skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Convolutional neural nets have been around for a long, long time (early 90s? or maybe late 80s) and they just needed more data (and a few training tricks :) ).

The state of the art has become a lot better in terms of training deep (multi-layer) neural networks. The naive approach (start at a "random" weight setting, use gradient descent) that works on a convex error surface fails catastrophically on deep, complex neural nets. (Shallow neural net training is a non-convex problem as well, but seems to be "less non-convex" in practice.) In the past 10 years, people have become better at getting past that.

Theoretically, only one hidden layer is necessary for neural nets to be universal. Thus, for a long time, most research focused on single-layer networks because those were "good enough" to model any mathematical function. The problem is that convergence, for single-layer nets, can be very slow (especially given that you're often doing stochastic gradient descent when working large data sets). Single-layer nets are often very difficult to audit. There's a lot of "cross talk" where unrelated features are mapped to the same "space" in the network. So you have a "black box" that is hard to interpret.

Deep neural nets (which is what ML researchers call "deep learning", until MBAs start abusing the latter term, as they have with "big data") have come back into style over the past few years, due to recent research into how to make them actually perform, and findings about superior convergence with the right conditions. In deep nets, there's often a problem of signals either amplifying or vanishing as they propagate throughout the net. The former leads to saturation (the neural net moves very slowly from a suboptimal but flat place on the error surface) and the latter is too linear and unlikely to pick up interesting features. Even now, making deep neural nets not sensitive to initial starting conditions is an unsolved problem, but there's been a lot of progress.

I would hazard the guess that the convolutional technique is a lot more useful in deep neural networks than it is in single-hidden-layer neural nets.
Better, if you still have contacts, I encourage you to reach out to some of those devs involved. Otherwise, read wisely.

It seems that Bukkit had just been going on too long under it's quasi-relationship with Mojang. Semi-blessed but not supported (and still technically illegal). Energy drained to a point where the developers realized that as fun as Bukkit was they might like to work on other things after so many years.

This point has been almost entirely lost on the reddit lynch mob. They've only been focusing on the secondary event, the DMCA take down and it's effects. This was also significant, but I don't think people appreciate that even if Bukkit were still up and, like you said, "devs [...] keep adding features [...] upgrading", the very heart of the project was already walking away.

I really wish Bukkit would have been able to find a better footing to build atop of than relying on distributing Mojang's code sans license, putting them in a legal bind. If they would have had that technological footing early on, I think Mojang would have actually been more legitimately supporting of more of their efforts. Instead, they only turned their eye to the violations, and skirted the issue leaving it ambiguous.

Eventually the ambiguity without change got to the core team and they decided to close up shop.
And poor real world performance will be blamed on lingering 16 bit code in Windows!
>it is backed by BTSX. BTSX does have value.

Which makes it pegged to usd how?

The only way a dollar peg can work is when there exists an entity (it doesn't matter what it is, it can even be an alien civilization) with very big amount of dollars, ideally infinite. When the pegged currency gets too cheap it has to spend dollars to maintain the peg.
There's no long-term reason for anyone to spend their dollars to maintain bitusd peg.
The short-term reason is a modified pyramid scheme: as long as the cost of maintaining a peg is less than the influx of new money from people buying into btsx because of currently working usd peg (and perhaps others), it will be maintained by major btsx holders.
41 year old you might regret 31 year old you taking you out of the game. A lot of the type-A people who dominate the coding and business worlds might not be happy with just one big paycheck while they watch their peers continue on.

I can't imagine Bill Gates selling MS in '86. He wanted to build an empire.
The All New Apple Watch Sport
The fact that there are a monoclonal antibody, an RNA-i drug and an experimental vaccine available three months after is became clear that the West Africa outbreak is out of control tells me that our friends at Fort Detrick and their colleagues at Biopreparat took precautions, in case it would be used against them.

For a bioweapon, Ebola has the disadvantage that there is person-to-person transmission. On the other hand, the experience in Uganda shows that with proper medical facilities, an outbreak can be brought under control, Uganda is a reasonably developed nation, and the disease never spun out of control there. On the other hand, Sierra Leone and Liberia never recovered from the civil wars in both countries, which is why the epidemic is spreading like wildfire over there. On the battlefield, it would do just that.
Perhaps out of some twisted sense of honor the individual in question feels that blackmailing such a mysterious and (among hackers) revered figure would be unseemly. Although if this account is true it seems like he might be blackmailing him anyway.
My kid loves it, but I'm the one who has to deal with the mods and the shitty YouTube videos and ad-filled garbage forums made by a community that's somehow never heard of GitHub.

Hopefully Microsoft can reign in all of that crap and make the game less of a nightmare to maintain.
... and in a month a new game comes out and minecrafters realise this is what minecraft should have been all along ...
Is this parser open source? If so, why not post a link?
The iPhone 5 ad that Apple wants you to forget today
Thank you for making me realize I'm not the only crotchety old bastard who bitches and moans about this! My kids are old enough to play Minecraft but too young to understand how to install mods.

Speaking of that, I've looked into the mod making scene and it's rather disgusting. Mojang really dropped the ball by not having an official way to write mods/plugins. Instead we get a horrible client side mod environment (Minecraft Forge), and a half decent server side (Bukkit), but they're not compatible with each other. Bravo Mojang!
People keep bring up movies and books, so... honestly curious - about what? A Minecraft movie makes about as much sense as a movie about Battleship, and we saw how well that did...
What is our generation doing that is as bold as the Franklin expedition?
I don't think that is quite correct. There is per-transaction stuff going on but it isn't being tokenized for every transaction.

The token is stored in the secure element but is generated by the Token Service Provider (for example Visa Token Service).

After reading the EVM token spec linked in the post[1] and the developer guide I think I'm able to answer my own question.

The card is only tokenized once (or at least not per-transaction). For in-app purchases it is using 3-D Secure and for NFC is it using EMV, both of which provide some per-transaction security. Unlike a standard card the token will only work with 3-D Secure or EMV. For example a standard Chip&Pin card could still have it's mag-strip data extracted by a malicious POS system and used at a merchant that only uses magstripe terminals. With Apple Pay (and any other network token based system) a copied token would be worthless because it can't be used at a magstripe terminal.

Basically the phone is acting both as an automated 3-D secure checkout (it is processed by the processors just like 3-D secure but the authentication process is automated) and as a contactless EMV card without the downside of also having a magstrip with the PAN on it.

[1]http://www.emvco.com/specifications.aspx?id=263
Thanks. I couldn't see a button for closing the window. Apparently somehow asking for higher magnification of the Firefox window didn't give higher magnification of the ad window; thus I didn't see the close button.

Thanks.

With your feedback, I tried again and did see the big X close button outside of the main part of the ad window. The thing did close.

Read the article. Cute.

Thanks.
There is huge liability in living to be old. Sure, work hard, save money for old age, and get old, there's a stash of funds.

But even a million bucks has got to last the rest of your life, and who knows, my aunt is 100 years old, and still going. Retire at, let's say 70, and figure it out, will that stash last up to 30 years?

Do the math, taking out taxes at 25%, that's $25000/year. With social security, around $4000/month, just an estimate. How wealthy is that? Is it really even adequate?

Consider what happens with age: people get sick, bodies deteriorate, it's natural. Go to the ER, have an MRI, a hospital stay, whatever, it can be thousands out of pocket, even with medicare + insurance.

With serious illness, that million bucks can go fast. And even if there is good health care to be found, which is dubious, it's still scary and a constantly threatening reality.

Don't forget the house payments, computer gear and all the other normal stuff one needs to buy. If the house is paid up, chances are it's an old house and will need repair. Price out what a new roof or furnace costs (I've had to replace both in the last couple of years).

OK I'm old but I still go to work, though I can't do that forever. Call it what you will, I have a wealth of experience, accomplishment, family and great friends, but not a princely cache of money. Many old citizens are in a far more precarious position as financial security goes. I hope no one thinks it's a trivial concern.
Indeed. It's clear Satoshi never worked for any C++ development firm that imprinted at least some type of coherent design pattern on him. The programming has the flavor of someone involved in a lot of open source, spare-time C.
I think about this often actually. It really could be what second life and lots of other platforms really wanted to be. I think if and when the modding api that they have been promising ever comes out it really could be the metaverse, or at least OASIS.
Or maybe:

3) you don't want the project to lose its integrity/vision. The dollar amount matters less than finding a fitting buyer at a good enough price.
No Large-Scale Heartbleed Exploits B/f Public Disclosure
Tesla's custom built supply chain as a competitive advantage
How many minutes are you going to waste playing with that little nub

Zero minutes and five seconds. The watch has Siri. You say "directions to X". Boom. Done.
And then you're having to hold Nx more connections open, which is not free.
Somewhere, there's a product manager or developer coming to terms with the fact that the decision to check that box by default tore at least one family apart.
I believe with 90% certainty that "George" is female.

I have a complicated family background myself (not willing to go into it in public under this handle), but in George's shoes, I would not have pushed this; in particular, I would not have told Thomas about his father nearly as easily.
Yes, the docs say exactly this.
See page 5 of this document for evidence that recurring payments are indeed supported. https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/Getting-Started-with-A...
Thank you Freshyill and JWN! I nearly ripped my hair out trying to keep the Minecraft, Forge, and the JVM in sync version-wise for the Pixelmon mod. I tried upgrading just one of them and the Pixelmon mod silently failed.

Of course the forums are a Wild Wild West of inconsistent solutions that make me feel like Druidic incantations would be just as effective.
So you're OK with Safari crashing and other issues due to lack of RAM?
I'm a casual runner and see no value in the $350 Apple Watch as well.

Heart monitoring and GPS is a nice to have for me. Seriously, all I need is my old $75 16GB iPod nano 6th generation square.
Not so fast buddy, what Apple has today is a marketing video they aren't shipping until 2015. The moto360 is available today. So for the record google were first to market with this concept. And it was google who had NFC payments on their nexus line last year with widespread integration so lets not pretend that was an Apple innovation either.

The only new innovation I see is sending sketches to other people, on a tiny screen. What a silly gimmick. Now I can send little drawings of boobies to my friends. How soon before that gets old ? Hardly a oculus class breakthrough. Apple has lost its edge.
When you are dealing in billions, you don't pay taxes.
I've started going through the 'goodbye' posts from various team members that mbaxter assembled[1]. I feel a profound sense of loss reading through and remembering the many interactions over the years. When I read lukegb's[2] account in particular I almost broke down.

Luke is someone I still have the contact details of (in fact I could probably find most of the guys on irc or through various social network profiles) and I reached out directly to thank him. He was one of the few still involved today who was with us at the start. I was incredibly humbled, and grateful (there are tears in my eyes as I write this), when he listed me along side the 4 who were acquired by Mojang -

"Thanks to @Dinnerbone, @Grum, @Tahg, @Cogito, @EvilSeph for kicking off such an amazing project that’s been a big part of my life"

Minecraft is almost no part of my life today, but I can say for sure I wouldn't be where I am without these people and the Bukkit project. It's sad to see it in turmoil like this, but as you say the world is a bigger place, and no open source project is worth pouring your time into when legal ambiguities abound, the community is so volatile, and the rewards are so fleeting.

[1] http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/an-independent-goodbye.3100...

[2] http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/a-sysadmin-falls.310051/
The more I read about this, the more I think that what we're facing in North America isn't class war, it's "generation" war.

By "Limited Government" the baby-boomers backed republican party means "screw schools & food stamps, but hands off my medicare!".
For many watches are used as a signaling device. That is, an expensive watch indicates to people that you have money. I assume these people aren't going to downgrade to an apple watch. I don't know what percentage of watch owners this is or whether it could affect uptake, but it could be factor.
The mechanism that you describe should be impossible to achieve with one bit-flip. I have no idea how you came to think this.
Imagine the uproar if Dropbox started removing files from people's personal, private folders due to alleged copyright infringement.

They could theoretically do this in a way that doesn't really invade privacy (by using only hashes), but the controversy would probably kill Dropbox.
Have you stopped working at Google?
And who knows if Minecraft will grow in complexity and interconnection to the point where instead of having websites, every company has a Minecraft world? Who knows if Minecraft won't become the online world from Snow Crash?

In my own personal case though, the second I had anything worth $2 million I would sell out and retire. I just want to be able to feed myself and shelter myself and I'll gladly do independent research the rest of my life.
Middle East Peace Potential Through Dynamics in Spherical Geometry
You joke about sticking your card to your phone but that's what my bank did https://www.commbank.com.au/blog/tap-pay-new-commbank-app-io...
Yep, I decided to be customer-funded (traction) instead of vc funded. I had met this guy a while back and thought if I could get some funding in it could take me to the next level faster... but, re-focusing on the customer again seems to be the better alternative :)
That's a good point. It's still a long ways away, and even if it were possible, continuations make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
Good book, there are a few similar ones out there. His process seems very similar to the 'challenger sale' in either case, I think it is a good read! Thanks for the recommendation :)
Living in San Diego, I love having the option of driving out to Anza Borrego to see the stars.

If you haven't seen them in a true "dark sky" setting, I highly recommend it. You'll be shocked how many of them you see and how there are just layers and layers of them everywhere and being able to see the milky way with the naked eye is incredible. I doubt it comes close the so-called "Overview effect" Astronauts talk about when they see the Earth from... not the Earth, but it is still quite powerful and humbling when you're used to looking up and seeing half a dozen stars on a good night.
It was so much worse before Forge. With Forge, it's still incredibly arcane, but it's not batshit crazy like it was before. Of course, now you need to have the Forge version of a mod, and you have to have the right version Minecraft too.

I'm getting mad just thinking about it. I need to stop now.
Apple unveils watch, larger iPhones in bid to retake innovation crown
The code always struck me as a cryptographer who knew how to program rather than a developer who understood cryptography.
I'd like to hear what you think happened then.
Suppose Bruce Schneier kicked off an email with a cron-job in order to throw you off his trail?
When you are dealing with someone who potentially has access to hundreds of millions of dollars. Blackmailing then in public might be a way of protecting yourself from having an "accident".
Intel's CEO says its costly tablet chip strategy has paid off
I suppose they may have seen it as a viable option. It's tough to tell who is legit at times especially if they come recommended from someone you know (who also may not know the predatory behavior). Who knows? Some of these predator investors/consultants are just schmucks!
I didn't mean to imply there was more than one. Just on or off.
> Japan is a high-functioning democracy

I almost choked on that one. Yeah, a democracy when there's a change of prime minister every single year or less, can surely be defined as "high functioning". It's as functional as the 4th Republic was in France.

> But they haven't committed any military aggression toward any country in more than 65 years.

They have unconditionally supported the US war operations in many theaters around the world, though. they have not taken directly taken part in conflict but support the US in their wars. That's just because their constitution prevents them to, not that they don't want it...
Read data -> compute checksum -> check against on-disk checksum -> rebuild from parity -> repeat.

But this also wouldn't be a random failure. ECC RAM with a consistent defect would give you the same issue. It would also proceed to destroy your regular filesystem/data/disk by messing inode numbers, pointers etc.

Your scenario would require an absurd number of precision defects: ZFS would have to always be handed the exact same block of memory, where it always stores only the data currently being compared, and then only ever uses that memory location to store the rebuilt data. And then also probably something to do with wiping out the parity blocks in a specific order.

This is a weird precision scenario. That's not a random defect (bit-flip, which is what ECC fixes) - that's a systematic error. And I'd be amazed if the odds of it were higher then the odds of a hash collision given the number of things you're requiring to go absolutely right to generate it.

EDIT: In fact I'm looking at the RAID-Z code right now. This scenario would be literally impossible because the code keeps everything read from the disk in memory in separate buffers - i.e. reconstructed data and bad data do not occupy or reuse the same memory space, and are concurrently allocated. The parity data is itself checksummed, as ZFS assumes it might be reading bad parity by default.
I think this all that extra stuff is a standard 3D Secure transaction (Verified by Visa/Mastercard SecureCard). Apple has replaced the complicated multi-step authentication process with TouchID
While this might be true on one level, once you get into the realm of $350+ watches it can be very hard (if not impossible) for the casual and uninformed observer to guess whether a watch cost $500 or $5,000.

$350 is already more than most people spend on any watch, and that's only the entry-level price -- I imagine some of the more premium versions of the watch are going to be $500+, though that's just speculation. That's quite expensive for a watch for the vast majority of people I think.
I missed that flamefest, and I know very little about the transmission of infectious disease, but there's a part of me that can't help but wonder how so many medical caregivers (both locals and westerners) who were supposedly experts in the transmission of the disease and who were reportedly taking every precaution managed to contract it.

I'm not losing sleep over it or anything but it does seem like there's something going on other than just the local population being ignorant about the disease this time.
ohhh, the movie is about making minecraft, like the movie about facebook.

Also, the movie could be about teens who play networked and develop relationships in-game and out of the game.
I very much agree. Last Christmas I gave my kids one mod install each. Earlier in the year I helped them once which set a bad precedent :). I cut them off telling them to wait until Christmas. Since then they've discovered some minecraft launchers which automate some of this process, but it's still pretty ugly.

Mojang really needs to fix this: standard mod interface (which doesn't require jar surgery), sane distribution, etc.
Two small things:

* The product pages for the individual Watch lines, especially http://www.apple.com/watch/apple-watch-sport/ , are the first time I can recall Apple using sex or (literal) sexiness in its advertising. (We'll pass over the "Rip. Mix. Burn." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo cringefest ...)

* I await Gruber's reaction with considerable interest...
I apologize then for the judgment. I read your comment in a more antagonistic way. Cheers!
> In a democracy, that public support really matters.

I guess the American's population strong opposition to the Vietnam war or the second Iraq war says a lot about the validity of your comment. No, even democracies can go to war without much public support. Most democracies have actually special measures to go to war without any kind of popular vote.
Hey Tomp - I wrote that post. I cited the author, linked extensively, and gave credit in multiple places. If there had been a contact on his HN bio, I would have reached out that way as well.
> Truthfully, seeing what I saw, Apple's watch is just not a leap forward in any interesting way i can think of over android wear.

Isn't this the whole point?

When iPod, iPhone and iPad were first announced, it wasn't immediately obvious (to everyone) that they were a huge leap forward. It's not until people actually use them and we have the luxury of hindsight that we can say how groundbreaking they might have been.
Honestly, I read through the article pretty quickly and I missed that there was some attempt at a control. The statement that mislead me was "Most of the children in the study, six out of seven, caught up in all of their learning skills and their language...", which seems like a strange thing to say if there was a control group (aren't the control group also a part of the study?).

There were enough red flags that I'm pretty sure this was not a very scientifically robust study. For instance, even for a very small sample, wouldn't you still say how many out of the control group caught up (e.g. 2 out of the 7 control group members).

Also, I wonder if the person evaluating the symptoms knew which were the control versus test subjects?