skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't read the paper and probably won't get to it until after the weekend. So I'd be interested in getting a summary of their main claims.

But I do know a little about this subject and my understanding is:

(a) the essential claim is right that living standards in India declined in the 19th century.

(b) I believe this was largely caused by British interference and mismanagement. One egregious and well known example of this is the salt tax which made it more or less illegal for Indians to mine salt in India. This eventually was the catalyst for Gandhi's salt march.

Another example is the British East India company raising land taxes from 10% to 60% during the great bengal famine of the 1770s. The famine caused the death of about 30% of the population of Bengal.

(c) Art, culture and handicrafts were a big part of the Indian economy in the pre-British era. These were primarily supported by the kings and queens of the era. The British had no interest or use for Indian arts and culture and they got rid of most of this. And most of these people fell into subsistence farming with the obvious repercussions on the rest of the economy.

In general, most colonized countries had this terrible scenario where the rulers could set economic policies that had no repercussion on them personally. So they focused primarily on extracting as much wealth as possible with no regard whatsoever for the consequences of these policies because there were no consequences to bad governance by the colonizers. And it was precisely these policies which led to most colonized economies falling into mostly subsistence farming and the inevitable economic decline. I think the figures for India are something like 40% of the population doing agriculture before the arrival of the British ending up in about 70% of the economy being just agriculture a hundred or so years later.

I think talk about the lack of industrialization is a big smokescreen. Lots of developed countries industrialized really late - Russia, Japan, Korea, even Germany to some extent. The difference between these countries and India is not late industrialization but colonization. Because colonization systematically drained the country of both material wealth (i.e., capital) and technology (subsistence farming doesn't leave you with much time for educational accomplishments).
"Saving" vs. "Downloading" is not a duality we should entertain either. If it is downloaded, it is likely saved to a permanent storage, and maaaybe some process will eventually delete it. In any case this should not be the territory for law.
At first, i was disappointed that the Levenshtein Automaton is not some sort of golem. But then i read the rest of the post and realised that the Lucene committers have at least created a pretty impressive Frankenstein's monster.

The Python code; does it execute at runtime as part of Lucene, or is it only used in the build phase, to generate Java code which executes as part of Lucene? It sounds like the Python code implements the DFA generation, which would have to happen at runtime, surely?
>What kind of thing is legal to do once but not 65,535 times? //

Knock on someone's door? Once is fine, more than about 20 times [in a day] is likely to be seen as a nuisance. You'd have some sort of exclusion order long before you get to 2^16 times.
I consider myself a bit of a skeptic's skeptic, and I am not very fond of the actual article myself but chose to post it rather than the youtube interview I came across. I've read enough on this topic outside this single article at this point and I am pretty convinced that something strange is happening.

Posted here so someone can possibly explain how this strangeness is not strange at all. Unfortunate that I picked a "disreputable" website.

Why does this strange statistic exist?
http://www.slideshare.net/hammawan/deep-neural-networks :)
Don't forget plex, entire chrome tabs, podcasts, photo libraries etc.
I think you are right in your sentiment that deep learning is becoming over-hyped. I've written before that it's mostly a method of brute forcing the problem of AI that happens to work very efficiently on modern GPUs and other parallel processing units. That being said, for the tasks it does well on (mostly facial and other types of simple image recognition), it does extremely well compared to everything else out there. (And it may very well end up as a part of a future architecture that better simulates general intelligence.)

However, I don't think it is reasonable to assume that AI tools can only be valuable if they can be rigorously mathematically characterized. The "holy grail" of intelligence -- that is, actual human intelligence -- certainly can't or at least hasn't been mathematically characterized, and I don't think anyone will ever offer any "proof" (mathematical or otherwise) that the biological brain is inherently wired to arrive at or at least tend to converge to correct solutions to intelligence problems. And of course no one will argue that human intelligence isn't valuable!
Link to dubious sites without giving them “Google juice”
Seven Days Natural Sciatica Treatment- 7 Days Cure Without Surgery or Drugs
I've completely disassembled and re-assembled my (not recent) winnebago diesel, including rebuilding the engine. Almost every part on that RV has been redone by me, because I wanted to, and I didn't have to resort to any sort of safecracking tactics to be able to do that. If microwaves were built on top of a general purpose computing platform, then yes, I would want root access to them.

The only reason that total control is not granted by default is that companies fear that they will no longer control their customer. I can understand in instances where safety or device damage may be an issue (like, no, I dont want root access to a tesla for example), but for consumer devices, I should not be forced to use apples store to add software to my phone. I should not be forced to use googles software to use their hardware either.
Show HN: ReactJS Flux example with pagination
beautiful. use a coil as the water conduit and make it a continuous process with total heat supplied to the volume part of an inexpensive? feedback loop.

How fast does the water evaporate ? Can oil or gas be floated on top to stop it?

Could one just put water in metal cans painted black? Had no idea it only took temps of 130F to kill the pathogens that harm.
I hear O'Reilly's coming out with a book soon as well.
Wait, how handy will this be for adding backdoors once you have root?
Looks nice, but can 150 ºFahrenheit (65ºCelcius) "kill 99.9% of bacteria and pathogens" ? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_%28microbiology%... it would seem that's not the case.

Wonder if the article considers the effects of sun ultra-violet radiation to help in that process.
> In which case, he'll move on and sell it to the next guy.

Exactly what sort of situation are you envisioning, where there are multiple people who want to buy water (but nobody but you is dying of thirst), yet only one merchant selling it?

One can always make up improbable scenarios.

> People understand that this kind of behavior is wrong, so they don't do it.

That's one possible reason why people don't do it, but not the only one. There are game theoretic reasons why not doing it is adaptive.

In any case, if your argument is that people think it's wrong to take all the assets of someone who is dying of thirst, in exchange for one bottle of water, then you've shifted your ground. Your original argument was that people must assign infinite value to necessities like water, because they will pay whatever it takes to get them. Now your argument is that charging whatever the person dying of thirst will pay is "wrong". This is a different argument, and I don't see what it has to do with your original claim.

> I was replying to someone saying it's puzzling that people consider this behavior wrong.

Huh? The grandparent of my first post in this subthread was questioning your assignment of "infinite value" to water (or anything, for that matter). Perhaps you're thinking of another subthread?
Is this better than boiling water over a fire?
The hype is ultimately due to the very good performance recently (ie. much better than other methods, on learning tasks that people had been struggling to do better on for a long time) in a lot of practical applications like speech and image recognition.
See also Michael Nielsen's book Neural Networks and Deep Learning

http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/
(59) Write a Note
You can only edit/delete a post for an hour after it is posted.

The HN community in general is fairly against those sort of comments, preferring instead comments that add to the conversation by either bringing new knowledge or interpreting existing knowledge in a novel way. People are quick to downvote.

The only general solution is to always ask yourself "does this really bring something to the conversation?" before posting.

Also, you shouldn't worry too much about losing karma every once in a while for comments that you do feel are constructive. Karma is meaningless.
Clear Solar Concentrator from MSU Could Revolutionize Solar Power Generation
I wonder what are the drawback for such a gene since I would think the evolutionary pressure for it should be pretty strong. Or maybe there wasn't really much to be done at certain times and resting was the best strategy some 10000's of years ago.
There was a talk at JuliaCon about this exact topic, and they weren't using it for something I'd describe as "scientific programming". Hope it gets released eventually!
Inside the US, data services firms are governed by NSLs and the FISA court, offering impunity by way of legislated immunity and sanction.

Outside the US, they're subject to flat out illegal hacking, offering impunity by virtue of remote access and state-actor status. Though parties whose confidence is violated in that case aren't gagged from reporting this.
How much Tyler Cowen have you read? He has an ideology, but maybe not quite the one you think.

If wages do not increase, and demographics remain the same, social security does become a big problem. But that doesn't make him an alarmist that wants to gut social security. His typical writings prefer to avoid the problem the other ways: By either finding ways to increase wages, or through immigration.

He has also written book on the problem of how, while the last decade was great for world growth, it was very bad for the US and Europe: He calls is the great stagnation. So he is aware that more of the same could be coming. He just thinks most NYT readers do not really expect this to happen, as they think it'd be unprecedented.

The entire point of the article is not that 19th century India's problems were all that similar to the great depression, but that the US' current problems are a lot like India's, in the sense that we are facing a major supply shock as some major competitors industrialize and get better, while the country in question does not. In India, it was a country with major manpower advantage getting hit by new technology it couldn't adopt quickly. In the US' case, it's about a lot of countries that were competing mainly on cheap labor, and that now are catching up on technology, making the US' advantages disappear.
Doesn't the DoD already take Open Source very seriously?
You do realize this wasnt created "by the government" but instead Mikey Dickerson who was poached from Google to fix healthcare.gov

I think it would be worthwhile to read instead of "throw away the fucking playbook" site unseen
If anybody was wondering and looking at the forks, these scripts don't work anymore. They have converted the links to simple Javascript functions to link to chapters which stop these scripts from running now.
I use Linux (mentioned though not explicitly stated in my comment above). I've dug for config options and haven't found it. I've also searched for docs and posted on several forums without finding any resolution for this.
"Hinges allow the struts to move up and down like wings. While parked, or traveling through shallow waters, they can be extended to the side."

Maybe you missed this while scanning the article. This would allow the boat to sit high or low on the water; reminds me of the citroen cx which had high adjustable suspension.
Yep it looks like that. It is sad, it is a good interview.
Especially under the current copyright regime, finding some solution that preserves the intent of the creator to publish in a fixed format, would be a great component of a distributed publishing system. I don't think this proposal has as good a fair use defense as the Internet Archive wayback machine does.

In the world today, we often think of publishing online as providing access to something under our control. I think a technology that aims to solve these problems should embody a different spirit, one closer to "making public". The word "mine" doesn't need to imply ownership in the sense of exclusive control. I mean, "My children" is at least as meaningful a relationship as "my property". Some kind of copyright license ability built into a distributed document publishing system would be nice.
I agree with you that the calibre UI could use help.

*Being specific on where exactly it's deficient would be useful. "It's clunky" really isn't actionable criticism.

My own comments are sparse largely as I've found other elements (mostly the readers) so abysmal that I make little use of Calibre.
Gogs: a self-hosted Git Service written in Go
"Fun" and "conducive to a long and prosperous life" would appear to be at odds in this specific case. I don't find the characterization complimentary.
Even if it could kill 99.9% of bugs now, just wait until we get the inevitable HRSA superbugs after 20 years of this.

Though this does sound neat, and it's still much better to have than nothing at all.
This strikes me as a particularly creative and refreshingly simple device for sanitizing drinking water, but given the frequency with which we see articles with headlines like "So-and-so invents such-and-such device to clean water," the problem of access to drinking water would long since be solved.

That is, unless it's not really a technical problem.

Articles such as this don't often delve into broader issues of public health, education, or even poverty, but with an issue as complex as water access, perhaps we out to discuss it in a more complex context.
Komanda: IRC Client For Developers
What is amazing is that:

1) Never in the history of civilization has local knowledge storage (disk) and local compute been so cheap

2) Never have we had a larger free software ecosystem or more hackers to deploy free software locally

3) Never have we had more evidence about the differences in civilizational freedom between local and central storage/compute

What if backup/restore skills were taught alongside home economics? Is a home a place of both shelter & storage? Are we abandoning a set of possible futures because we want the "convenience" of "someone else" backing up our digital selves/souls?

"For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail."
Obama orders review of US police use of military hardware
Just imagine if every skylight was generating electricity? MSU engineers have also developed a new disc engine that is capable of 100 mpg

http://www.dailytech.com/New+Disc+Gas+Engine+Looks+to+Challe...
That was my thought. A small fire can heat a litre of water to boiling in a lot less than an hour. And you don't need to actually boil water to sterilize it, 160-180 degress F is adequate.
I just disagree with that. I don't think studying only one philosopher is a good idea. There are too many ideas, too many different things going on in philosophy to do that, in my view, if you want to really have any understanding of philosophy. I do agree with starting with the Pre-Socratic.
Show HN: Tripzzle – Discover best hotels based on interest and travel date
Because even the wealthiest person in the world only needs a finite, limited quantity of water (or any other necessary substance, like food) to stay alive. So wealthy people simply have no incentive to bid up the prices of necessities so high that nobody else can afford them. If they did, Bill Gates and the other top ten wealthiest people would own all the groceries and water in the world.

If one is really worried about certain people simply not being able to afford necessities during times of scarcity, like natural disasters, forcing prices to remain fixed won't solve that, because if prices remain fixed, people have no incentive not to buy things they don't really need (for example, water that they won't need to drink until after the natural disaster is over). So forcing prices to remain fixed just means goods get allocated by who can get to the store first, rather than who is willing to pay the most. What one would need to do is allow prices to increase, but subsidize purchases of necessities for people who truly can't afford them in a crisis. (Or one could set up a charity that bought the goods, paying the higher price if needed using donations for funding, to ensure they would be available to the indigent.)
This is my early stage attempt towards a perfect algorithm to analyze different parameters and suggest destinations and hotels based on user interests and expected travel dates, I'd like some evaluation on the results so far. Thanks in advance.
Yep.

Not seriously enough IMHO, but I was using open source in my job as far back as 2006, on gear that wasn't even that new.
It wouldn't surprise me at all - sleep preserves energy, does it not? And since food has been a scarce resource for the majority of human history, there must have been a pressure to sleep longer to preserve energy on one hand, and shorter to have waking time available to find more food (and do other things that ensure survival and reproduction).
This is just partisan politics from the Schauer campaign. The shutoffs have been temporarily stopped. Millions have been raised to help the truly needy. There were multi-million dollar businesses that were also not paying their water bills. You will never get politicians to take bold risks such as rebooting Detroit if you rip them every time there's a problem. Both Democrat and Republican governors have been kicking the Detroit problem down the road for forty years.
The BIG problem is the US military-industrial-congressional complex won't go down quietly. If 'they' see the BRICS countries getting ahead in industry and technology nothing will be off the table, including a nuclear WW3.
Socrates' ideas, or rather Plato's representations thereof, belong to a cultural context radically different from our own and have absolutely no relevance. Greece was undergoing a transition from orality to literacy at the time. It was also in the early stages of actual educational institutions. What the distribution of a few manuscripts in that context meant relates to nothing in our modern world.

Not to be a jerk about it, but the misuse of history is characteristic of very pernicious rhetoric.
I could care less what framework is used, and am fairly positively inclined toward Qt in general.

Some frameworks (GNOME in particular) lead to a shit-ton of user-hostile design decisions.

How you use the framework matters a lot. This is where Calibre needs a lot of love. The interface isn't intuitive (I've got v1.25 open now, and ... it's a mess).
The storage implications are really not so bad. You would have trouble ever breaking 100 GB unless you are some kind of bookmarking mutant.
One proposed reason for the evolution of sleep is facilitating neural plasticity (growth and change). These studies merely show benefits in the short-term. An interesting hypothesis to test is if people with this mutation, over the long-term, have the same cognitive skills as those without, assuming both parties get the amount sleep they naturally need.
You're equating syntactic abstractions one-to-one with pieces of plastic.

What?
"Of course, as Pack himself is quick to point out, even combined with Fu’s data the mutation sample remains miniscule. So now, in an international collaboration with existing sleep-study cohorts spanning the U.K., South Korea, and China, Pack is in the process of gaining access to somewhere between half a million and a million participants. The next step is to sequence the twenty or so CLOCK genes (the genes that are involved in regulating circadian rhythms) that have been identified, to look for both the mutations Fu and Pack have found and any new variants that may affect sleep physiology."

Prediction: like all other human behavioral traits, sleep length will turn out to be influenced by multiple genes, each with small effect. That is the consistent finding of all human behavior genetics research in the genome-wide-association-study era.[1]

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3778125/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498585/

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/01/16/1322563111
My TV remote has a keyboard - it's absolutely garbage.
It might not be a good idea to push compile-time bugs to runtime.

EDIT: Whoops, I misread your comment. Sorry about that.
There were other differences - e.g. people originating from colder climates have on average stronger willpower (as those that didn't work hard in the short summers were dieing of starvation and cold in the long winters).
> The utility is a company: But humans actually need clean water for basic life.

There are ways of getting assistance, it's not really clear how many of those due to have utilities shut off have pursued them.[1]

The bigger issue is that Detroit is a wasteland, and it's not fair to the poor that they're stuck in an economic cesspit. I'd be all in favor of programs to get Detroiters relocated to places with better employment prospects.

[1] http://www.needhelppayingbills.com/html/need_help_with_elect...
The American economy is relatively flexible, and various candidates for future growth are strong: technology, health care research, energy and higher education.

Everyone knows that Tyler plays fast and loose with the facts, but this statement really plumbs new, uncharted depths. Healthcare research seems to mean the pharmaceutical industry, and that field has been in trouble for 15 years. The major players have been on an outsourcing spree for the last decade, research is being gutted, and despite all that the development pipelines are not doing well. Energy is by its nature an extractive industry, which have this habit of creating some very rich people and many very poor people.

Finally higher education: higher education in the US is in trouble. Research is being done only at top-20 places. Even there the money is getting tighter, at any conference you'll go to you'll hear that so-and-so is shutting down their lab for lack of funds. The rest of the universities are repositioning themselves as vocational colleges, where students are paying for workforce training. It used to be that companies would train their staff, but nowadays a college diploma is the equivalent of a GED; you cannot afford not to have one. And then there is this proliferation of useless Masters degrees. Higher ed in its current form is a growth industry, but the country would be better off if it weren't.
both supposedly from Uzhmash in Dnepropetrovsk. Situation with Ukraine will in teh long run be similar to Gaza strip - one can call is stable as it has been the same for many decades :)
3D-printed vertebra used in spine surgery
In SQL Server, CTEs eventually slow down then temp tables win because they can have indexes.