skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did take me a while to realize that Google long since made the pivot from tech company (the search engine that started it all) to ad company (where they make their money). After you look at the profit numbers, it really isn't all that interesting how they spin what they're doing -- or what they do to maintain a customer base that buys ads (such as creating a smart phone platform to stay relevant).

I'm not actively going out looking for other direct marketing companies in order to give them my data -- why would I do so with Google?
The ROI Of iCloud Photo Storage
This indeed fills a nice gap, promising!
There is always a tradeoff, even for projects where lives are at stake. We do not have infinite time or resources. Nobody but you used the term "loose standards"; the argument is that all projects involve a tradeoff between speed and correctness, even when some demand more of the latter and less of the former.
You do realise Iran is Iran today because of U.S. interference in Iran's fledgling democracy in the 1940's, right?

"Mohammad Mosaddegh or Mosaddeq[a] (Persian: مُحَمَد مُصَدِق‎; IPA: [mohæmˈmæd(-e) mosædˈdeɣ] ( listen);[b] 16 June 1882 – 5 March 1967), was the democratically elected[1][2][3] Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 until 1953, when his government was overthrown in a coup d'état orchestrated by the British MI6 and the American CIA.[4][5]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh
Thank you for your comment, hope I am not being too harsh, I just have been very peeved by my experience. The downvotes are already here, not unexpected.

From my experience, and this was a while ago so I will be glad if this has changed, it seems that the community prefers to push their techniques as snake oil and not try to nail down the characteristics of their techniques and show how to match it with a function I want to optimize. I want them to offer principled guidelines that would allow generalizing the techniques beyond anecdotes. I have no problems with communities pushing their technique, to the contrary, my disenchantment is with them not doing this.

I want the community to produce re-usable pieces of interesting/novel information that I can use when I am faced with optimizing a function.

You mentioned non-differentiable functions. Now lets take a look at a subclass of these functions: convex non-differentiable functions. There are very efficient methods for these.

Consider another class, lets throw away convexity, consider functions that are non-differentiable and very rough locally but when filtered with a low pass filter is well behaved. Then again we know what to do.

Consider functions that are difference of potentially non differentiable convex functions (this is a Huge class. The difference need neither be differentiable, nor be convex), then again we have good ideas about what to do.

I think building this decision function: Problem_type -> preferred_algorithm is a very useful exercise. What annoys me is that GA community seems not to be interested in this, and take cheap shots by presenting anecdotes.

Prove properties, of your techniques, I will buy them by the bagful.
1. When information is scarce, people are more prone to misguidance. In a world where there's no privacy, misguidance is much easier to spot and invalidate. This is when you don't know much about something that truth gets fuzzy and can take any turn.

2. What if you're loud and I can hear you when you're inside your "private space"? What if my camera captures you in your "bubble"? Can I get into trouble for capturing any information? Will I be able to use my Google Glasses in public (public hopefully being everywhere)?

3. No such space should exist. Your thoughts and actions should always have social implications. Why shouldn't natural rules apply everywhere equally?

4. I don't wish to manually control all this information myself. I don't want to worry about what's private, what's public, avatars, pseudonyms, etc.

Actually, I wish others would track my every thoughts and moves so that I could stop wasting my time manually inputting all this information in systems and such. But this is only possible through complete transparency.
>Personally, I'm more worried about the determined Pakistani dad who lost his wife and children in one of our adventures which completely missed the target.

I'm concerned about undereducated radicalised individuals from any country. No country is free of these, even Scandinavian ones.

The question is how many are created, what sort of access to weapons they have and what sort of support system is in place to make sure they don't implement their plans.

I note that the answer to any those three questions is not "more guns".
I've never seen the Microsoft astroturf so vigorous. The same thing happened when this topic came up on /r/apple. I mean, it's /r/apple, and the pro-Microsoft position was the VAST majority of the comments and upvoting. It makes me think that this iteration is on the chopping block. That, if they can't start really getting some traction with them, they're going to have to pivot somehow. Of course, it could be that there's a lot of love out there for the Surface, even on an Apple fanboi forum, because it's just that good, but, somehow, I doubt it.

Also, yeah, retaliatory downvoting. Yay.
Thanks for the feedback. I would encourage you to note that those blog posts are from 2010 and 2009, and my understanding is the platform has improved dramatically in the ensuing 4-5 years. I'm a Linux systems engineer, but for an app where I'm not going to admin my own infrastructure, I have been happier with App Engine than other PaaS options.
Encapsulated Services with Consul and Confd
You are allowed to write that in the Western world. Some people in USA and other countries live good lives by writing conspiracy theories about their own countries.

Try to do something similar in China or a similar autocratic state. It might be a problem to write that in Russia today, too. :-(

And hopefully, China will change. I've seen arguments that to get beyond a certain GNP/Capita, countries have to democratize (unless they have lots of oil, of course).

(What scares me, is the possibility with AI and language understanding -- to have a 1984 control state with a working free economy; future history as a foot trampling a face...)
Help Fund MetaFilter
> KG: I can only guess it was the trial lawyers. Why? Because they lost at every turn. If winning the debate wasn't an option, they were just going to call the game off. Which is apparently what they did.

Is that a "description of how trial lawyers killed patent reform" or a "I can only guess?"

The article paints this picture that "trial lawyers" can kill whatever bill they want. But the narrative is facially implausible. You're supposed to believe that trial lawyers get their way by throwing a lot of money around. But they don't have the kind of money Silicon Valley companies have. If it were just a matter of lobbying and money, the companies interested in patent reform could steamroll over the trial lawyers and the trolls.

Ars had some good coverage of this that paints a clearer picture. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/gridlock-strikes-.... Specifically, they note: "Early this morning, several groups opposing the bill denounced those provisions, promising they would be united in their opposition to any bill that included them. 'Many of the provisions would have the effect of treating every patent holder as a patent troll,' read a letter sent out by the Innovation Alliance, which was signed by the American Association of Universities and the biotechnology trade group BIO."

Meanwhile, this is the message that Apple, Microsoft, DuPont, Ford, IBM, and Pfizer endorsed just 10 days before the bill was killed: "According to these arguments, 'patent trolls' are bringing businesses to a complete halt and that software patents are a barrier to innovation. Some pundits even equate 'patent troll' litigation with the legitimate legal interests of inventors who are defending their intellectual property.

The same anecdotes and flawed studies are trotted out time and again to the delight of those who wish to substantially restrict the patent rights of operating companies in favor of their own narrow business interests. What these sound bites don’t tell you is that the cost of reducing or eliminating the incentives for innovation would be devastating for nearly all sectors of the U.S. economy. Worse, it could make slow growth permanent by ceding our position as a global high-tech leader to foreign competitors." See: http://partnershipforamericaninnovation.org/category/frompai

See also: http://wallstcheatsheet.com/technology/apple-microsoft-and-o...

If you think this is about money, follow the money. Companies with a trillion dollars of market cap come together to say "we think the patent system is great" weeks before the bill is killed. Companies like Qualcomm sign a letter opposing the bill the morning before its killed. Who do you think has the money?
I had some inspiration from PapaParse, which is why I went with a returned object.

However, after reading your comment, remembering how Ruby does it, and some thought, I decided to default to a returned array but provide the option for a more 'detailed' response.
Now I just think you're trolling. There isn't any taboo against sharing personal information, but there are consequences.

A truly tolerant society doesn't care what people are doing in private. The only reason to go to the trouble of collecting and analyzing private data is if you intend to do something with that data. The reason people care about privacy is that your agenda is not the same as mine.
yet, that is what most csv code does. heck, ms excell did that until a few versions ago.
> EDIT: What's the downvote for? A lack of citations?

Maybe because of them? The article about Timoshenko is written by a serious antisemitic nutjob.
First -- that is not relevant to my point that authoritarian juntas seems to need to make external enemies out of the world's democracies.

Then...

Uhm, that was 60+ years ago.

The world is a different place now, after the cold war. Before 1989, juntas could say to USA -- "If you don't support us, we'll get support at the other place." Now, mostly Saudi Arabia can say that.

So for informational purposes, since you like to complain about USA, do you have any examples from the last 20 years?

(Please check the Democratic Peace Theory on Wikipedia. Not even USA starts wars with stable democracies.)

Edit: I got a down vote on both my other comments, a few minutes after I wrote this. I guess this one is good? Some other explanation? :-)
Watch This DJ Pound The Default iPhone Ringtone Into A Crazy Catchy Dance Track
Awesome, thanks! will try it :)
LINUX's History by Linus Torvalds
"To use Google Groups Discussions, please enable JavaScript in your browser settings, and then refresh this page."
Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab's Behavior Wizard
Its not just about hacking your current CC but identity theft and opening new credit in your name and charging thousands of dollars before they are shutdown. The aftermath for the victim is years of effort getting it all straightened out -- including the nightmare of credit agencies not believing the client that they got hacked. Not to mention indifferent police departments that hide behind jurisdiction issues when the crime spans multiple counties, if not states.

With the leaked ebay info all they probably need is a SSN to open store credits and I am sure the crooks have other databases to cross with this info to get a complete set necessary to open an account. And don't forget about phishing calls, now that they know so many details about the users the crooks can call them and credibly pretend to be various institutions that the ebay users have a relationship with and thus coax more info out of them. The elderly are particularly prone to this type of scam.

I have a friend who's identity was stolen and it was a nightmare. The crooks opened numerous store accounts in his name, typically for furniture and electronic stores. They had the goods shipped to some address and then sold it, ironically enough, on ebay. All told they got away with over $80,000 in theft. In cleaning up this mess my friend discovered from the FBI investigator assigned to his case that he was lucky -- all the theft was in another state and so there was no disputing that it was him and the crooks exceed some magic number of dollars and thus it was an FBI issue not a local police issue. It still took him over a year of work to get it all resolved.

I recently got some obvious phishing calls which is why I put a fraud alert on my accounts, it cost me nothing and has no impact on my ability to use my credit.
You seem to not understand that Apple defines the platform; consistency has to start somewhere, and it's not going to emerge by committee.

Apple and 3rd-party developers extends conventions by exploring coherent and consistent extensions to the platform.

Mozilla choosing to use a font that nobody else uses, for the purposes of consistency across their browser, not the platform, has nothing to do with what benefits the rest of the ecosystem, or by extension, the users, and everything to do with what Mozilla wants.
Perhaps if those folks spent their time learning CS instead of protesting, they could actually ride the shuttle.
I think he had something else in mind, somewhat related to overfitting -- you're maximizing (too much) a metric over an unrealistic solution space, and that solution when applied to a real solution space won't behave as intended.

So those are "overfitting" for the exact quirks of the engine. I agree, it's a stretch, but not unlike in ML, it shows that optimizing too much will show quirks if your 'objective function/simulation' pair is not exactly equal to the 'desired objective function/reality', or if there is an innumerable ensemble of situations you might expect the solution to behave well.
Merging two compiler backends, despite both targeting the same architecture, is not a day in the park.

LLVM gives you several opportunities to make decisions on how lowering from LLVM IR to machine code will occur, it is not likely that both backends would have been able to handle the same sets of preconditions for each other.

A very obvious example to consider: relocations.

Relocations are tied very closely to the final object file format. I doubt Apple's ARM64 backend had any provisions to deal with the ELF relocations in the psABI and I similarly doubt that the AArch64 backend had any understanding on what kind of relocations were available to it if it were to target Mach-O.
This articles mentions current diamond prices and even shows a graph of prices over time. My understanding was that there has not been a real market for diamonds, and thus, nobody was able to show an accurate price.

Where is this price data coming from? Is there now a market where you can buy e.g. diamond futures contracts?
It's also a structural argument. I'm trying to think how to rephrase.

Maybe the first question to ask is: are there enough wealthy powerful people who look after their own selfish interests in the political sphere, to tilt the playing field in their favor, or are they offset (or more than offset) by other folks trying to tilt the playing field in favor of the 99%?

It's also possible to argue about whether the field can be tilted (or which fields are worth tilting).

(Edit) parent was calling out enraged_camel's comment as as-hominem which I can see what it was saying but it's sort of the crux of the discussion so...
Relativity kind of messes with our notions of time.

Any event that happens outside of our lightcone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone) cannot have any casual effect on us, even theoretically, until it enters our lightcone. Before then, the event literally doesn't exist from our point of view. Because of this, it's reasonable and valid to take the position that distant events "happen" when we're first able to see them happen. It's not the only perspective you could have, of course, but it can be a useful one and astronomical events are often discussed this way.
Consider starting at the default behavior with the documentation. For example, in the parse section, if no header option is provided, the first row will be returned as an array correct?

Start there: "The default behavior is to return each row of the CSV as an array." then "If the CSV file has a header, pass in {header: true} to get back an object using the header values as keys." then "If the file does not have a header, pass in ...".

Also, can a user override a header that is present in the data?
Since both Amazon and eBay are public I'd check their quarterly or annual filings, the info may be in the notes.
If you're using email then various governments (UK, USA) have it no matter where it's hosted. It's not under your control while in transit. At best you can encrypt it, but they'll take a copy of it anyway and burst it open if they need to.
The navigation drawer is ergonomically equivalent to the deprecated "dashboard," except for touching to the right of the drawer to dismiss it. It looks a bit better, but it works just as poorly, being a place where you can do nothing but go to some other place.

As for the warning against using a "bottom tab bar" that's an iPhone idiom that should not be carried to Android. BUT Android has a split Action Bar option that is an Android-kosher way of displaying commands along the bottom of handset-sized layouts, and automatically putting them in the top action bar on large tablet-sized layouts.

The screen shot next to the "bottom tab bar" discussion is a bit confusing. It does not actually show tabs in an action bar, as the caption indicates it should.
" As a programmer, there is a limitless amount of stuff to learn"

I absolutely disagree with this. I learn new things at least once a week about computer science in general. No one knows everything.

"They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google"

So, she relies on S.O. for all her programming problems, what if other people don't? SO is _not_ my first choice anymore. Man pages are such high quality.
It is remarkably easier, that far I can tell. The number of "building blocks" so to speak in a programming language are quite numerous for most tasks (i.e. not core algorithms) -- something I learned quickly which frustrated me when I started programming in HS -- unlike in math where dominating elementary logic/algebra allows you to solve incredibly complex problems just by thinking hard enough, in languages/libraries tools and problems are tightly coupled, and numerous.

So often the better way is just googling, seeing examples, and a lot of copy-pasting.
The major difference between a thing that might go
wrong, and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong, is
that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes
wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at
or repair.

-Douglas Adams
Court Approves F.C.C. Plan to Subsidize Rural Broadband Service
The US did not bring down an elected government in Ukraine. It was taken down by Ukrainian protesters. While I admit that having the threat of force cause elected albeit very corrupt politicians to flee is very sketchy its a million times better then what happened in Crimea and eastern Ukraine and especially in Crimea Russia orchestrated quite a bit of it.
It's likely the NSA reads your Fastmail at the breakfast table. Their servers are on US soil.

It would take some wicked mental gymnastics to rationalize that fact away.
Looks like they're running on 900MHz. To be effective, 900MHz antennas usually must be rather large. May limit the useful applications.

Edit: I stand corrected. http://www.slashgear.com/whistlegps-dog-tracker-first-to-use...
Here’s What a $100 Million Day Looks Like
Krugman is all wrong:

Giles: unlike what Prof. Piketty claims – wealth concentration among the richest people has been pretty stable for 50 years in both Europe and the US.

Krugman: Take, for example, the landmark CBO study on the distribution of income;"

Krugman then shows some graphs about capital income (which is not the same thing as wealth) which don't clearly demonstrate any change among the richest people. This is fairly typical Krugman, but I hope HN readers are smart enough not to be duped by this.
This "loophole" was even a plot device in a recent book, "Free Fire" by CJ Box. http://www.cjbox.net/books/free-fire
A lightweight WebGL library(evanwithlightgl.js)
As another example of using genetic algorithms for breaking things, a friend of mine wrote his dissertation [1] on using genetic algorithms for file format fuzzing. I believe there may even be some source code available on GitHub.

[1] http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/1347/
Happy to help. Let me know how it goes.
How about a licensing requirement for non-earning, non implementing companies? If they don't have revenues that haven't been awarded by a judge, require them to license according to a schedule determined by a regulatory board.
Piketty definitely needs to respond thoroughly to the errors that Giles found, and Piketty's response so far is too flippant and superficial. This is serious stuff and it deserves a serious response.

That said, those who don't want to talk about inequality are prematurely jettisoning Piketty's conclusions.

A very simple way to measure inequality is the ratio of the wealth of the top quintile to the middle quintile. It's easy to see how this ratio escalated over the last 25 years.

http://houseofdebt.org/2014/05/24/piketty-and-u-s-wealth-ine...

Spreadsheet errors notwithstanding, the inequality story is not going away.
Gulp.js + Highland.js
Richard Feynman's 'Computer Disease'
So you don't transact with any US banks? What are you implying?
D-Link don't actually do anything like what you or I might call R&D or even software development. These products are absolutely riddled with security flaws, but the brands haven't caught on yet. I think really understanding why requires a bit of background, which I'll attempt to provide:

Brands like D-Link solicit stuff from "white label" vendors (who most people will have never heard of); the models they like the best get D-Link branded and get a chance at shelf space around the world. The brands do have input into things like the web interface, enclosure design and/or setup procedures (e.g. WPS button). What the brands do is valuable, but they usually do not have deep insight into how the product actually works or how it's developed.

The white-label vendors are like artists, trying to produce "hits", and the major brands are like record labels who can introduce things to a wide audience.

Naturally, the brands try to find suppliers who can provide the best features at the lowest hardware cost. The software side is often not looked at very closely.

When a researcher reports a vulnerability, this usually goes through the brand. Unfortunately, since they're not very technical, the brand tends to mangle the communications to the white-label. The white-label is scrambling to make their upstream customer (i.e. D-Link) happy, not the consumer. Communications problems are exacerbated when (as quite often happens) the firmware developer at the end of this chain does not have strong english.

Finally, in the case where the firmware is riddled with such bugs, it's in the interest of the white-label to HIDE this fact from the brand.

I think what needs to happen is that D-Link need to have high quality security reviews conducted as part of their vendor / hardware selection process. It's likely to happen, but it'll take years for the benefits to flow through to consumers.

On the Telco side, most places are now putting their home gateways and so on through fairly rigorous security reviews during the selection and deployment process. The hardware vendors are slowly learning embedded security via that route. No-one likes to lose multi-million unit sales.

[source: I've worked both in wifi router firmware development and pentesting, including embedded device security reviews].
H/T to acqq's comment in an earlier thread[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7793878