skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, mustelids worked well for rabbits in England. And to be fair, ferrets (they introduced stoats, weasels and ferrets) do spend most of their time in the grasslands preying on rabbits. It's the stoats and weasels that really devastate the birds. The 1080 drops for rodents works on well on mustelids too, as they tend to eat the dead bodies, and 1080 bioaccumulates.

But yeah, in hindsight, thanks guys. But at least they didn't get around to introducing dingoes from Australia to control the possums as proposed.
This invasive species is slowly being relocated to Australia.
Disclaimer: I work in the GPU industry.

If you're interested in the architecture of a GPU this Berkeley ParLab presentation by Andy Glew from 2009 covers the basics of how the compute cores in modern GPUs handle threading. It's a subtle, but powerful, difference from SIMD or vector machines.

http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/sites/all/parlab/files/20090...

If you want to get into the details of how a GPU interfaces with the system and OS software, which is almost an entirely other animal, you may want to look at the Nouveau project to get oriented.

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
At first viewing of the video I didn't understand why the body doesn't spin around with one rotor and a pair of blades. That was some magic! Then looked at the picture again and saw another rotor underneath. Pretty neat to have two rotors counteracting each other.
Here are a couple of non-technical summaries:

http://www.aaas.org/news/new-genome-sequences-reveal-bird-tr...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-11/an-unprecedented-fl...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141211-bird-...
2015 Tech Trends by Amy Webb
It's a bit of overstatement, but the general idea of getting rid of the invasive mammals would be great.

A massive project though, getting rid of animals trying to survive is incredibly hard - one of my uncles worked on clearing Motuihe in the Auckland harbour, and they had a hell of a time with the rabbits - when threatened, they go into a 2-week breeding cycle, and were hiding in holes halfway down the cliffs!
The NICE system is a good implementation of rating cost-effectiveness, but it still has the aggregation issue.

If NICE determines that a drug isn't cost-effective, no one gets it (unless you pay out of pocket), regardless if it would have helped that individual patient.
Ok, well my comment about "screaming for mercy" was hopefully taken as tongue-in-cheek. My conversational writing style is somewhat cold sometimes without intention. Plus it's night here, so I must beg pardon for claiming that I would get back here in the evening. I had a dog dependency I had to resolve.

I will definitely try to find the raw data for my main issue, which is that through Quantitative Easing by the Fed (Rounds 1 and Two) the purchasing power of the dollar was devastated, which makes dollar wealth comparisons pre- and post-recession even worse than reported. If your wealth drops 20% from $100 to $80 but each $1 of that $80 buys half of what it used to, then your wealth has actually dropped by 60%: your eighty dollars has the purchasing power of forty dollars when once you had one hundred dollars of purchasing power. These hypothetical values don't exactly match the specific situation rendered by QE but give you an illustration of the worst aspects of the austerity imposed in America. I don't want to quote the exact drop in purchasing power of the dollar pre- and post-recession but I have found the data before and calculated that drop for a co-worker, and the drop was precipitous and un-reported by-and-large. I'll be back with that data when I have it.

In addition, many corporations snuck further cost-savings for themselves in terms of reducing volume of a product by unit but did not modify the unit price respectively, so they are receiving marginal increases in revenue despite the down-turn and all the weight being thrown directly on consumers.

Here are some general articles about the loss in wealth for most Americans while the wealthiest experienced a gain in wealth for the wealthiest.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/04/23/a-rise-in-wealth-f...

In the UK, pensioners feel the bite of QE:

http://www.sharingpensions.co.uk/quantitative-easing-annuity...

There are a ton of blogs out there with people talking about the issues surrounding QE but I am trying to sift through the chaff for you. I should have bookmarked the links I used with my coworker.
Add some sound effects, including rocket sounds and shaking the screen during launch this would be incredible!!

Very nice!!
>Damascus steel has not been completely successfully reproduced to this day

Because it sucks compared to modern knife steels. VG-10, S30V, or any other high-end steel beats the hell out of Damascus/wootz steel.

If there were any serious benefit to Damascus steel, we would have certainly reverse-engineered it by now.
Fair enough :)

I just wanted to clarify in case someone read your comments and have a wrong impression that Emacs is a text editor like Vim. Nothing more, nothing less.
SDN Series Part III: NOX, the Original OpenFlow Controller
Heard about this report and Amy Webb on NPR (Newshour). Found it very relevant for the startup community.

"At the end of each year, Webbmedia Group applies our FuturePrint Trend- spotting Framework to surface the most important emerging trends in digital media and technology for the year ahead. This 2015 Trend Report offers 55 key insights representing the immediate trends that we think will matter most in the coming year."
Not sure what the score looks like for your post, but this is certainly the big question for me too considering that one of the primary factors in the terrible stagnation of widely used media formats (which has consequences as terrible as people commonly and unironically using GIFs -- fuckin GIFS!!!! to share "videos") has been serious patent concerns associated with most new contenders.
How could distribution of the encoded images be infringing a patent? It's the distribution and possibly use of the encoders and decoders that would be within the scope of patent law, not the output itself. The encoded image isn't the invention.

If I own a patented 3d printer, would you be worried that those patents could restrict my ability to distribute the objects printed by it?

The javascript decoder would certainly be covered by the patents as much as any other decoder, so it doesn't solve the patent-related barriers to adoption even if it takes care of the practical issues with using the format.
Yep. The stupidity involved in this decision is breathtaking.
Significant part of functionality of moder GPU is in software that abstracts away differences between different models and generations, from this point of view it does not make much sense to document actual interface between software and hardware. Other thing is that complexity of this software abstraction layer is comparable to the GPU itself and manufacturers do not expect that somebody would want to implement all that from scratch (this is similar to e.g. FPGAs, where even when you know bitstream format, you still have to write something non-trivial that generates the bitstream).
IBM Design Language: Front-end Fundamentals
> advancing early discoveries could move at an exponentially faster pace.

Faster pace towards what though? Someone swooping in, doing the last 1% of the work, and making all the profit. E.g. it's sad how much more money Apple has made on Siri than SRI did. Patents do a pretty awful job of making sure researchers and inventors get compensated. But they're one of the few things to tip the balance in favor of researchers and inventors.
When I clicked it I thought this was supposed to be a test damning BPG somehow, but I get the impression from other comments that I am NOT supposed to see this: http://i.imgur.com/XDXOB2w.jpg

All the other image formats work fine.

Any idea why? Windows Chrome 41.0.2243.0 dev-m (64-bit)
The article mentions having to buy 10k+ new drives in the next few months? Is that number just your average increase for new drives and/or replacements for failed drives? Or does it include planned replacement of older pods with smaller drives? I'm curious if there's a point where you've found it less expensive (or less problematic with drive failure rates per pod) to replace and upgrade older pods compared to just letting them continue to run.
New Zealand’s Apollo program

Wiping out rats? The Apollo program? I know it's a small country, but wiping out rodents is both hopelessly petty and hopelessly grandiose at the same time. Spoiler: The mammals will win.
Even though it seems that you can create pathological SIP rules that are undecidable could you reduce a subset of the problem if you are only allowed to do a set of forwards and then you have a graph where you can detect cycles with a simple cycle detection algorithm?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory F. Treverton  – How to Predict State Failure
Reminds me of "The Black Swan".. (paraphrasing) Dis-confirmation reveals more than confirmation.
I wasn't aware, but BPG is a Fabrice Bellard[1] project.

Bellard is possibly the best example I'm aware of the 100x programmer.

[1] http://blog.smartbear.com/careers/fabrice-bellard-portrait-o...

[2] A subset of things he started: LZEXE, FFMpeg, QEMU. He's also held the record for the calculation of the largest known prime and the most digits of Pi, wrote the first x86 emulator in JS that could boot Linux, won the International Obfuscated C Contest, etc etc.
M.Mplay3: de toutes nouvelles chansons en sonneries mobiles MP3
> This is not necessarily true.

In biotech/pharma research, it is absolutely true. If a competitor's patent lands first on targeted genes/proteins/etc. it can shut down an entire lab's line of work permanently. The staff involved usually get reshuffled to other lines of interest, and any work they'd done is simply written off, never to see the light of day.
Pass the Salt?
It's interesting to see the comparison at a fixed output size. It would also be interesting to see a comparison at a) fixed encoding time, b) fixed decoding time.
They're selling API access and the data:

https://opencorporates.com/products
Autotype works just fine for me on KeePassX, do you have the latest version (2)? You also need the appropriate x utilities installed.
What in the world is Slack?
Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley [pdf]
Point taken and your are right. It sucks! we will fix it.
SpaceX uses slight variants of their 1st stage rocket engines in vacuum, so they don't really need this kind of testing. And this test rig is 10x larger than SpaceX's current vacuum Merlin 1D needs.
The paper mentions a quantum oracle for training the quantum memory I guess used to store the system. So would a quantum computer even be able to utilize quantum deep learning without such access to storage?
There are other countries.
This[1] is a good place for high level, but it won't help you individually. Sodium only has the ability to impact blood pressure by 2-3mmHg diastolic and 5mmHg systolic, so limiting its of very little value for most[2].

My own personal experience reducing my creeping blood pressure came not from curing salt but from curing carbs. When carbs are reduced, the kidneys begin functioning better, reducing fluid in the blood which reduces blood pressure far more successfully than curing salt. This is just one of the many positive metabolic effects of low carb, high fat diets that are very well documented in scientific literature (others include normalized blood sugars, reduced inflammation, reduced liver and visceral fat, improved blood lipids, weight regulation and improved insulin sensitivity).

1. http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2013/Sodium-Intake-in-Populations...

2. Individuals vary. This is not medical advice. See a physician. Yada yada.
Err, because MPEG-LA and the other patent holders that didn't join knows that Fabrice Bellard didn't license the patent from them, so you used an unlicensed encoder.

If you stick that poly-fill on your website they can also sue you for distributing the decoder to everyone that downloaded the javascript file.
I'm also looking at using Scratch in a school curriculum starting with children from grade 4 through grade 6. Are there any course ware, workbooks available for those grades?

How old are the children in your class?

Can you give any other suggestions about other programming languages that can be used as kids grow older?
Your intuition is correct, but a minor nit: bulbs aren't linear devices and don't have a fixed resistance. At low power, a bulb will look pretty close to a short circuit (it's just a piece of tungsten wire, after all). As power increases, the filament temperature rises and so does its resistance. This is why bulbs generally burn out when turning on - 170V across a mostly short circuit, with most of the resistance being in whatever section of the filament is most worn through, so most energy is dissipated at a single spot. poof!.
I think it was Thomas Hobbes who said "If I had read as many books as other men, I should have been as ignorant as they are."
I think this article is a bit alarmist...

Now, let's say that we want to implement CTS in SIP. The CPL language is not powerful enough for that but we can define a very simple extension

...

And because we previously proved that SIP with CPL is Turing-Complete

...

Note that at least some SIP systems are not necessarily Turing-Complete - here we had to add an extension to our very limited system based on CPL to make it Turing-Complete.

In other words, he had to create a completely theoretical extension, which AFAIK doesn't actually exist, just to show that it could be Turing-complete? If there's a real extension in use or set of extensions that could make it Turing-complete, why didn't he just choose that?
This always bothered me about Babylon 5 - how/why did the spine of the station remain stationary while the bulk of the station rotated?
s/uber/food and s/sydney cbd/famine area

"I could argue that jacking up the prices for food in a starving area is ethical, since it would encourage diversion of food from other areas, bringing in merchants who would otherwise not visit"

Or maybe ethics is a little broader than just economic invisible-hand logic?
Well I wouldn't get upset about that. Now that it's built, $700k/yr is an insanely cheap price to maintain such a strcture. Now e.g. SpaceX can use their Space Act agreement with NASA to use the facility at cost for testing their own engines. $700k/yr of taxpayer money to enable SpaceX et al to build better rockets is a good ongoing investment imho.

The article is a bit hyperbolic in that regard. The facility isn't closed down, it's just locked up because a locked door is cheaper than a security guard. No one is using it at the moment, but that doesn't mean it is not open for use.

Doesn't detract from the insanity of building the thing in the first place though.
CodeMirror Movie – Progammatically Create Code Demos with CodeMirror
the critical assumption in this post seems to be that drive speed was the only rate-limiting factor when they were collecting data... but as i understood the post, it seemed like perimeter load-balancing, sata controller/nic load, and/or customer usage patterns could be responsible for some of the differences they observed.
CDAP: Cask Data Application Platform – Build Data Applications
The usual technique is to claim the encoding technique, the decoding technique, and the data structures expressed by and expressing the technique. There's also equivalents and the doctrine of induced infringement.

The patent courts and ITC have looked very unfavorably on First Amendment claims and on defenses based on lack of infringement within the USA and technologies with alternative non-infringing uses not being liable.

The Supreme Court is less extremist than patent courts on insisting that patents pre-empt the Constitution, but the Supreme Court takes very few cases and you'd already have spent millions to get there and -- most importantly -- the patent courts largely don't consider Supreme Court cases to be necessarily binding precedent next time around.
Introversion and Extraversion Don't Exist
Economic Recovery Spreads to the Middle Class
This testing gets you valuable information about performance and stress characteristics which can allow you to make improvements to the rocket, either by changing its shape for better efficiency or by making it lighter where it turns out to be over engineered. SpaceX hasn't been doing this testing yet because it hasn't been necessary and building a test stand too expensive. Now they could.
At work we've spent some time talking about the idea of using a quantum computer to do inference over a probabilistic knowledge graph. It seems like a natural match.

I actually did some preliminary investigations, but unfortunately using factor graphs as a way of quantum state is apparently an area of active research. That makes searching for using quantum computers to calculate factor graph traversal pretty hard!

This paper looks pretty interesting though.
I'm concerned that highlighting his accomplishments every time one of his projects comes up gives the wrong impression to the newer programmers reading the site, or even to experienced programmers.

You, reader, can be a Bellard. There's nothing "special" about what Bellard has done, in the sense of it being beyond your abilities. You just have to believe in yourself, along with having a willingness to work hard most days. But working hard is easy when you find an interesting problem.

Bellard is able to do so much because knowledge is like compound interest: The more you know, the more you can learn. Bellard has been saving up for a long time.

Competition is sometimes motivational, and if you insist on looking at it like a competition, then realize that every day Bellard devotes to relaxation is a day you can catch up to where he's at. Competition is what motivated me, when I first started. And once you realize there's nothing magical about what they know, you realize you can sprint very hard towards where they're at, which is exciting.

But once you start down that path, competitive spirit tends to transcend into something else entirely. You stop comparing yourself to others. You focus on putting one foot in front of the other, taking the next logical step towards your goal. Repeat for N days, and suddenly people are highlighting the projects you've done.

But what's your goal? Well, that's up to you.

So pursue your interests! You can do it.
I'm making a trilogy of essays based on Peter Thiel's Zero to One motivation to find contrarian truths. Here's the second essay.
SpaceX do need to test their methane rocket engine design, which is bigger than the Merlin.
Very nice compression! As others have mentioned, BPG seems to be a bit better at picking which details to save. It's an improvement over mozjpg - even at "tiny" size, the usual (and annoying) "JPEG/MPEG-style block noise" seems to be eliminated. (no offense intended to mozjpeg, which is working from an old spec)

--

Speaking of image formats, it might be nice to have a new format where the container is designed to only allow a minimum of features. Something like a file with only [MagicNum, xsize, ysize, xdpi, ydpi, gamma, <compressed pixels>, CRC32].

The idea is that it should NOT support "metadata" like comments or EXIF. As we've seen, there is a problem with getting most people to understand that they should probably strip EXIF/etc before uploading, and having a format where we could say "only upload .foo pictures" instead of "run $tool to strip EXIF". A browser plugin could even auto-convert every image while uploading.

Unfortunately, it would face the same problem as any new image format: nobody wants to use a new format until it is already popular.
Wiping out rats is possible. While not exactly the same situation, the Canadian province of Alberta is rat-free due to an aggressive program to prevent and contain infestations [0].

[0] http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/agd...
Show HN: Cast Data Application Platform – Build Data Applications on Hadoop
The writing reminded me of Roald Dahl's "The Ratcatcher."
Why programmer should have a blog
Yes it is true.

However, it's not like we couldn't cure hepatitis C before, we could, but just not very well.

The old regimen was interferon + ribavirin. You had to take it for months and months and the interferon makes you feel like you have the flu (it also put the patient at risk of depression and suicide). The cure rate was ~50%.

With the new drugs you don't need to get interferon injections anymore. You just pop one pill a day and 12 weeks later there is a 95%+ likelihood that you've been cured of HCV.

It's a HUGE medical advance.
The only thing which was really better in the past, was 'way back' we havn't heard it that often -that former times had been better. So, YES!
Darpa plans to develop implantable devices to monitor the nervous system
Not stupid, evil. Those people are evil. Everyone who signed off on that deception should be tried for crimes against humanity.
Awesome! totally cool.
Of course you can't use this compression technique without being sued. And that is the key reason software patents are really bad.

You may hear a lot about trolls and grossly invalid obvious patents making millions in licensing and extortion by legal fees and I agree those things are bad. They are very bad. But the real problem is the apparently valid patents.

Monopolizing a programming technique is a long-term barrier to invention that provides little or no incentive to create anything new compared to all the invention it prohibits. It's the same in any field where experimentation doesn't require billion dollar research teams and each new idea is built on thousands of others. No new work you do in video, audio, or image processing or encoding will be legal without a mountain of licensing agreements. Anything beyond common established software applications will be unlicensable and effectively outlawed. Google had to fight for years with a giant legal team to get permission to release WebM and you don't have that kind of power.
they've also done it on several islands in haida gwaii(queen charlotte islands) in BC.
You are spot on with this. Data acquisition is the foundation of data science which in turn is the foundation of [fill in the blank]
https://github.com/LLK/scratch-flash
This is because GPUs are parallel and can't do nested ifs, not because representing code that way is efficient.

Even GPUs do sequential operations. You could never program the vast majority of algorithms like "if the input is exactly 100011110101... then output 100011001...".

If that seems silly, that is exactly how the proof that single layer NNs are perfectly general works. It proves that you can represent any series of if then statements like that in an NN. And people who don't understand the proof are mislead into thinking single layer NNs are just as good as deep NNs.
A Glimpse into Computer Vision
I agree. The classic talk on this subject is Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research." [0] I think there may be video online.

[0] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
The article actually says it's not ready for use, has no instruments and has not been tested under vacuum. It's a big steel shell.
What Is Sway – Office Sway Vision Video
In some ways, I feel like all we tend to do with our higher-level abstractions is make macroassemblers out of them again. Tiny amount of algorithmic content, then massive amount of business logic. As models for business logic grow more complex, they change from code, to data, and then into code again(this time as a separate language). Provisions from the old environment are lost in the new environment, requiring a second set of abstractions. Repeat...
BPG does a much better job at smaller sizes: its artifacts are way less jarring than JPEG’s (they just look like smudges).

However, to my eye, Large is the only acceptable quality level on these examples, and at Large the difference between JPEG and BPG looks almost imperceptible. Considering the cost of polyfilling, I would stick with JPEG.