skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The paper compares in detail against word2vec, but (spoiler alert) GloVe using 42 billion tokens from Common Crawl beats word2vec using 100 billion tokens from the Google News corpus!

They don't actually use the 840 billion token model in the paper as it was made with some parameters that didn't allow for direct comparison, but the code and the models are all released for anyone to use from their site.

This is one of many great examples of open datasets like Common Crawl allowing talented people from academia and start-ups to compete with the large proprietary datasets of Google or Bing.

(disclaimer: data scientist at Common Crawl who does the crawling)
Man, I was thinking about this last night, how I could use my morning and evening commutes to take people home on my way home -- since I'd either stay in the city (killing time for traffic to die down), or be paid to sit in my normal evening traffic home across the bay. Only hiccup would be if I had a fare taking me to the south bay, but that seems a reasonable gamble.
> I really don't see any reason for Google not to immediately remove this app from the store permanently and ban whatever developer uploaded it

The original article is down, but do they somehow bypass the Android permission authorization process? Or the user still has to authorize the app to access all the resources?
What about Erdős :) ?
What I am not describing is a single strand of thought that is fuzzier. Like I said, it's awareness with clarity.
All one has to do is look at the App info for the Uber app.

It doesn't ask for permissions to access anything SMS related, or call history related.

I'm assuming they've included the entire InAuth SDK, but not used most of the functionality.
Not really; the difference is that most people want only some types of government actions to be off-limits, and will list the things they want to forbid.

Other people start from a principle of "if a government did it, it was wrong". Which places all government actions off-limits.
A LOT of this stuff is pretty easily explainable. They want access to SMS and phone calls because the Uber app uses those things.

Camera doesn't seem terribly implausible. IT could be an incoming feature that allows you to take a photo of where you are so that your driver can find you more easily.

The WiFi stuff is probably related to location.
edit: as pointed out below, this is so that you can take a photo of your credit card so you don't have to type it in.

This seems like "hydrogen hydroxide KILLS" scare mongering.

BTW, this is all available in the app permissions: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-FVPu6x-F5SM/VHUZgU47m-I/A...

I don't see the big OMG SECRET MALWARE scariness.
The Unknown Crocodiles
Gtk-redshift has gamma and is ime way more stable than flux on Linux
Did you notice the snickers salad belt across the upper midwest?

If it's a salad. it must be healthy is a way of life.
>- SMS list

Nothing provided by the OP shows what is actually being sent. The linked text document of the code only shows the creation of an instance of the SMSLog class, which itself is defined in another class (not provided or discussed by OP). This is the same for most of the scary bits, which is unfortunate as seeing the code itself (or the MITM'ing the app and seeing the data) would be very interesting.
Well it's very popular among users. Removing it from the store immediately and/or permanently seems likely to get some backlash from the user base.
Wonderful! Just last week, Samsung did an update on my phone software and installed the Uber app automatically. Glad I removed it after that.
Booking.com uses an agency model with hotels and doesn't handle any payment from the user. They basically get a commission once your stay is completed. What this means is that they pass on your information to the hotel so that they handle billing/charging, etc.

This is in contrast to most OTAs in the US that are on a merchant model where they charge your credit card and have a pre-agreed upon net rate they pay for rooms to the hotel. This means the hotel has no idea what your credit card is or how you paid, just that a paid reservation with their partner was made.

This isn't very different than calling up a hotel and providing your credit card number and CVV / Expiration date on the phone to make a reservation. Only difference is that they sent it electronically.
Definitely uncool and a great article.

I do find it funny that despite all the other allegations, absolutely reprehensible business practices, and general malice they've put in the world that this is a surprise to anyone. I'm quite surprised that they still have so much business, but then again, morality isn't a one-size fits all sort of deal. What bothers me, may not bother other folks, or may seem as smart business tactics ( :sadface: ).

To me, it's just more icing on the cake.
How Should Secular People Approach Sacred Art?
> why mobile OS authors haven't learn anything from the web security model yet?

Which mobile OS authors? The behavior you described is default in iOS.
It still hangs trying to load assets. The text-only version should load immediately: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
They can be. It is possible for those individual streams to be entire personalities, though I've only rarely touched that space, and only during peak experiences. I'm not sure yet how I can put that to practical use in ordinary, day-to-day life.

In the version you have, the times when I usually have something like that arises is when I'm playing Go or when I'm making architectural decisions. I don't necessarily try to give voice to all of the threads, but rather, keep them in varying states of potentiality, while examining a single thread to check it's validity. It's not always necessary to render a thought stream into a voice until you need it. Kinda like lazy eval, I suppose.

I've met people who are significantly more intelligent than I am, and I can usually tell, they are doing something similar with greater clarity. And I'm just barely hanging on to the ride, trying to keep up with them.
If you want programmable high-resolution knobs, this is an area that the music industry has had covered quite well for a long time. A quick Googling for "midi controller knob" brings up:

Livid Alias 8

Livid DS 1

Nektar Panorama P1

MIDI Fighter Twister

Behringer B-Control Rotary BCR2000

Akai LPD8

The last one is about seventy bucks and gives you eight independent knobs and eight pads.

Of course, there's value in minimalism and a good UX for configuring/programming the knob(s), but there's also something to be said for just trying to solve the problem yourself based on what's currently available. If a $70 MIDI controller makes your Photoshop experience noticeably better, great. If not, a single knob might not end up being worth it either, regardless of how well-made it is.
Even before this disclosure, the Uber app required a nauseatingly long list of permissions.

I wiped an old Android phone, configured it with a dummy Gmail account, and then installed the Uber app there.

So it's a dedicated Uber-only phone with no contacts, no personal data, powered off until I need a ride. It's a giant pain in the ass.

Kinda happy to see this article, it validates my paranoia in some small way.

Now the real question is, why use Uber at all if they're this cavalier with my personal information? Good question, I may not need to power-on my Uber-only phone any more.
I would like to share the link on an iPad. But I guess you were too smart. When I tap on the link to select and copy it, some JS code autoselects the whole link. This is a nice idea and should save me some work. But the copy mode on the ipad breaks. So I cannot copy the link and share it.
As a dumbphone user, why people even allow an app to get information like this is beyond me.
Founder Stories: Hannah Wolfe, CTO of Ghost
I know that at least Cyanogen exposes something similar inside settings > privacy. I believe it comes from the hidden app permission manager built into Android.

Further reading: http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/07/25/app-ops-android-4-3s...
Gift for the Dad Who Just Needs a DAMN NAP Car Map Play Mat Shirt
There isn't enough highway in DC to make express lanes worthwhile.

The benefit of HOV on 395 & 66 comes from having limited access. The lanes get crowded during rush hour, but they still move faster because of less merging & exiting. When traffic is all moving in the same direction at the same speed it flows smoother.

The changes to the Springfield interchange did a lot to prevent backups by reducing the amount of lane changing necessary to get on and off the Beltway.
This book is more or less the definitive book on functional persistent data structures. More about how to design and reason about them, then a collection book.

http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Oka...
A lot of apps collect this information. There are flashlight apps that collect the same level. This is nothing new.
Nth Degree Technologies invented this product. http://www.nthdegreetech.com/

Here is one relevant patent: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8846457.html

Here is an album of various pictures taken earlier this fall (2014), and also just a minute ago with two pieces I had around the house: http://imgur.com/a/nBB5r

The technology is several things: it is real, it is sufficiently bright to stand up to daylight conditions, and it is mass-producible. It has raised interest from various industry sectors.

Lastly, this technology is not the work of Rohinni. They bought some pieces from Nth Degree, and what their business plan is, who knows. They did not invent it, legally cannot produce it, and it is doubtful they have the the technical knowhow to do so anyway.

In short, Rohinni is taking credit for a product they did not make.
They do need to ask for these permissions at install time. But as another user here pointed out, they do have legitimate reasons to ask for most of them to provide the functionality of the app.

The issue is that they're phoning all this information home, when the user might only be expecting it to be retrieved while the app is in use and only as needed.
The paper compares in detail against word2vec, but (spoiler alert) GloVe using 42 billion tokens from Common Crawl beats word2vec using 100 billion tokens from the Google News corpus!

Damn!!

Background for those who don't follow this field: Word2Vec is an apparently miraculous demonstration and poster-child of the unreasonable effectiveness of big data. Beating it at all is impressive, assuming the performance is as robust as Word2Vec is against different metrics.

Beating it with only 42% of the tokens is wondrous.
Which is always curious to me how someone with a rock solid website can have one wrong link on their site and BAM! they're delisted for months, and have to go through copious amounts of customer service levels to get their site to show up again.

And yet, this and the Rick Santorum searches have been reported on by plenty of mainstream media. And yet, it stays up for months on end.

It's like, "Don't try and manipulate the SERPS, unless of course it's politically motivated and Liberally slanted, then we'll let it slide."
I don't know why you think much "thinking" is needed. She is Queen of Canada, and that status has been legally separate from Canada's status as member of the Commonwealth for decades.

Membership of the Commonwealth has for more than 60 years not been linked to being a monarchy, and is no longer directly linked to having been part of the British Empire either (Mozambique and Rwanda were granted membership without even having indirect legal links to the former British Empire)

There's no "thinking" needed in that case other than to treat alternate titles as synonyms in the case where there's no sufficiently highly ranked direct hit, which also explains the result in this article.
Looks great - forked it and look forward to submitting some tests.
Netflix Sues Yahoo CIO Mike Kail for Alleged Fraud
We also develop since 2.5 years a thin backlight LED lighting technology and do observe the market closely.
I am in the same boat here with lots of skepticism at least comparing to the photoshop pictures and expectations set. As the articles says it is some ink combined with LED lights, which will require some thickness as there is a silicon, die attach, some sort of bonding and a base carrier.
http://www.businessinsider.com/lightpaper-technology-prints-...
With the thickness of the material thin as paper there is very limited optical scattering possible, which would require enormous amount of LEDs to compensate for. To me something does not add up here or it is truly a revolutionary technology, but I do know from our optical simulations ink printing alone won’t make that possible.
I'm not sure the criticism in the linked post is justified.

Here's what Uber says about its Android permissions -- the page isn't that difficult to find:
https://m.uber.com/android-permissions

Uber says the camera permission is required to take a snapshot of your credit card. The phone call permission is required to call your driver. The get accounts permission is required to enable single sign-in (Google Sign-In, Google Wallet).

The Uber app doesn't, according to the gironsec.com post, request Android's READ_SMS permission, so pointing to a "sendSMSLog" code excerpt by itself doesn't mean much. And so on.

As <andymcsherry> pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there's a "perfectly reasonable explanation for almost all of these permissions" except WRITE_SETTINGS. Uber says in its Android permissions post that: "We use this permission to save data and cache mapping vectors."

It seems as though it would have been useful for the author of the gironsec.com post to read what Uber has to say -- or, better yet, contact the company before posting a critique. If Uber PR can't cough up a good explanation, it makes the final critique more powerful.

I've posted here on HN criticizing Uber before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8383854), but before rushing to judgment here let's check our facts first.
The Conspiracy, Bait Life Outside the Federal Witness Protection Program
Strange blog:

+ credit card check banner
+ stolen template notification?

http://postimg.org/image/vg3ehzxqb/
This is like saying we should give everyone root access because there are legitimate situations where that is warranted and not misused.

I mean, I might trust my neighbor with the key to my apartment, but I'll still call the cops when he comes in and trashes the place.

Similarly, maybe there are valid reasons for Uber to have these permissions. That doesn't mean they can upload a dump of whatever data they can find to their servers.
> How to win friends and influence people is 70 years old now.

Actually, it's 78 years old (2014-1936 = 78).

In any case, the book has been revised significantly. If you buy a new copy today, then you're not getting the 1936 text. Wikipedia[1] indicates that the most recent major update was in 1981.

> Have any other books on the topic been released that are highly popular?

That seems likely, although I doubt that any single book has had anything like the popularity of HtWFaIP (if only because HtWFaIP was published in a time when bookstore shelves were not overflowing with self-help books).

I'd be interested in an answer to this question, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...
What If Money Were Designed to Celebrate Science Instead of Presidents?
They let users take pictures of debit/credit cards for easy input.
It's Greek, not Latin.
Just changed to this: http://imgur.com/YRQrPK2

I am based in Boulder, CO.
My Unexpectedly Awesome AP Computer Science Class
Uber uses the card.io SDK to let you enter your credit card information by taking a picture of the card, which requires the camera permission.
Tech Superstars Build 'Startup Factories'
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6rWGz01...
HOW DARE THEY!

Thanks, I forgot about that since it's been so long.
Why Azure Sucks for Small Businesses (Post-Crash Rant)
Ah, so the idea is to have 64 parallel bits coming in at 6 Gbits/s, along with a slower clock that you multiply up to 6 GHz and use to sample the inputs? That will be quite tricky to get working 1) without any analog signal conditioning on the inputs (or outputs), and 2) without inter-bit skew making it impossible to meet timing on your inputs. Best of luck to you, but the interface alone sounds likely to be problematic.
I would be in favor of such a redesign, but the nitpicker in me wants to point out that U.S. bills don't all feature presidents.

Alexander Hamilton, on the $10 bill, was never president. Bills valued at more than $100 have not been made for some time[1], but the most recent $10,000 bill featured Salmon P. Chase, who was also never president.

[1] Not since 1945, saith Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_denominations_of_United_...
This could also be a nice alternative to a steering wheel for driving/racing video games.
Simple rule for editors: any headline that includes a word like "might" or "may" or "could" can be replaced by a headline with the meaning that has that word replaced with "might not"/"may not".

When faced with such a headline, please use the negation of the one you originally thought of, then ask yourself if it makes a terrible headline. If it does, don't use either. If there is no headline that describes the story without such weasel words, consider spiking the story. It contains no interesting information.
Mirror in google cache:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6rWGz01...
Vero: true TV
> Curious, I've been hearing a lot lately about functional languages and immutability and wasn't quite sure how it worked. I agree with it in premise but it seems like all these immutable data structures introduce massive overhead.

There is some seemingly inherent overhead for certain data structures. On the other hand it allows for structural sharing, and plays more nicely with concurrency and whatnot. Suffice it to say that you'd be wise to design your immutable (persistent, specifically) data structures very differently to how you would design your regular imperative data structures. There was a famous PhD dissertation - now a book - on the topic. You'll find it easily enough if you search for it.

Yes, immutable data structures seem very inefficient. But they're implemented in a more clever way than to just take regular imperative data structures and copying for every "update" instead of directly mutating.

> What is going on behind the scenes when I modify a single value in an array with 10k members? Surely it's not going to create an entirely new array.

It would be unwise to use a huge array (in the usual sense - contiguous memory) like that to begin with. You'd probably have an "array" that is more in the shape of a tree, which facilitates more efficient "updates".
Thanks! Looking forward to seeing what you put together. Are you working on the Rails side or the Ember side (or both)?
I love any and all attempts to develop, improve, explore, the interface between humans and computers. I think it is one of the areas where not nearly enough is being done ... as a player of the continuum fingerboard, I quickly realized that a transformation of interface can have a more dramatic and meaningful impact on sound than the actual synthesis engine.

Roger Linn used to have a great demo on his page showing him playing a prototype Linnstrument using only a sawtooth wave with a lowpass filter, and it sounded more expressive than many top of the line physical modeling synths, because the dimensions of control were so impactful.

That said, the Photoshop example you give seems a little bit of a stretch. The Wacom tablet is a wonderful piece of human interface for Photoshop that addresses many of your concerns, and many other concerns, and has existed for years. For example, some Wacom pens have a ring on them that you can use to change brush sizes.

Wacom Tablet:
http://blog.phaseone.com/work-faster-by-customizing-your-wac...

Continuum Fingerboard:
http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/

Linnstrument:
http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument.html
works for me, surge notifications and all
We've attempted to change the baity title to something accurate and neutral, but if anyone can suggest a better title, please do.
I like the idea of a sterilizing force-field. (Not like, sterilizing, but... sterilizing...)

I enjoy speculation like that, but I am comfortable making the following generalization:

Corporations worth billions do not run physics experiments in densely populated areas, targeted at public land meant for public use.

Disregarding that common sense, some other wild assumptions:

Use static electricity as a subconscious cue to pay attention to a billboard nearby. Pavlovian training, too--associate your brand with a tingly feeling?

Super-high-power RFID/NFC reading!

Make a positioning system with increased accuracy using strong magnetic fields

Gauge perceptive abilities by demographic groups, and willingness to experiment with curious physical sensations.
Well that sucks; thanks for letting us know!

Chrome and Android have definitely gotten the most attention so far, though this is the first I'd heard of iOS having issues with that. I had run into a similar issue on Windows Phone (and successfully fixed it), but I'll have to revisit iOS.

As a temporary workaround, does it work when you try a second time? On mobile it should stop trying to grab the link for you after the first time.
It does make a huge difference. I'm uninstalling, but at this point I just needed an excuse.

If they're actually sending all this stuff, I'm also telling everyone I know about it. But only if they actually are.
It's hard to disagree with that. However, being offensive (in the way that word is most commonly used) is not even my point. I also never expressed doubts about his engineering prowess. People can have significant mental impairments and still perform math or engineering tasks, though the output of these tasks is often colored by their limitations as well. He is the same way. Imagine the things he could accomplish if he wasn't in schizophrenic mode!

My point was about whether he is an "inspiration" or not. Mentally ill people can be assholes, too. It's debatable and probably an unsolvable question to which extent his badness comes from his disease, so all we're left with at this point is to simply judge him by his behavior, and maybe charitably take some factors into account in his favor. But even after doing that, I can't get to a state where I can say: "this person is awesome and a continuing inspiration to me".

The nature of mental illness makes it very hard to talk about the core personality of affected people. Their illness is a part of them, just as all of our little hangups and traumata are a part of every one of us. These properties are us in a very real sense.

On a multidimensional scale of personalities, I do judge him way more harshly than a person with Tourette's syndrome, precisely because there is meaning behind the words when he speaks them - even after I make a conscious effort to discard the instances where that meaning was distorted, there is still enough content left that I'm uncomfortable with subscribing to this person.

Ultimately I'd like to reiterate: my frustration is not with him. With this illness, he got a bad deal in life. I hope he stays safe and gets all the care he needs. I hope he can continue to find creative outlets like his operating system. My frustration is with people idolizing him in his entirety, accepting or maybe even sharing his views. I do think it's possible to admire the work a person does without subscribing to their views, but when doing so you have to work extra hard to separate the two. You can't just admire that person without reservations. Frequently, on this thread and elsewhere, no reservations were even visible. We even got people talking about how he was factually right about calling black people dumb.