skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NIPS gets a ton of submissions, so the law of large numbers governs pretty strongly. Imagine that each paper submitted is independently either good or bad, with 22.5% probability of being good. With 1660 submissions, the total number of good papers follows a Binomial(1660, 0.225) distribution, which has mean 374 and standard deviation 17. Under this model, the fraction of good papers would be somewhere in the range 20.5-24.5% (corresponding to a two-standard-deviation window around the mean) in 95% of reviewing cycles. So even though the quality of the individual papers is totally random, the randomness mostly "cancels out" and the overall number of good submissions is relatively constant.

Of course this is assuming an objective standard for what constitutes a "good" paper. As others have pointed out, the only really meaningful standard is "how does this paper compare to other work being done in this field"? So it's also reasonable to think of NIPS's goal as just trying to present the best papers that were written in any given year, not as bestowing a strictly-defined stamp of objective quality.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this has absolutely nothing to do with what PG was referencing in the article. I'm guessing he could at least give some broad overview of the book he's referencing. The issue seems to be that it seems so small in comparison to the book itself.
The point of sous-vide is [primarily] to break down proteins in meat? Presumably then you can freeze the meat or refrigerate and simply re-heat/sear at a later time?

Under this assumption are any stores offering pre-sous-vide meats?
Everyone is arguing over what we should go "back" to -- back to the 50s, the 60s, pre-industrial hunter-gatherer societies, etc. Almost everyone, liberal or conservative, builds their arguments around the idea that there's some mythical golden age that we need to go back to.

Everyone I see is not doing this. I'm not sure how to reconcile our completely different takes on CA. FWIW, I live in the East Bay Area.
You can take a look at sample applications built using Tigon : https://github.com/caskdata/tigon-apps

Also, Tigon is the realtime processing framework used in CDAP (cdap.io). Sample applications built using CDAP (Cask Data Application Platform): https://github.com/caskdata/cdap-apps
I'm still a student. But I do know this kind of knowledge is used in certain CS areas, such as computer graphics or algorithmic trading.
> a new era of "share and share alike for the common good" is upon us.

Bringing discoveries and inventions into the public domain for the good of society is the primary reason for having a patent system. To the extent that it inhibits this outcome, the system is failing.
I agree! Perhaps the (parent) meant something different, I wonder?
Tracking things like this tend to be trickier than I expect. Nice to have a writeup of considerations and approaches.
I have had great experiences with Scratch, but I agree that it's not great for kids in middle school. My kids are just starting elementary, and they love it to death.

For middle-school and up kids I would unreservedly recommend Racket. The curriculum at http://htdp.org is far and away the best introduction to programming concepts I've ever seen.
It's one instruction per cycle that gets 8 flops. And what are you arguing even? Assuming its unthrottled FP32, that gives a quad-core A15 at 2GHz 7 watts to be over 5x less efficient.
What i found shocking here, is how casually pg talks about what i believe is the fundamental point of philosophy. That is the mapping of our minds inductive model of the world, and our deductive one.

>Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists.

Here, he is pointing out the the relevant information you perceive, your empirical data, is only retained insofar as it effects your deductive model of the world, that is, the model we use to determine truth and falsity. The rest of the data is generally trivial. This is a very sensible insight in my mind, and kudos to him. The dance between empirical data and deductive truth is one of the most difficult things for me to get my head around. This as a model for data retention is something i'd not thought of.

>Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index and even edit them. So although not knowing how you know things may seem part of being human, it may not be.

Here, i find this problematic. In Soros's terms, the mind is reflexive. Thus, in reviewing the data, we are experiencing new data. If we edit our thoughts, do we not remember editing them? I don't see away to take away the reflexive nature of self examination, that in creating changes, we create new data about the changes.
Scratch was my introduction to programming, around 6 years ago. Since then, I've graduated with a degree in CS and co-founded a successful (and growing) software-house startup. Without having discovered Scratch, I'm not sure I would have decided to do Computing at A-level. No A-level, No CS degree. No degree, no startup.

In my case, it was the perfect way to learn about some of the important principles that underpin programming, without necessarily realising that it was happening. Scratch just allowed me to be creative with ideas for simple games. You can take away a lot of the cornerstones of imperative programming (loops, variables, booleans, conditionals) but also evented programming concepts; which will make sense straight away in a language like Javascript.

My father is a Head Teacher at a primary school in the UK and has introduced it into the ICT curriculum to great effect. There are primary age children (< 10 years old) starting to experiment with Ruby and Python at school, as a result of positive experiences with Scratch. It's is also how I interested my younger brother in programming and he in turn took A-level computing and has applied to study CS at University. I don't think Scratch was as much of a factor in his story, but it was certainly his starting point.

Overall, I think it's a fundamental stepping stone that children should have the chance to try at school. It represents the opportunity to find out whether you enjoy programming. Until I picked it up, it had never crossed my mind that I might.

Hats off to the Scratch team!
You're right, my mistake. That "five higher" should have been "four higher".

The thing is that your solution is the algebraic solution. You're simplifying an equation by balancing both sides, when you subtract four. Just from our perspective, you simplify to a still difficult state, instead of the easiest possible state.

Algebra is just a way of formally stating what you did, and then offering some simplifications that speed up the process. Or offering more powerful methods that making solving more difficult problems easier.
> Almost everyone, liberal or conservative, builds their arguments around the idea that there's some mythical golden age that we need to go back to.

Except for most conceptions of socialism/communism (talk of proto-communist hunter gatherer societies notwithstanding).

(Non-strawman) communists see communism as a future post-scarcity society, like Star Trek economics. To them, the path to get there must involve ownership models that (to them) are not exploitative.

From the very start the idea was to figure out how to arrange society in order that the incentives are maximized to bring about post-scarcity. (Let's not get into a discussion about how well anyone did in attempting to bring that about - that's a very complex topic by itself).

So I don't know what you're talking about when you say that socialists are looking to back to some golden past.

I read a lot of broad ideological writing as well, so when people make statements that go completely against what adherents of a particular ideology have been saying themselves for over 150 years, well, it's a little jarring.

Again, this isn't about any ideology being right or wrong, this is about accuraccy.

> There are no better ideas.

The biggest mistake you can make is thinking that history is over.
At least they don't decrypt and read your email as part of their business model.
In order to develop on Patent 1, Labs B and C should officially license Lab As patent.

As I understand it there's no "research exception" for patents, and they don't just apply to "selling". I'm basing my understanding on this article:

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v25/n11/full/nbt1107-1225....

It's also true that researchers rarely take any notice of patents, and the issue just gets ignored.
Getting Started Placing Calls with Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking and FreeSWITCH
It is impossible to run an email service without being able to decrypt data. You can search your entire email archive in seconds, from a phone on the end of a slow network, and it just works. End-to-end encryption isn't compatible with the way people want to use email.

We are happy for people to use PGP, though of course we don't offer an interface to it because that would involve sharing keys with us and defeat the purpose.

We've addressed the legal framework we work in in the linked blogpost, and addressed precisely the scenario you lay out. Governments change, and they love to posture, but the reality is the laws, not the soundbytes.

We would be aware of the outage - have you seen how reliable NYI are?

http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/10/security-availability/

They don't have outages.

I'm much more worried about the NSA (or any of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies) knowing of a hole in one of the pieces of software that we use and injecting a rootkit with that. Thankfully the same security practices that defend against hackers are also useful here.
The Cubli: a cube that can jump up, balance and walk [video]
If more renters voted we'd have a situation like this:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-03/portugal-crumbles-a...
Show HN: Xconf.io, search thousands of open-source Dockerfiles on GitHub
5 hours is very fast - did they use pitocin (Oxytocin)? Without pitocin, and without breaking the bag of waters, labor takes much longer (so Dr's hate it), but it hurts much less.
'Fibonacci quasiparticle' could form basis of future quantum computers
Don't play this game unless you're not really interested in full confidentiality. Some people are willing to increase security to the point of protecting their financial interests without concerning themselves with security against nation-states, I think the future, if not the history as we already know it, will prove this to be foolish.
We can't philosophically disprove it. But Occam's razor applied to the behavioural evidence suggests Uber thinks surge pricing is fantastic, and keeping it in place during crises is corporate policy unless and until there's a media backlash large enough for it to actually get through their thick skulls that people are pissed off.
Consider the demographic submitting to NIPS. It's a self-selected group within the top researchers in the world in that area. The best people in the field don't want to be seen publishing the so called "second-tier" conferences, so they will submit exclusively to the likes of NIPS. And if you're an up and coming researcher or research group, you will want to establish credibility by publishing in these sorts of venues, and you will almost surely send your best work there. Add to this the fact that this is a "hot" field, so more and more researchers and research groups are getting into the field and trying to publish papers, I think it's very likely that NIPS gets a lot more good papers than they can possibly accept.
Khan Academy is obviously a useful tool for learning, and of course it's part of a child's education, not all of it. The point I think Dan is making is that if you 1. say you're aligned to the common core, and 2. provide mastery statistics to suggest a level of comprehension or depth of knowledge tied to those standards then that should predict well a child's performance answering questions aligned to the standards but outside the KA system (e.g. a Smarter Balanced Assessment)

That means until that ideal is reached KA could say "Mastery at X depth of knowledge but note, for this standard Y is required" or allow teachers to write free response questions and have them tag the questions by standard, type, depth of knowledge etc. and grade them by hand in the KA system. Including hand graded questions (by a student's teacher)with an adequate tagging system KA mastery statistics might be significantly more accurate.
Apart from other reasons mentioned. LEDs don’t work well in parallel. Even if you have just 2 of them, one will be bit brighter (drawing more current) than the other.
The "in retrospect" was an important part of that point. Reviewers don't have access to it when reviewing.

Some conferences and journals have a retrospective prize for the best paper of, say, ten years ago. It's a neat way to recognize papers that turned out to be useful.
Perhaps "cached thoughts"? http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/
The way you guarantee constant framerate in both a GCed or manual environment is the same: arenas/regions/pools/buffers. Manual memory management is susceptible to memory fragmentation, which can severely slow down allocation.
The answer to this, at least for longer strings, is usually 'both'. You'll usually find several sets of series wired runs connected in parallel and sometimes mid run branches.
Putin may not be the best leader but I find it scary that we are cornering a nuclear state into a hole.
Much of Southwest's profitability actually comes from doing a great job hedging against fuel cost changes, rather than making extraordinary margins on the seats.
As far as I can tell, some small waterproof fans would be more than enough for sufficient circulation. Why is that a specific advantage of high-end ones?
Yeah I actually went back and looked through that comment section afterwards. The responses from the author were super disappointing.

While I agree that the naming of variables is vastly more important than some (most?) people think, tossing convention without any actual rules for what should replace it is pretty worthless.

The immutability argument was actually novel to me and something that I actually found to be an interesting shift in thought process. However, the change from:
Ball ball = dog.getBall();
to:
Ball ball = dog.give();

totally destroys any readability. Give returns an object? That object is a ball? What?
Since NIPS is a very prestigious conference, I'd expect a lot of submitted papers (perhaps a vast majority of them) would fall in a grey area between "clearly unsuitable" and "clearly suitable". I personally think there are too many factors at play in evaluating a series of papers - no objective sorting can really exist.

A note for people outside the academic Machine Learning field: NIPS is widely believed to be on a different level from the rest - during my PhD, my advisor used to say that a NIPS paper would be on par with a paper published on a good journal, resume-wise. The difference is especially striking if you've had the chance to attend other conferences (including, alas, IEEE-sponsored events) - that are, with very few exceptions, fairly terrible from a scientific point of view.
The news is that I found it after giving up on trying to use regexes to parse what our users think their phone numbers are, and I thought it would be useful for other devs. I don't remember seeing it here, but maybe it was in the back of my mind when I was looking for solutions.

Thanks for the link to the older discussion.
And I don't believe the general public will fund it without the hope, however distant, of getting into space themselves. They have been promised too much that hasn't come true and scientists are currently telling them that they are doomed anyway.
Rouble crashed in value - more than 10% lost in a single day.

Then they did things to interest rate - +6,5%! - the news was published at 00:39 in the night, so that means "we are monkeys behing levers who don't know what they do".

Now FOREX shows Rouble rebounded a bit, but I don't know what happens tomorrow. Happily most of my savings (which aren't much) are in hard currency.

I'm going to tell "I told you so" to a countless number of people.
Hostility towards scientific consensus: A red flag identifying a crank or quack
I think he says "OO C++" and "STL", not "C++" and "preprocessor".
This is a laudable effort to bring more facts to light concerning banks & other financial institutions.

Just don't expect it make a whit of difference to the "Social Contract" that is mentioned.

As long as "Too-Big-to-Fail" and the like exists, Banks & other financial institutions have incredible (almost unimaginable) power & influence over the state [1] at least in the USA. There is revolving door between Federal officials in Treasury and the Federal Reserve etc and big banks such as Citigroup & Goldman Sachs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJpTxONxvoo
I've been toying around with monitor mode on the Pi, and I'd love to see your implementation if this. Do you have a write-up somewhere? (I have no nefarious intentions, though that assertion is admittedly useless when it comes from a stranger on the internet)
Unless the reviewer doesn't actually know anything at all about what he/she claims to.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if most of the general public would be unable to distinguish a SciGen-generated paper from a real one.
Want to influence the world? Map reveals the best languages to speak
To add to this, and this needs to be emphasised, is that we make it clear to anybody requesting data that there are legal channels with due process to go through which work.

See the following for more info - http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in...
Or just a smart language implementation. Go makes it easier to avoid heap allocation, and thus GC, since it allows you to specify if a structure resides on the heap or stack.
See also, the psycological litterature on source amnesia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_amnesia
I think you're misinterpreting me a little. I don't think history is over. I'm just saying that I get the sense that everyone else does. :)

I've toyed around with a few radical thoughts recently, but political ideology isn't my bag so it's just private speculation.

One is that the problem with socialist schemes is that they don't really address the root of inequality. It's become kind of clear to me that the root is heritable inequality of both the genetic sort and the inherited-privilege sort.

So I've speculated a little about some sort of "transhumanist socialism" that would attempt to address inequality at the biological level by making both germ-line and postnatal enhancements universally available. The idea would be to transform humanity itself into a runaway self-improving AI by siphoning off some percentage of GDP and applying it to the artificial redistribution of beneficial adaptations and the augmentation of human intelligence across familial lines. By far the best thing to be taxed here would be inheritance, since the whole aim is to break heritable inequality.

It's the sort of idea that would make everyone's head explode. Most dogmatic libertarians would hate it since it contains the word "socialism" and involves some sort of wealth redistribution. Liberals are all greens now that worship the naturalistic fallacy, so they'd all scream "no GMO!" Conservatives would hate it since it's theologically sacrilegious and would disrupt the social order rather deeply.

Makes me think I'm on the right track. :)
>It is impossible to run an email service without being able to decrypt data.

Counterpoint: seems to me that protonmail is doing exactly that.

>We've addressed the legal framework we work in in the linked blogpost, and addressed precisely the scenario you lay out. Governments change, and they love to posture, but the reality is the laws, not the soundbytes.

You haven't addressed any of the points I initially raised. Your blog post skirts the issue quite handily.

>They don't have outages.

Anyone claiming 100% uptime are fraudsters.
You're correct, quotes won't convince me. Actions (i.e. what they wrote into the Constitution) mean much more than anything they said.

And what they wrote was:

* a House of Representatives selected by the people

* a Senate selected by state legislatures

* two executives selected by Congress (with the remaining members of the executive branch at most needing consent from the portion of Congress not selected by the people)

* a judicial branch selected by the executive (again, requiring consent only from the Senate, who were not selected by the people)

So out of the entire government they gave the people the ability to select half of one branch. And while that one branch would select the President (and VP) it would have no voice in selecting the rest of the executive branch or any of the judicial. The ability to remove members of either the executive or judicial branch also went to the branch not selected by the people.

Sorry, but when I read the Constitution I don't see much "ability of citizens to maintain power over the government."

As for District of Columbia v. Heller the question was if the 2nd Amendment grants the right to bear arms for lawful purposes - violently overthrowing the government is most assuredly not lawful, regardless of who you want to quote while doing it.
My original post wasn't all that clear. I'm kind of scatterbrained at the moment.

I actually think the "California ideology" is probably the most progressive thing standing, but that's not saying much. I do agree with the article that it sort of wins by default for being the only worldview to advance any kind of optimism at all.
From the OP's posting:

Test	MDBM	LevelDB	KyotoCabinet	BerkeleyDB
Write Time	1.1 μs	4.5 μs	5.1 μs	14.0 μs
Read Time	0.45 μs 5.3 μs	4.9 μs	8.4 μs
Sequential Read 0.05 μs 0.53 μs	1.71 μs	39.1 μs
Sync Write	2625 μs 34944 μs	177169 μs	13001 μs

As to losing credibility, I'm semi retired, I stopped trying to impress people a decade ago. If i were you I'd be more worried about your own image, bad mouthing other people's tech when you demonstrate you don't understand it hasn't made you like good to at least a few people here.

It wouldn't be that hard to say "MDBM is great when used as an index into a DB, it works just fine for that. But you are going to have to rebuild the index after a power failure unless you take care to flush the data. It's somewhat unfair that the OP compared against my database because mine is slower because it handles crashes."

Instead you come out with "MDBM is complete crap". Well, no, it's not. In the domain where it is useful it is actually quite useful, it's 10x faster for lookups than your DB. So the trade off is speed vs surviving reboots. For lots of people, speed is much more important. Machines don't crash every ten minutes. In fact, it's pretty common to see uptimes in 100's of days. Lets say that 100 days is average and lets say that it takes a full day to rebuild the MDBM. So MDBM is delivering 99/100 days of useful work. You deliver 100/100 days. Oh, wait, except that your useful work is running 10x slower if the DB is being used as an index. So you delivered 10/100 days. See why some people may prefer to use MDBM when it is put like that? Performance is a feature.
Yeah. On the GC, games can reset some "bounding box" registers, draw some 3d geometry, and then read out the 2D coordinates of the bounding box of the things drawn. Games like Paper Mario uses it to make a copy of that region and apply various effects to it, and if the region is wrong weird things happen.

There are no such bounding box registers on PC GPUs, so you have to either software transform the coordinates and ignore that your results won't be perfect (some pixels might have been thrown away due to z tests etc and wouldn't be counted in the bbox), or you use some modern shader tricks to simulate it in hardware, which is what the current Dolphin authors have now implemented.