skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years ago I remember reading reports of the FBI forensic labs doing much worse-- taking evidence from the crime scene and contaminating evidence taken from the accused with it so that it would produce a "match" and the like. It was a big scandal.

In fact over the past 20 years I've heard this story at least a dozen times-- where crime "labs" at different levels of government and in different states (eg: state labs, federal lagbs, etc) were caught doing this.

And when it happens, that isn't enough to get people to be able to appeal unless they have evidence the lab did it in their specific case.

One of the problems of our system is that the criminal system is lacks checks and balances. The judges, prosecutors, police all work for the government. They all have the same interests-- they all report to people who want to look "tough on crime".

Since the police immediately take over crime scenes and collect the evidence and then get the evidence analyzed, they have a lot of power to be corrupt in the interest of more convictions-- and the consequences are negligible for being caught.

Whose going to try a dirty cop? You can shoot a guy in the back on video and never get put on trial for it in this country. (I left Texas when a cop gunned down an unarmed black kid who was on his knees crawling away from him... shooting him multiple times in the back... on my college campus. The cop lost his job and then joined the police force in a suburb. No charges were filed. Apparently a black kid crawling away was "threatening" to the white cop. Alas, I moved to a liberal state and was then myself the victim state corruption- though fortunately, the damage was only $3k to a lawyer.)

This is why I think any evidence submitted in court needs to come from an independant lab, done in a double blind way, and with several audit cases sent to that lab regularly (eg: taking dna from people not involved in crimes and send it in as if it was part of an investigation and see if they are fabricating evidence.)

The idea that the government is independant and objective is to me, now that I'm older and have seen these scandals over the years, laughable.

Every time it happens everyone acts like its' a rare thing.

It's not.
Kesey about this book, from the article:

> I had no major problems with the book then, though I haven’t looked at it since. When he was around us, he took no notes. I suppose he prides himself on his good memory. His memory may be good, but it’s his memory and not mine.
When young I once had the opinion that such exceptions would be a good thing.

That is, until I installed some version of Red Hat that aliased rm to "rm -i", and extracted a few wrong tar files. Then I understood why the shell is that way, and why everybody just clicks "ok" on Windows dialog boxes without reading the alerts. Funny thing is that I lost some important files because I expected the prompt, but pressed "y" 19 times, instead of 18...

Nowadays I Just do backups.
Hey! Thanks to @nickbarnwell, we'll have a suggest city feature tonight.

Didn't realize this was going to be on HN today, and did NOT plan for such amazing traffic. Everything we do is spread via word of mouth, so we don't face these issues as much as we have been today!
Why do you think grubwithus failed?
We’re All Terrible at Understanding Each Other
I'd like to see this answered by someone knowledgeable too.

From my limited knowledge I would guess the function being C2 gives the curvature a "global" domain; while if the function is only C1 the curvatures will have limited influence, and you can use that to enforce other curvatures "prohibited" under C2. Anyway, I might be completely wrong, just the idea I got from the article :)
What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
Same here, kept me engaged the whole time. But I did skip the last few paragraphs.
Granted I haven't written my own mosaic generator, but it seems little more than iteration and averages.
In time! Lots of social norms we gotta be more understanding of before we expand into South Asia in general.

I have a personal interest in expanding into India and nearby areas, given my family background and a lot of nonprofit work I've done in the past, but we definitely have more operational challenges to sort out before we can focus intently on international expansion with an appropriate amount of tact and attention. In time!
It presents a few powerful ideas so clearly, just from a few minutes you are left a little smarter :)

I'll definitely save this as an example...
Chrome doesn't come preinstalled on any OS that I know of. So you're suggesting that users think that they, "Used google to download google so they could do searches on google?"
Show HN: Newsbar – Get to Hacker News Discussions from the Chrome Omnibox
It's not native advertising, it's just regular PR. No money changed hands.
As a comparison though, the first 2 challenges took about 200~300 lines of code. This challenge looks like more then 2000~3000. It literally is asking for enough that it made me say "Screw that, I'd rather work on my own projects" rather then "Hey, that looks like it'd be interesting". I could see a photo-mosaic challenge by itself, without all the cruft of logins and such, but this seems like massive feature creep compared to previous challenges.

Edit: Oh, and on top of all that, it's supposed to be deployed on a server... Seriously, screw that, I'm not paying hosting costs for a crappy contest like this.
The latter :) We've considered becoming a 501 or something but for now we are just playing it by ear and doing what we can to bring tea time to as many people as possible.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6489135
Think about the hypothesis that all fingerprints are unique. That's voodoo. First off you would have to fingerprint everybody to check it. And secondly they don't actually match fingerprints, but match a description of the fingerprint that throws out most of the data (like taking a million books and reducing them all into one byte hashes of their text, and then claiming that Moby Dick is a plagiarized version of Henry V because they produce the same 8-bit hash!)

The problem is, these things were indicators, but they have been manipulated to be used as if they were proof.

If the suspect is a red head male, and the witness describes seeing a red head male, then the jury is inclined to think that's the same guy.

IT's human nature.

Even in New York City.

Where there are at least 84,000 red headed males!
I used to mentor other programmers while I worked because management hired unqualified people for the positions and they needed help in getting started. I would see coworkers stuck not knowing what to do in a blank Visual BASIC 5.0/6.0 screen. I'd go over and help them out and give them some lessons in Visual BASIC to get them started.

Most mentors want something back in a relationship, I did it just to help out other people with no reward for me at all.

I got sick one day, stressed out and mentally ill, and went on disability. Been trying to get back on track and get back into programming. I'm 46 now and could use a mentor, but I lack people and social skills due to my mental illness and trying to rebuild them. I often get confused as someone whop suffers from autism in the way I write and talk. But I don't have autism, I have schizoaffective disorder which is rare and like bipolar with schizophrenia.

Because of my mental illness friends and family abandoned me, and my career was basically over. Nobody wants to hire a programmer that is mentally ill. But if I find the right company and the right mentor, I could get back into things.
Direct Match (YC W15) Is Hiring Java Developers
It will be very interesting to see their findings. As far as I know Numenta's software (or HTMs in general) haven't been tested yet against known benchmarks like LSVRC, CIFAR, etc. Or results haven't been published.
They should at least do what my provider does...cap in place but midnight to 8AM is exempted. That way the people that feel a need to download the entire internet can still do so...but in a way that doesn't affect anyone else & doesn't require additional capacity.

Obviously true uncapped would be ideal but it strikes me as a decent compromise. And 8 hours of gigabit ever day gets you pretty far if the aim is to move data...
The title is misleading because Facebook hasn't solved anything, unless you felt the world was missing a self-surveillance system.
Man, that promo video was tough to watch all the way through. I'm not sure why they believe they need to hard-sell the concept of cheap rockets.
I've seen a lot of young engineering graduates in India who experience a lack of direction. One person here who I know helps these people out with good mentoring is http://pramode.net/. I've met several of his students and, if they're anything to go by, he does an excellent job.

I've started something similar (http://thelycaeum.in/) to what he does myself. It's a lot smaller. I've currently working with my second batch of students and it's going okay.
To what end? Obviously faster is better, but right now anything above 500 faces a serious diminishing returns problem let alone 1 gig vs 2 gig.
All people have an agenda. Their agenda generally favors themselves in some way or another.

We, as the potential victims of injustice want a real, actual, scientific, blind justice system that presumes innocence and requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, checked by a jury that can nullify laws, and the like.

Politicians want to be "tough on crime" so they appoint judges and prosecutors who get convictions.
Judges want to be re-elected because they are "tough on crime" (in places where judges are elected)
Prosecutors want to have a successful career so they will do anything they can get away with to get a conviction.
The police want to have the case be off their hands and to be "closed" so that their stats look good because it's good for their career because the Mayor wants to be "tough on crime" and so the police find the first plausible suspect and try to build a case.

All these organizations are in cahoots, literally, and so no prosecutor is going to indict a judge or cop unless they absolutely have to.

So long as the public can be lead to believe they live in a society with the "rule of law" not the "rule of man" then nothing more needs to be done. And the public is very gullible! (Especially when you control the schools and you raise them to be gullible.)

IT's not that these people are evil. ITs that they are self interested.

The founding fathers attempted to put in checks and balances and they did a damn good job.

But over the past 200 years, they have been systematically eroded.
"Seriously" is hardly a constructive comment
I thought it was interesting to read some philosophical thoughts about this and the other rules. Basically, that since such complex, chaotic, or random patterns can be generated from simple rule sets, and since these simple rule sets cannot be reliably divined in reverse from analyzing these complex rulesets, it basically invalidates the Intelligent Design argument. Those arguments are something along the lines of how incomprehensible outputs can only be generated by incomprehensible inputs (like a higher power, etc).
Yes. There is no academic requirement for publishing research papers. Anyone can submit a paper for the peer-review process at most journals. However, as an outsider it would be better if you collaborate with someone familiar with the journal and the research publication process. There are lots of esoteric rules that the journals take very seriously (e.g., formatting, common research terms, language, and tone) that is impossible to know unless you have experience with the publication process. You should also note that each journal is different in terms of what they specialize in, the types of topics that publish, and their target readership. The more inside knowledge you have about the journals, the quicker you can get your paper approve for publication.
> IE11 is an evergreen browser with constant improvement.

Until Spartan comes out?

> There won't be another IE. There will be Spartan.

So we're going to be stuck supporting IE11 long after "Spartan" has taken hold just like every previous release? Doesn't that go against the whole purpose of the "Evergreen" browser?

> They basically have, long ago. IE10 and IE11 aren't Windows 8-exclusive.

I don't mean exclusive to the operating system. I mean that there are parts of the OS that rely on the browser libraries itself. And there are weird situations where OS things rely on IE libraries, or (Worse) Office Libraries. That at least for a while was one of the big reasons the problems would never get fixed.
2 New Web VR Experiences Highlight the Creative Power of Browser-Based VR
An Experiment in Purely Functional IO for Clojure
To quote Max Planck:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
I developed few apps on WP few years ago and I realized that Metro design is very dictatorial in almost every aspect of design and UX. Almost everything is well defined that you can't come up with creative ideas. iOS on the other hand gives a very flexible environment (almost like a blank canvas) where you can come up with innovative UI controls.
I think, the problem is similar to the trouble we have with judges in our country. One judge recently said something that really put a very shady light on many of his colleagues. I regret, that I don't remember it exactly, what he said.

The trouble in my opinion with some judges in my country and with the police in some countries is, that everybody just assumes, that because they work for law enforcement, they have a high level of integrity. But when you look how they are educated, the subject "integrity" is not even touched (I even don't think, that it is taught in law schools).

In my country, when somebody is already a judge, there is nearly no chance at all, that this person will be held accountable for misjudging. I think, not even the highest courts can replace a judge that repeatedly and knowingly is bending the law. At least I don't know of any case at all where a judge was punished or even replaced. And don't think, that all judgments are correct in my country.

In my opinion, when there is one thing to be learned from history, it is that any person can err and even the best meaning persons can change into dictators over time depending on situations.
I'm not one of the org-mode users. I've been a big fan of Onenote for a while - works great on my phone, mac, and windows computer. I tried org-mode when one of my co-workers kept talking about it, but it didn't really work for my workflow, even though I use emacs for most of my code-related tasks. Just use whatever works best for you - if you want to use Onenote, it doesn't really matter if org-mode or some other tool happens to be more popular in some community.
They wouldn't be a communist or nazi if they were trying to join. The only reason would be to destroy it.

There's already too much tolerance of people that would enslave and destroy.
I didn't accuse them of not knowing math, I said it seems to be reckless and irresponsible. I don't dispute that the method is statistically robust - in fact I said that this would make it fine in an RNG library in some programming language. (i.e. I would have zero qualms using it as my RNG.)

It's just that if there is anyplace where some numerical correlation might accidentally peek through the curtains, it would be in the kinds of things someone does in mathematics software. Here is a bad algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RANDU that was "in use since the 60s'". I'm sure it's fine for certain uses, but, "as a result of the wide use of RANDU in the early 1970s, many results from that time are seen as suspicious."

How surprised would you be if this very simple RNG turned out to produce incorrect results somewhere?
Supreme Court, Legislative and ultimately voting are all mechanisms that should moderate corruption.

The problem is all of these mechanisms are controlled by the government, which is the source of the corruption. Even voting-- I do believe that the voting machines are corrupted about 50/50- half for democrats and half for republicans. But that only serves to reinforce our one-party-with-two-wings system and exclude greens and libertarians.

I long for the day when all of the nationally televised presidential debates include the Libertarian and Green candidates. (At the 2004 & 2008 elections they put their differences aside and travelled to the debates and tried to get in, and got arrested attempting to do so as a protest of being excluded. And then had a libertarian-green presidential debate. Loved it.)
Proto quantum computer inspired by Victorians gets a speed boost
digging through the wayback machine, shows a slightly different version from around this time (1996) - https://web.archive.org/web/19961219205128/http://www.pizzah...

Thought this comment was particularly humorous, considering general the lack of content

<!

* *

* PIZZA HUT INC. *

* *

* PHI proprietary information: the enclosed materials contain *

* proprietary information of Pizza Hut Inc. and shall *

* not be disclosed in whole or in any part to any third party *

* or used by any person for any purpose, without written consent *

* of PHI. Duplication of any portion of these materials shall *

* include this legend. *

* *

HTML	index.html

DESCRIPTION	Home Page.

REVISIONS

Date	Who	Comments

----	---	--------

08/18/94	SCO	created.

->
Yes, and having travelled extensively and lived in Mexico and Chile, my experience tells me that while the USA has failed to have adequate checks and balances, other countries often have even less. I loved both of those countries, but I wouldn't really feel safe in Mexico, and I didn't feel fully safe in Chile. I think the Carabineros of chile are taught integrity and are mostly above reproach, however, and so I hold Chile out as a good example of doing it right. But even still, none of these countries have enough checks and balances.

I think the problem is there's a magical thing that happens to people when they think about government.

They somehow think it's ok for government to do things that individuals cannot. And once you give a group of people that magical power, it's easy to forget that they are people.
Need more ANSI from The Floating Pancreas, which was a rather unique BBS that served up a lot of textfiles back in the day. How could it be omitted?
They clonned Epitech and made it free and hopefully with a better service. But if they really liked free education they would publish the classes for free online. They will earn money from recruiters.
Again we see that our law enforcement branch is overreaching, acting in error, and effectively breaking the law. What penalty is appropriate for this? How do we rebuild our country to stop this? I believe the answer is to hold the perpetrators responsible. Easy to say, but we need financial and jail times far beyond the pain these people cause. We need to root out this corruption, whether it's intentional or negligent.
Once you sign up to host there are some informal "training materials" available. I have never attended a TWS event but I will be hosting my first one next weekend (!!!). It's a little nerve-wracking to go in with no prior experience but I think that's okay since a big part of TWS is being open-minded and having no expectations about where the conversation will go.
The Osborne effect whee announcing a future product before it is made way too early cancels sales of the current project.

People forget when Osborne was losing sales, the IBM PC and PC-DOS was gaining sales and CP/M systems like those made by Osborne had a lot of competition. Microsoft/IBM had a converter program that could convert CP/M-80 programs to DOS programs. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2015/04/17/10608...

Also Kaypro had won over Osborne customers with their own CP/M machines that reached the market before the new Osborne models.

Commodore had the VIC-20 and later Commodore-64 that provided cheaper computers as did the 8 bit Atari line. Some people would rather buy a $399 Commodore or Atari computer and hook it up to their TV screen.

So announcing a new product too far ahead of time was only one factor in the Osborne effect.

Makerbot has Chinese competition, and they had technical issues as well. There are more factors here than just announcing a new product too far ahead of time. Instead of Osborne it is more like the Apple III http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III
The reverse is true, too. After IBM couldn't even send a quote for a seven-figure purchase, we went with Sun's amd64 servers. For years, they got additional business because the process was to email or call & wait 10 minutes for a detailed quote which was correct on the first try. Every so often we tried to get IBM or HP involved but their sales guys talked us out of it within the first 15 minutes.
It will all end in tiers. $200 a month for first world internet, $70 a month for the crap-tacular service that people can afford.
I don't know about a "violent revolution", but I'm very skeptical of fixing a broken system while working within the rules of said system.
The Fed has in recent years done a lot (billions of dollars) of buying that helped hedge funds, beginning with the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management and continuing through the quantitative easing.

This doesn't imply a conspiracy, but it is definitely a revolving door.
IMO, if you haven't met Peter Cooper, you've missed one of this life's joys.
Comcast doesn't have caps in The Bay Area (at least not according to what they say on their website) and where they do have caps, they are tiered like the speeds are tiered - higher speeds, bigger cap.

http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-u...
Do we already have anything like this in Bangalore? Another "occasional" tea connoisseur here :-)
Most of the 1200 use it at the same time. My webservers are behind the load balancer, but newrelic - the performance monitoring tool has lately started showing app server times taking as long as 1200ms. Rather than add more servers I wanted to hear from others if 2 instances for 1200 users is in the ballpark, or is my application poorly designed.
Logically, it does not invalidate intelligent design.

Using your summary "incomprehensible outputs can only be generated by incomprehensible inputs" this sort of thing only proves that an incomprehensible is not a necessary condition.

To truly invalidate intelligent design, you would need to exhaustively show that incomprehensible inputs never yield incomprehensible outputs.

Ninja edit: The sort of reasoning you discuss does strengthen the basis for evolution by natural selection, as it indicates that comprehensible inputs can yield incomprehensible outputs.

This is all in the realm of logic, not observed evidence supporting one view or the other.
That first little example is the best explanation of a functionally pure language I've read.
Because back in the day everyone was a novice.
The way I explain how google got a de facto monopoly on search in France (and in Europe) is a combination of :
-being a good product with no real good competitor for european languages (except for russian where Yandex exists)
-set as the default search engine for mozilla, opera and then chrome from the start. Bing is the default one on IE but bing just came along in 2009. Before that I'm not even sure what was the default search engine in europe for IE. Things have changed in the last years but most people configuration once set won't change even if google is not the default search engine for firefox anymore.

I was actually not speaking about using law to force competition but just saying that the general web literacy in France and probably in most of europe is so low that every law that deals with internet does not get any traction with congressmen and in the media because most people doesn't understand an inch of what is as stake therefore they do not care.