skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But a serious amount of tech for their time and era/system. They had industrial scale rooms with steamers to open up envelopes and the likes.

Also the great east berlin telephone line distribution node: 50 wires coming in, 100 going out ... only 50 of those were for households.

All of this can be seen in the Berlin Communications Museum.
DJI Phantoms and the more common clones by Walkera and other manufacturers are well known for going on "journeys of self discovery." When connection with remote drops, they are supposed to come back home, but some just tend to fly away, never to be seen again. One of those dropping on your head from 200 feet in the air will kill you!
More to the point, a low quality wikipedia article on HN's front page.
With things like PaX the trampoline method won't work, gcc now creates thunks, which are essentially heap allocated thunks of memory (hence the name) with PROT_EXEC.
GLB was signed by Clinton, but it was sent to his desk with a veto-proof majority. Destroying the American banking system was a bipartisan effort in stupidity.
IRS had a contract for email backup
It reminded me of the Ghost Hunters show, where they are constantly playing spooky audio that they recorded and finding words and sentences in it. It's almost always the same format as in this article: play some spooky sound, then say what they think it says and then play it again (with subtitles). You can almost always hear the words after they are suggested. But then they treat this like actual evidence of ghosts :-/.

Also, this phenomena is occurring to me frequently as my 2 year old nephew is learning to talk. He tries to communicate with me, saying a word over and over and it doesn't click until he points at the object he's talking about or my sister tells me what he's saying and then his mangled speech suddenly makes complete sense.

Our brains are so cool.
That's why the library is the only civil service you can trust. They delete your records when you return books, unless you opt-out.
That's a very interesting question. In your example, finding the identity of one or two drivers might be possible easily, but finding the identity of many drivers would still be very difficult. I guess whether it's anonymous or not depends upon how strictly you think anonymity is defined.
Ugh.

> Functions with about 16 parameters.

I am reminded of a talk by Kevlin Henney [1]. He mentions this quote from Alan Perlis: "If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some." [2]. Kevlin goes on to give anecdotes about code he has encountered or heard stories about while consulting / teaching - the record was a function with around 370 parameters, and that function was still growing.

I'd prefer to see a function with a dozen arguments than a "function" that takes no arguments, returns void, and secretly communicates using global state. Explicit horror beats surprise horror.

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/architecture-uncertainty-...
[2] http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
The term "reasonable expectation of privacy" has a very specific meaning. It is a test that courts use to determine whether a search violates the fourth amendment[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy].

If you choose to start shouting at someone on the street and the police listen in (without a warrant), then you can't claim that your fourth amendment rights were violated - you made the choice to communicate in such a way that any number of people could have heard you. Subjectively, you couldn't have reasonably expected your conversation to remain private and objectively, society does not generally regard shouted messages as private. On the other hand, if you have a conversation in your home then it would be a violation of the fourth amendment for the police to listen in without a warrant because a person does not expect to be overheard in one's home and society considers one's home to be a private space.

The point isn't whether or not the police were technically capable of listening in. The point is that in order to claim that an act was private you actually have to take some steps to demonstrate that you want and expect it to be private and that society in general would expect it to be private. If you seal a letter in an envelope then you clearly want the contents of that letter to be private. On the other hand, if you write something on the outside of the envelope where any number of people can see it, you have a much more limited claim on how that information is used.
While I tend to agree with your overall point, I was asking the question for a different reason.

I find it useful to examine my opinions from different perspectives, even ones I disagree with, in order to better understand the crux of the issue.

Again, while I personally agree with what you say, I think it's a bit assertive to say "proactive mass surveillance does not work". I know several people who would argue just as strongly that their work is critical to national security.

This is a bit nitpicky on my part, but your statement "as long as there is zero benefit it seems pointless" is a tautology. I think the argument is regarding whether there is zero benefit.

Again, I don't mean to criticize your beliefs; I'm just interested in openly exploring different perspectives to try and understand the situation better.
is there a way to gerrymander the state to give advantage to one political party over another?
I wonder how they deal with tyranny of the majority

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

If direct democracy were implemented in the US, everyone would be forced to pray to the Christian god, tithe 10% to their church and force-feed creationism to the kids.
Bezos has said he believes AWS could be amazon's biggest business.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/jeff-bezos-believes-aws-cou...
In northern Australia, the Aboriginals of Arnhem Land are also being trained by archaeologists based in Darwin.
I'm not sure exactly what good it would do since the data are already out there. I guess I could re-anonymize the ids and see if I could get the links replaced.
> Unit testing applied to a highly monolithic code

Do you (or indeed anyone else reading) have suggestions for getting other forms of testing in place around legacy monolithic code?

Perhaps this is a fairly ill-posed question without more context.
Lambda calculus is model for abstract computation. Any computation. The fact that it can express and operationally reduce arithmetic is just a proof of usefulness, but it's not supposed to be limited to that.
Yeah, this is a really good point. I'm going to try to reach out to someone in the government on Monday. I don't really have many contacts over there, so if anyone has suggestions on how to navigate the bureaucracy, I'm all ears.
Everybody needs insurance, in one form or another (at least in the US).

I wonder if a company like Google that can possibly determine non-obvious risk factors, has a major advantage here.

E.G., imagine if people who searched for the term "dui attorney" were 40x more likely to be involved in a vehicular homicide as a defendant. Google could refuse to insure those searchers, and, as such, significantly cut everyone else's premiums (giving them a major competitive advantage).

I have no special knowledge about the distribution of insurance payouts, but I would guess it follows a power distribution. If so, removing the top 10% of payout insurees could HUGELY decrease insurance payouts.

Does anyone know if the major costs to auto/home/health insurers are payouts?

Excluding healthcare, do people care if folks who exhibit risky behavior pay higher premiums? In the US, young men (actuarian-proven to be higher risk) pay higher auto insurance, and everyone seems fine with it.
Life for a letter can be a bit rough. Most likely, those are just from automated sorting machines.
Lambda calculus is the computational equivalent of compass and straightedge geometrical construction[1]. It's about starting with fundamental and simple components and building higher-level abstractions upon these firm foundations. Euclid's Elements, which heavily relied on this approach and made it famous, was arguably the most influential mathematical text ever written.

By combining simple constructs according to simple rules, you can be certain that more complex constructs are themselves correct. This also often highlights simplicity and elegance in the underlying structure of otherwise complex constructs.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass-and-straightedge_constr...
Ranking the top 20 angel investors
Sure. Have you looked at the PGM class on coursera for CRFs? The slides are a great condensed version of koller's book on PGMs. NLP is a really easy context they are used in. With that, I would recommend the stanford NLP coursera class (the first one from a few years back) that covers viterbi, CRFS, and general sequential models.I know I'm recommending a lot of MOOC content here, but I would add here that I think they provide a great overview from which to break in to the papers/other literature on the topic.

For SVMs, outside of the typical research you'd do on wikipedia, I unfortunately haven't had much specific experience with SVMs. I used them quite a bit a few years back for relation extraction and other algorithms, but I'm mainly from an NLP background in that context.
PDF-XChange Viewer Pro 2.5.308.2
A welcome return to the Acorn/RISC OS days where "100% ARM assembler" was a back-of-the-box boast for many games and applications (Sibelius).
i've been listening to albums on youtube lately - it recommended me this the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1v3NeGtm_Y

it's pretty crazy. i (re)wrote a lot of code to it yesterday.
In search of perfect sound – The Denman Horn
Actually, no it can't. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy
I came across about Torch in this FB comment by Yann LeCun:

I have moved to Torch7. My NYU lab uses Torch7, Facebook AI
Research uses Torch7, DeepMind and other folks at Google use
Torch7.

Apparently it is used in many deep learning labs. I think that in Toronto they mostly used Matlab and Python, does anybody know if this is still true?

https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10152077631217143?...
If you can't pay then you can't pay. Don't make yourself crazy over it, and you'll certainly not lose your house.

Even if recorded on a credit report it does not adversely affect your credit score.
It wasn't always freshmeat.net, though...

https://web.archive.org/web/19980419152907/http://freshmeat....
Yes. He showed up on the reddit post and started abusing the commentators. See for yourself. http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/28r1sz/why_linux_and_...
how to teach recursion
IMHO, it doesn't matter how the quote was created.

What matters is Mr. Jobs said the quote. He said artists both copy and steal. He did not say 'create'. Can we agree on this?

And following may be common knowledge on HN but let me just bring them up for the benefit of those who may not know.

1. Remember the $350 bonus Mr. Jobs did not give to Steve Wozniak, which was rightfully Wozniak's. This bonus was profit from their very first join venture, designing board for Atari.

2. And before there was the Apple Inc. the Computer company, there was Apple Corps Ltd, of the Beatles fame. The name of 'Apple' in Apple Inc (the computer maker) was 'copied' without authorization from the Apple Corps Ltd (of the Beatles). There were multiple litigations between them over the name.

I really hate to bring these up with Mr. Jobs gone but let's not forget these things happened. He was a great figure no doubt.
Has anyone tried gambler's ruin in real life? Theoretically, you have the best odds of doubling your money if you put all your money down on one hand.

Given most casino games, your odds of winning a single game is less than 50%. So lets say you encounter the best case; your odds of winning are 49%. Even then, for every game you play, you are more likely to lose money.

Probability of winning = .49

N = number of times you play

.49^N will become a smaller number as N gets bigger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_ruin
The EU has it out for Google in particular. Why don't they go after the sites that have the information in the first place?

Regardless, if you have a news story about you, that you did something, it should be there as information forever. If the story is correct, then it's there. 20 years from now, you shouldn't have the right to say to some search engine that just happens to index it that you don't want it indexed anymore. The facts are still the same. The news story is still accurate. The site that has the news story still has it. Just because it may paint you in a negative light 20 years ago still doesn't mean you get the right to expunge that from the public record.

The implications of this are just chilling and far reaching.
This is pretty much how it works in my country (Australia). Those earning under 55k are not required to make repayments, and those who never earn that salary do not repay a cent.

The government of course loses money on this scheme, but the people would tear down any government that tried to revoke it. It's an important and fair middle ground between national free ride and a USA-style 'sins of the father' system. Also note that the repayment amount is nowhere near the true cost of the degree, due to Conmonwealth-supported places.

If you have time to work your way through school at current US tuition, you are probably taking courses below your level.
These guys win early engagement by being free and having awesome functionality.

Want to tune it to actually work for your needs? Trying to figure out how to use our 'RAMOptimization' library? Better start buying some training!
> Holy shit.. can you imagine someone just plotting all the trips from a single gay bar? Listing off all the connected residential addresses? And not only that, any subsequent trips home from those addresses the next morning? Taking the walk of shame to a whole new level!

There are some weird assumptions going on here, in addition to the fact that you grossly overestimate the precision to which GPS data can de-anonymize individuals who are using a shared, public transport mechanism in a city as densely crowded as NYC. The density of people and businesses alone makes individual identification difficult, not to mention weak GPS signals and low accuracy with skyscrapers every hundred yards. Is there any evidence that the logs have enough accuracy to do what you're claiming, or are you just wildly speculating?
The SCOTUS disagrees with you. There is no such requirement to "take steps" to have an expectation of privacy. The deciding factor is if the situation is such that the "community in general" would expect privacy to exist in the type of situation being examined.

A good example is how the SCOTUS ruled that there was an expectation of privacy regarding IR cameras. Very few houses have any kind of real shielding against IR leakage, but the use of IR cameras was still rare enough that it would be unreasonable to expect the average citizen to take specific steps to defend against that intrusion. The average citizen expects they already had a reasonable amount of privacy.

The implication, of course, is that this is something that can change over time. If IR cameras became commonplace, it would be reasonable to assume a lack of IR privacy. At that point, it would indeed be prudent to expect people to take additional steps toward securing their privacy.

This "community standards" distinction is particularly relevant re: data mining, because relatively few people have any idea how powerful the table JOIN can be, and as such DO expect a certain amount of privacy regarding their data.
Flinch Pricing: How one woman increased revenues by 10x in 10 minutes
I think that's because 1) it was submitted by gwern and 2) it's weekend
Idea for an app but no programming skill. how to bring it alive?
I've an idea for an app, but have no programming skills. How can i bring it alive? if i hire a developer, how to believe that the dev won't publish the app himself? Advice please.
Upvoted the story because I am keen to see some discussion around it. I have kept an eye on Torch7 but there have been a few things that make me a little wary. A prominent one is the sheer number of unreplied to posts on their mailing list. Numpy/Scipy and Julia lists seem much more welcoming and prompt. Even if people there cannot help they do respond.

Now if we ignore the social side of it, I would really like to know why Torch7/Lua and not say Numpy/Scipy/Theano or Julia for that matter. To me scratching an itch is a fine enough excuse, just wanted to know if there are any compelling technical advantages to do it this way.

Some aspects are quite promising, one is to JIT compile away most of the FFI glue, another is interaction with Numpy/Scipy code. There have been a few projects to allow seamless back and forth between Lua and Python, so if that can be done with Numpy and Cython that is indeed quite an exciting possibility.
I had read the text beforehand, and could make out parts of the words but I was surprised how much clearer the distorted recording became once I heard the original.
I think it is fascinating that I can hear it and my wife can't. The only difference I can imagine is that I play music and she doesn't so perhaps I've trained myself a bit to pick out structure. Conversely she can see those 3D images when you hold up the picture to your face and I can't.

It gave rise to another thought, is there an audio equivalent of color blindness? Not deaf so much as unable to process certain sounds?
Yeah clearly not your average first year.
Thanks! This is helpful. I'll check both out courses.

The recommendation for PGM sounds promising. I am familiar with Bayes theorems (through the first offering of the AI course on what later became Udacity).

I had signed up for NLP on Coursera but dropped in it the middle since I was already familiar with the contents till that point (having read most parts of both Christopher Manning's and Dan Jurafsky's books already). I'll check the materials for the rest of it.
It's like they don't care at all about the Constitution anymore.
Google Voice Transcript of a Busy Signal
This is marginally tangential (because the Intelligent Mail tracking programs are completely separate from the tracking the article references), but tracking mail is hugely important to the USPS. Giant postal customers who individually mail millions of pieces every month want end-to-end routing metrics, and the USPS itself uses tracking for their own internal reporting. It's how they know quickly when a service facility is overloaded, and it's how AT&T knows your bill last month made it to your front door (or at least to your local Post Office).

Assuming you're in the US, check some of the mail you've received recently; do you see a jagged-looking barcode on the front? It can uniquely identify that specific piece, as well as the mailer and any special services applied--mostly requesting higher levels of tracking. The metadata for that piece lives in a big postal database in the sky, where mailers can request access at varying levels of detail. The USPS is way past just delivering mail at this point.

(Source: I was a developer in the postal mail industry for six years.)
Yup, Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD). It tends to run in families, too.
Is your other code like the SMTP client also available for download? I love looking at small but elegant code
I don't know where you got this idea, but it is just wrong. Of course, employers are free to do whatever back of the envelope calculation they want to decide your salary, but the law in France, the UK, and most other countries is about "paid leave" and that's exactly how it works.
So if somebody wanted to mail anthrax to, say, a government office, how would this stop that? Dropping off a stamped envelope in a mailbox in a different neighborhood with no witnesses is not likely to get intercepted.

And of course government efforts in "The War on Terror" would never be abused, right?
And why is that? If you make a profit, you sell something for more than the sum of its parts. You add value and get something in return. Property is just stuff you kept after an exchange. Money is a medium of exchange. Where is the unfree part?

IRL, there are lots of problems (in general), most of them not from markets, but lots also because people make bad decisions in markets. I think those are communication problems, though - people not agreeing on values. So many people scream "market failure", but nobody ever screams "voter/election failure", when people make bad decisions there that cause problems.
Proactive mass surveillance does not work.

Sure it does, just not for what it is claimed to by its proponents. The real point of proactive mass surveillance is to perpetuate a culture of mass fear, a chilling effect on free speech and to maintain the socioeconomic status quo; that is, to limit upward mobility and destroy any notion of wealth redistribution before it gets off the ground.
I think the more you reduce your pricing based on being able to exclude buyers using secret criteria, the more you run the risk of failing to exclude the riskier population, and under-pricing your product as a result.

If the conditions for purchase are stated in the contract, then in a sense, you know exactly what you are getting, and you can price more accurately.

If pricing is based on something like secret tracking or user surveillance, these are necessarily factors the buyer hasn't explicitly agreed to disclose to you.
I've been using Financisto (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.orangesoftw...) for about two years now, and absolutely love it!

A little rough on the eyes, but absolutely great in every other context. Free and OSS as well! :)
I'm actually sure that overdue medical bills ARE included in your credit rating, from personal experience, I can tell you, not paying your med bills will kill your score.
If Google is selling insurance, it's only because they have created an AI compelling enough to fully automate the servicing of those policies.

If there's one thing Google will not stand for, it's highly trained customer support reps.

In that context, insurance is an interesting automation problem which is totally solvable.
The phrase "take steps" was a bit imprecise. My intention was to say that by having a conversation in a private space, such as your home, you're putting yourself in a position where privacy would be expected.
Noone is "going after" anyone. Some guy sued Google, the court decided the case they were presented with (and said some things that are applicable outside the specific case).

As for the actual matter, I disagree. In particular, there are quite a few steps between "expunge from the public record" and "make it the most visible thing on the web", where the latter quite clearly is in conflict with the goal of resocialization in the justice system, for example.
Passwords in plain text
Low quality though it is, it was a great bus stop to exit at. I spent about an hour reading about Peral's submarine, torpedoes, and dreadnaughts. Good trail-head, if nothing else.
Yes, that's the part you SEE. But I'm pretty sure your boss doesn't pay your "paid vacation" out of his own money - it's part of the calculation of the total package they have to pay you (including your desk, the money they might have to pay to headhunters to acquire you, ...), mandatory state "insurances" or fees.

They only pay the value of the package - you can calculate your hourly rate on total yearly pay / yearly hours worked, or are free to imagine you get paid total yearly pay / total hours of the year, and then boom, you're also paid for the vacations, for weekends, for the nights and so on. But in fact you're only paid because your boss knows what value you provide and how many hours you'll be there that year.
Relations in RavenDB
http://www.eeweb.com/blog/extreme_circuits/voice-bandwidth-f...
What is the weird assumption? That GPS is precise enough to identify addresses? Not all of NYC has skyscrapers every hundred yards.. that's only portions of Manhattan. It's 5 boroughs.