skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> and they note only the fact that the _vehicle_ violated the speed limit. The _vehicle's owner_ gets a fine in the mail shortly after.

There, fixed that for you. Now, I'll admit, a large part of the time the owner is also the driver, but with speed cameras it is not the "driver" who receives the fine, but the _owner of the vehicle_.

The one difference with "speed cameras" and the NSA's data mining is that measurement of the rate of travel of a vehicle (assuming a properly calibrated and non-malfunctioning speed measurement device) is so close to 100% accurate as to be considered 100% accurate.

No "connect the dots, infer here, infer there" data mining in the NSA's dataset will ever be even within several orders of magnitude of accurate as compared to a properly functioning, properly calibrated, speed measurement device.

And that underlying, non zero, error rate is what triggers the base rate fallacy issue in statistical analysis. When an occurrence of X is extremely rare in a very large population without X, then the test for X has to be impossibly accurate for the results to not be swamped by false positives. And this is a completely counter intuitive result, which is why it is so often overlooked.

Pertinent quote from the Shiner article at https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_f...:

"Let's look at some numbers. We'll be optimistic. We'll assume the system has a 1 in 100 false positive rate (99% accurate), and a 1 in 1,000 false negative rate (99.9% accurate).

Assume one trillion possible indicators to sift through: that's about ten events -- e-mails, phone calls, purchases, web surfings, whatever -- per person in the U.S. per day. Also assume that 10 of them are actually terrorists plotting.

This unrealistically-accurate system will generate one billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999% and you're still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day -- but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you're going to miss some of those ten real plots.

This isn't anything new. In statistics, it's called the "base rate fallacy," and it applies in other domains as well. For example, even highly accurate medical tests are useless as diagnostic tools if the incidence of the disease is rare in the general population. Terrorist attacks are also rare, any "test" is going to result in an endless stream of false alarms."
Specifically the issue is that if offensiveness is considered a perk of being amazing, then people who think of themselves as amazing are more likely to be offensive to demonstrate that they are amazing. Sounds silly, right? But that is what leads to prima donnas.
How would the world cope with a Spanish Flu like situation in 2014?
Indeed. One of my best friends died a day after my birthday, so this pushes me to make an extra effort for him.
I wonder how much of this is that relatively simple techniques work very well on small amounts of data, and that more complex techniques don't perform sufficiently better to justify baking them into a compression format?

That is, to some extent I subscribe to the compression-as-intelligence school of thought: compressors are tiny little AIs which try to predict regularities in the bitstreams they are given ( http://prize.hutter1.net/ http://mattmahoney.net/dc/dce.html http://www.danburfoot.net/research.html ).

But when we look at the state of the art like ZPAQ, the AI techniques used don't seem to be much more complex than, say, a one or two layer neural network which might as well be from the 1970s. You don't see anything fancy like deep networks or other modern staples like random forests.

So this makes me wonder: maybe compression performance has stagnated because we're not willing to provide compression algorithms extremely large amounts of data or runtime, and so simple algorithms really do perform best with the minimal resources we're willing to use for compression. (People are happy to run neural networks on thousands of GPUs with many gigabytes of data and wait weeks for training to finish; can you imagine a compression utility which required that?)
ToxMail experiment
Yes, thus the "(2000)" in the title. (Or was that not there originally?
Yes, but the word 'professional' technically describes a job that goes beyond doing work and getting paid. Some milestones of a profession:

1. an occupation becomes a full-time occupation
2. the establishment of a training school
3. the establishment of a university school
4. the establishment of a local association
5. the establishment of a national association
6. the introduction of codes of professional ethics
7. the establishment of state licensing laws

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession

Software dev has yet to come up with official ethics and state licensing for the most part, verses civil engineering for instance, which you have to be licensed to do.
That would be South Africa - Lesotho. Frankly Lesotho barely qualifies as a country though...its 100% surrounded by SA, 100% dependent on SA and its currency is linked 1:1 to SA.

It was more of an example though...borders pretty much don't exist in Africa. The only people that get formally checked are those using the roads & border posts. Once you're on foot its a free for all. Hell there are people repeatedly using deportation mechanisms as a free ride home after doing migrant work.

As for the issue at hand...I have little faith in Ebola being contained to be honest. The overall social setup is uniquely incompatible with containment. That being said Rwanda etc have demonstrated a reasonably approach to AIDS (awareness driven) which did impress me.
There's a reason vim & emacs are referred to as great 'editors': their advantages show mostly when editing & refactoring. They don't help you with code that flows from your head to your hands fully-formed much more than any other editor or IDE. Where they do help is in making actions like 'swap this block of code with this one'; 'replace the text inside these brackets with this', 'execute this sequence of actions on everything matching this regex' etc. efficient.
One of the active crater, Marum crater
My negativity comes from experience. I also like the theory and concept of it, but I haven't found it to help in other than very specific circumstances, and quite destructive in time and understanding when used even slightly outside those.

Terminology had nothing to do with the issue, in my particular experience.
I also thought that FE XXV was a misspelling, or bad use of notation. But it's (apparently) the usual notation in spectroscopy. http://www.nist.gov/data/PDFfiles/jpcrd200.pdf

FE I is not ionized Fe (26 protons, 26 electrons, 0 net charge)

FE II is ionized Fe (26 protons, 25 electrons, +1 net charge)

FE III is not ionized Fe (26 protons, 24 electrons, +2 net charge)

...

FE XXV has (26 protons, 2 electrons, +24 net charge)

FE XXVI has (26 protons, 1 electron, +25 net charge)

--

This is not the standard chemical notation. In chemistry:

FE II is ionized Fe++ (26 protons, 24 electrons, +2 net charge)

FE III is ionized Fe+++ (26 protons, 23 electrons, +3 net charge)
Since other people have responded to the parent by saying he's making it up... no, he's not. Abusiveness is prevalent in my experience throughout Linux and open source culture. For example, getting flamed for asking reasonable questions at a point where it makes more sense to ask than to keep digging.

Sometimes people deserve it, but often times they just don't. The people doing this are not paragons of judgement like Linus (arguably) is.
Then their sense of "north" would become decoupled from true geographical north, but would still suffice for navigation within the current reference frame.
That appears to be so, but the committee's application of that preference is rather self-contradictory. Without an explanation, the result would not even have been a contender for the prize, and it was Alpher who first provided the explanation.

As Alpher also showed that the universal ratio of hydrogen and helium isotopes can be explained by nucleosynthesis in the big bang, he seems to have been seriously overlooked.
Erik Naggum and Tom Christiansen come to mind.
Doesn't that argument work just as well for touch typing? Would you argue that being a touch typist is useless?

Do you ever use keyboard shortcuts... Ctrl-A, Ctrl-F, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Z, Shift-End, etc.? Extrapolate that to everything you might want to do when reading, reviewing, or editing a text file.
Sorry. jQuery wasn't loading for the demo page on SSL, feel free to check it out now.
It would be nice if we all can contribute a little bit you improve the repository :) I've already started giving a little bit of my time to it
Like swearing while meeting someone's parents, or loudly within earshot of a lot of kids.

Well; in many parts of Spain, everyone kinda curses in front of everyone --even kids and the elderly.

As strange as it sounds, 'tone' is in fact quite socially conditioned.
He writes code that helps most of the servers running important code function, lets remove linux totally from the computing environment and you wouldn't even get a DNS request through let alone a webpage returned.
People often mistake the succinctness of vim's commands as an attempt to save a few keystrokes typing, but that's only a side benefit.

The vim command structure makes it trivial to define transformations on common blocks of text; words, sentences, paragraphs (lines), blocks of code inside {..}, etc. It makes it easy to repeat those commands, by repeating them a fixed number of times, applying them to every instance in the file, or asking for confirmation around each one.

But, most importantly, it means that we can now extract that little bit of text-transforming functionality into a script we can save and bind to a new command (if it's something particularly reusable). This is really what vim is about to me - providing a language to describe text transformations, in the form of sequences of commands. This means that the way I code every day, conveniently saving me a few seconds like you mentioned above, is the same method I use when writing/editing plugins/macros for the editor to do more complicated tasks, like say consistently formatting every line of a log file that begins with [ERROR] and removing all other lines, so we can process it with some other tool.

Sure, you could write a script in [python/perl/ruby/etcetcetc] to do all that just as well, but the point is that Vim provides a nice little domain specific language right at your fingertips, optimized for working with text at a higher level, capable of handling one-off jobs as easily as big jobs over a whole log file or even as a little command to be reused later.
Historically, these rural areas have been overlooked by the major private utility companies, and communities have had to DIY if they wanted electricity, telephones, etc. One thing people miss is the reason these areas have municipal electric companies in the first place is it was the only option to get electricity by the communities. There's a history of locally owned utilities working well. Besides electricity, locally owned telephone companies are also popular around the region.

Another big thing is that the interests of the business community and the residents are aligned in rural areas. There was no carrier hotel or POPs by any other providers in Dalton. Before muni fiber in both Dalton and Chattanooga if you wanted high speed internet you'd have to get a private loop backhaul all the way to Atlanta and then also pay for the internet access. No national or local providers had IP routers with gig-e or above ports locally that I'm aware of. Not like in Atlanta where you can get a local loop (from multiple national providers) to a carrier hotel and have your pick of 50+ IP transit providers.

Muni fiber was the only option for affordable internet access for both businesses and residents in these areas, and the utility was guaranteed an almost instant monopoly on high speed internet for business users. They electric cos also had all the rights of way and customer billing infrastructure, pre-built client base, and were running fiber anyway for their own use in managing the power network.

I think there's a reason why almost every successful muni fiber ISP is in a rural area with a muni electric company, and that's that local governments probably shouldn't be in the ISP game, but in some cases it's the only option by communities to obtain high speed internet, and in those cases necessity is the mother of invention.

In larger cities, I think the model would have to be different, and a muni fiber network would be a transport loop only service and you'd get to pick which ISP to connect to on the other end, like DSL in the CLEC days.
A lot of it can also come down to pure fun. I really enjoy programming in vim, and I had fun learning a new tool.

It's not always about pure efficiency metrics. I code better when I enjoy using my tools.
I think it does. Some technology requires too much cost and opportunity to learn (SAP, and those costly IBM stuff). Some technology would never click with a person (I never click with J2EE despite being really proficient in Java, and I can't find the right way to work with Wordpress and version control).
How long did it take you to get used to that? Replacing the searched-for letter with (essentially) a marker seems a bit mind-altering.
Better to link to full description: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-down-everything.

While the "meme" is quite crude, I have to admit that the whole Ebola situation constantly reminds me of Pandemic II and a clone I recently played on Android.
Show HN: Goalheads SMS Accountability
> Why everyone tries to attribute something to software professional and redefine the meaning of professional.

(1) There are several definitions of "professional", one of which (from your own linkedsource, wiktionary) is "Of, pertaining to, or in accordance with the (usually high) standards of a profession." -- which requires the existence of such standards within the profession.
(2) The actual word at issue in the title of the linked article is "professionalism" which is specifically, in its primary definition, about standards/expectations within a community [1].

> The whole discussion about professionalism in the context of software reminds me of FSF attempts to convince us that "free" means something else which is not actually the same as "free" in every other context.

"Free", too, has many meanings, but being a reference to freedom (i.e., liberty) rather than absence of cost isn't a particularly obscure one. For instance, the common phrase "free country" does not mean "a country available at no cost". The idea that there is one thing that "free" means "in every other context" besides Free Software is, well, completely wrong itself.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/professionalism
Visualizing language usage in New York Times news coverage
The important thing to note about Erik's behavior is that occurred on Usenet, and unlike the mailing list or places like HN, on Usenet, there were (I have not looked closely at Usenet for about 12 years) no "owners" or moderators for a newsgroup and no way for the newsgroup considered as a "community" or a "collective" to enforce behavioral norms (e.g., around politeness) on individual posters.

Individuals regularly complained about Erik's nastiness, saying (correctly, IMHO) that he was scaring people away from Lisp.

Also, I never saw any of the intense admiration for Erik on comp.lang.lisp when Erik was alive that I have seen on Hacker News. The quality of his Lisp code and the insightfulness of his posts won him respect from many on comp.lang.lisp (specifically, those who accepted that there were almost no limits on speech on Usenet), but he would definitely not have been tolerated for long in most places on the internet where technical subjects are seriously discussed today (particularly HN, which has higher politeness bars than most such places) if he were posting with the same hostility that he did on comp.lang.lisp.
It hasn't been for months. I remember this 'secret' acquisition being reported around the beginning of February of this year.
pretty interesting.

What scares me about licensing is having all the non coding CMM professionals that evolved into Agile that may end up defining the licensing requirements.
Ask HN: [Desperate] Where to get urgent help with deploying app on AWS?
I spent already 12 hours trying to deploy a simple flask app on AWS (my 1st time setting up server etc.). What's the best place to get help? I don't want any forums or hints, I need somebody just take my AWS credentials and set-up things to make it work, the explain it to me what was done. Of course, I am ready to pay for help.
I do know that, but most of his public output was spent on vitriol that damaged race relations further. hence the part where I felt it was a shame.
Sam Stephenson (Author of Prototype and Rbenv) talks about that here: http://sstephenson.us/posts/you-are-not-your-code
ah, eye for an eye. well, that philosophy has certainly never worked before but maybe this time!
No, but it's cool how I was able to find a mechanical parser (not something based on machine learning) that translated that for me.

I might learn it in the future.
a misguided attempt that had the opposite effect. it's almost as if you are of the belief that racism can fix racism.
We are fairly quick to erase, forget or forgive the racism of white leaders, but seem to have a harder time doing so for those who oppose the majority's cultural status quo. I fear this has been used historically as a way to marginalize certain voices.

Certainly X is a complicated, difficult and contradictory figure, but also one who, through the autobiography, is able to capture a particular time and experience amazingly well.

I haven't read the book since high school, but the segment on conking stays vividly in my mind. It is a great example of one of those seemingly small details that X manages to use as mule to talk about larger issues of identity and assimilation.
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I edited the title to reflect this.
Defending the Indefensible: Do You Spam? Do You Auto-Bot?
I think that the overly critical culture of many European nations prevents younger people from trying out or voicing ideas because humans are human and don't like being humiliated , especially in public. This is something I think we should not emulate.
What is not commonly known is that just as we can do a "gravitational assist" or "slingshot" around a planet, we can also perform a gravitational assist off a Lagrangian point. Specifically, we can "bounce" off L4 or L5 as if it were a body of negative mass.

Not sure it's ever been done, though, but the theory is sound.
Eventually putting your hatred for marketing here on hacker news is also a marketing :)
Thanks for your comment, stewbrew - I updated my post.
You can always ask on IRC...

Does you app run locally already? If not, learn how to do that. Afterwards start an AWS VM with your favorite distro, and deploy like you did locally.
Yes. As the article states, theoreticians have already suggested 60 potential dark matter explanations. Teasing those apart requires careful experimental and theoretical work, and that's what the Nobel committee is (supposed to be) looking for.
Agreed. I don't know how anybody could use vi with escape unmapped. It's also very useful outside vi though, since esc is the default 'cancel' key in many cases. For example, most browser dialogs (and keyboard-navigable menus) can be closed with esc, and it works for many desktop dialogs too (at least on Linux).
This whole thread people discuss technical mitigations, and I'm thinking "man, this is such a clear case where a bit of law and the tiniest amount of civil damages totally would fix the situation, as long as the attacking person lives in a country with a level of rule of law." What a waste of resources trying to make something impossible, rather than just illegal. (I was thinking mostly of the anticompetitive acts and the title.)

Your comment actually shows a clear example, of how actually threatening legal action makes someone come to their senses, whereas any level of technical measures just gamified the situation.

This is just a case where we can collectively enter an arms race for technical solutions, or just use a bit of law and live in a sane society where this isn't on the competitive menu.
Search the archives and you'll find Paul Graham talking about the age distributions, and contradicting you.
Can you provide any concrete indication that anyone was actually discouraged from researching general-purpose lossless compression by a "system that maintains an eagle's eye on new ideas"? Looks to me like forcing a social explanation on a technical problem.

To me it simply looks like there just isn't much possibility of improvement in that field. Ultimately, you're limited by the pigeonhole principle.

Special-purpose lossy compression, i.e. video - that's where you see leaps and bounds in active research and improvement.
You're veering wildly off-topic. Tyrannosaurs said that "the evidence" shows that Linus's behavior hurts productivity, and that is what was being disputed here. You might value other things, but that isn't what's being discussed.
I'm both a vim and emacs user. I love vim for all the reasons everyone always mentions, but emacs comes out ahead consistently basically because emacs-lisp is so much more usable to me than vimscript. I find it much easier to create or modify plugins in emacs... Don't like the (often overfeatureful) functionality of a plugin? Change it!
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It sounds like you're saying that we should focus on things that give us a bigger bang for our buck today, instead of hoping that tomorrow we'll be able to turn the asteroid belt into a collider. And that's true. But we were more pessimistic about our survival prognosis during the cold war, and we seem to have made it through that. There surely is a middle ground between "let's see what this dollar will get us" and "maybe, in the future, when we have a quajillion dinaros".
That's the understatement of the year! I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it but I don't remember ever feeling as attached to a character except maybe in Shawshank.
As a long-time Asm programmer who has read a lot of compiler-generated code (usually for RE purposes), I completely sympathise with Linus - despite all the research and improvements, compilers are still very stupid, and will routinely generate code that no sane human would. The widespread notion that compilers can almost always generate better (faster or smaller) code than a human is probably closer to myth than reality. The one thing that is certainly true is they can compile orders of magnitude faster than a human can, and that's usually the main reason for using them.

I think the x86-64 ABI is also partly to blame for this mess - IMHO it's far too complex (e.g. the "red zone") and makes it easy for these bizarre edge-case-bugs to occur.

"Spilling a constant" is something I've never seen before and I'd probably WTF the first time I saw it, but thinking about it more carefully, it might actually be a wise choice in some cases - x86-64 unfortunately allows very few instructions with 64-bit immediate values, and those few instructions are very long (opcode + 8-byte immediate), so it could make sense to store some constant in memory, on the stack, for a while and put it in a register when it's needed with some moves - 64-bit r/m move with 8-bit displacement is 3/4 bytes. Of course that's not what GCC is doing here; that last move instruction is 6 bytes alone (mov + mod/rm + disp32.)