436/Saf...
The only trustworthy way to make sure that only the recipient is reading your message is to use end-to-end encryption. Which for e-mail means GnuPG.
(Disclaimer: I am not an native english speaker)
The title of the article and of the algorithm (learn everything about anything) is a bit misleading. You might believe that it learns everything, period. Actually it's more about finding every variation of a "concept", I quote their website:
"a fully automated method that given any concept, e.g., horse, discovers an exhaustive vocabulary for it that explains all variations (i.e., actions, interactions, attributes, etc) that modify its appearance."
The no free lunch theorem states that, the performance of any two search algorithms are equivalent when averaged across all possible problems. This fails to hold in coevolutionary settings - selecting a champion through self play. In such cases there will be pairs of algorithms where one is demonstrably better than the other for all possible problems; a free lunch by criteria of the NFL theorem [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.100... ; also worth checking out: http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/12-10-017.pdf].

The No Free Lunch Theorem is also one of those limit statements that rarely impinges on reality. We are not interested in all possible functions - the majority of which will be of such complexity as to be indistinguishable from random - only those with exploitable structure. It's much the same reason for why, although kmeans is NP-hard, failing to find a good clustering is very often suggestive of an ill-posed problem with no interesting structure. If kmeans didn't find a good cluster, very possibly a good one does not exist (e.g. Clustering is difficult only when it does not matter; http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4891)
That seems fairly self explaining. By the definition of having more karma, they're better acquainted with the site and have successful experience appealing to the audience.