skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in the DC area and frequently visit Beijing.

The DC Metro is currently building the Silver Line, an extension out to Dulles airport and a bit beyond. The first segment of the extension, with five stations, was completed last year after five years of construction. The remainder is planned to be complete in 2019 or 2020... assuming there aren't any more delays.

In a similar amount of time, the Beijing subway went from a sad little system with three lines to the second largest system in the world today, with 18 lines and 7 more under construction currently.

Now, Beijing is a substantially larger city, but it's still vastly disproportionate. The contrast between the two metro systems is just shocking.

I don't know what the hell we're doing in the US, but whatever it is, we're doing it wrong. Safety and quality differences aren't adequate to explain it by a long shot.
CityDesk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityDesk

(or it was 15 years ago)
If you just want to "extend" it, there are easier ways. http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html?trid=TRDSMSO14C... I know "easier" wasn't the point of this project, I just think the Infinite Jukebox is cool!
> (1) how much space my data will take up after compression and deduplication

In my experience, deduplication typically doesn't do much for the first backup. Further backups take approximately as much space as usual incremental backups. So the answer to this is "as much space as your existing backup".

> (2) how much bandwidth my incremental backups will need

I recently looked into this and for me the cost of bandwidth used for daily backups is about 10-15% of the cost of data storage.
Holy CPU time! That site consumes 100% of my CPU (presumably 100% of one core) whenever it is in the front tab (Firefox/OS X).

Anyone else experiencing that or is it just my laptop running wild?
Not sure about the WTC but I know for rail, bridge, etc. there can be lots of environmental regulations to deal with in the US. Finding a butterfly in a field can be enough to stop the work while they do environmental assessments to see how it may impact that butterfly species.

I know a little bit about this because my first job out of engineering college was working at a consultant company doing the drudge work for such an assessment. After 6 months of work, I felt we barely put out anything of value while burning consultant hours. The reports were cookie cutter format from previous contracts with a few facts filled in.

A friend who works for the state transportation engineering agency mentioned finding a native american arrow while expanding a highway triggering another investigation. Then there is eminent domain, noise assessments, impact reviews, etc.

So basically it is not the engineering costs but all the other demands of society that make these a slow and expensive venture.
Yeah, I'd much prefer a $10/month for 10 GB of storage plan without any variable pricing.

But honestly, it is what truly stops me from using Tarsnap. The part that stops me is the fact I have a dev server at home I have on 24/7 and I can just wait 9-10 hours for it to pull gpg'd backups.
The man has accomplished so much that dying was the only thing left he hadn't done.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Lee. You are an inspiration to all.
This isn't the core language changing though. This is people who are new to javascript coming to it and deciding they all must write their "hello world" framework / extension.

Most of it is just superfluous fluff that doesn't actually do anything but change the syntax to something they perceive as fundamentally better, when it's just a matter of taste and fashion.
Robocars and Ultracapacitors (and other energy sources)
What differentiates this from Codility?
The Daily Show had a segment on this a few months ago. IIRC there was a bill in Congress to stop the ivory trade in the US and it had wide support until the NRA spun it as an infringement of your gun rights, because you need to buy/sell/own ivory-handled pistols. Then it was predictably killed.
Seriously!

In the example I'm best acquainted with, the 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado, their early reporting was as good as anyone from the outside. In my personal photo gallery http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ the before and after pictures of my apartment complex at the end were grabbed from the Daily Mail. (EDITED from Daily Mirror.)

In general, in events where photos matter they're really good, and their copy, once you filter out the "passion" as I put it above is pretty good, especially since they don't overly try to force things into irrelevant narratives. More straight reporting than US we pretend to be objective "journalism".

I suggest you try them a few times when a "breaking" event happens, e.g. a hostage situation.
If I recall correctly, Peter Jackson asked Christopher Lee to utter Saruman's loud death-scream after Saruman had been stabbed in the back.

Christopher Lee responded that a person in that position, (due to punctured lung I suppose) wouldn't be able to scream, so it would be more of a strangled noise. Apparently this drew on his experiences in special forces in WW2.

edit: the scene is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bG8CVUujhs Saruman is stabbed, it is Grima Wormtounge who gets the arrow.
> And of course Apple collects information on you to help improve its products - nearly every company in existence does this.

The article claims that Apple's privacy policy explicitly says that it can use that information for marketing/advertising. From the article:

the company plainly states in its privacy policy that it does use private data in many ways, including... to build its own advertising network.

That's actually pretty evil. Normally if I turn on "tell X about any runtime errors", I expect there to be pretty strong privacy protections in place. After all, I'm doing them a pretty big favour by donating (an admittedly tiny amount of) bandwidth and compute resources to their product improvement. The absolute least I expect is to not be shafted in return.
Not to be confused with the Baader-Meinhof Gang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction
You're correct that there is probably more excitement for them then there ought to be, considering the simplicity of bash. People ought to create more programs following the UNIX philosophy, which can be chained together using simple pipes.

There are, however, cases where you simply need to use code. In these cases I'd rather use the language I'm developing in rather than bash. I haven't used Brunch for more than a simple project, so I can't really comment on it too much. I have used Gulp though, and I commend its authors for creating great abtractions following the UNIX philosophy in this context.
TrueConf Pioneers 4K (UltraHD) 1-on-1 Video Calls
I'd suggest feeding the raw FFT transform into the RNN, then translating back to normal sound afterwards. Raw sound has an awful lot of just bouncing up and down... a RNN isn't going to be any better at you than figuring out what's going on from there, whereas the FFT view of a song is much more meaningful... I can glance at one and at least have an idea of what the song is doing.

I'm still not all that optimistic, frankly, but it'll be better than raw data. Some further experimentation with different encoding might be necessary.

That said, I'd put $10 bucks that just putting an FFT representation through wouldn't necessarily produce a new pop song, but it would sound uniquely spooky, I bet. If nothing else you might have something you can hook up to some speakers next Halloween and make some kids cry.
You don't need to VPN. A DNS server works as well as a hosts file and is much faster than putting every request through your network.
Judging from the outside, US law enforcement has a "no accountability" problem, not a warrior one.
Physicists demonstrate new violations of local realism
Same here on my 2015 MBPr.
TL;DR: the foundation is apparently fairly closed. The reason for skepticism is that they spend a lot of money without a public decision making process. They spend more money than many countries on healthcare and if they decide to pull the plug on certain projects, those projects are going to have a very tough time.

I personally don't really see a need to worry or be skeptical. They've been doing this for over a decade and so far it's going great. I'd be grateful rather than skeptical about them spending so much money on projects that otherwise could not exist the way they do.
Are you sure that you optimized/tuned Neo4j or MongoDB as much as you did with ArangoDB?

Also, I don't like when a company posts a comparison between its product and others. Although some of them are arguably informative and objective, I consider these posts as marketing/ad posts.
It's probably easier to think that way when the effects of pollution are so apparent. When your boogers turn black after a day outside, you can't deny that something is happening.

On the other hand, if you live in a country where pollution controls have turned it largely invisible, and the worst pollution you experience is smelling a bit of diesel exhaust when you got too close to a bus, it's probably a lot easier to say that human activity is insignificant.
Weird. I've only heard about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon recently, but I'm an expert on the Dunning-Kruger effect.
You implemented an automaton that computes Levenshtein distances. However, Levenshtein automata are quite different from what you describe. Your automaton executes the basic Wagner-Fischer / Needleman-Wunsch / ... algorithm.

Btw, see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9698785 for another discussion on basically the same problem.
A nice idea, though is not easy to implement, it would be a service that lot of companies would love to use and pay for.
I don't see how the two are related. Certainly pollution controls will increase costs a bit, but not have an effect nearly this size.
How do you deal with PayPal disputes?
PayPal is in the process of extending buyer "Purchase Protection" to cover intangible goods, making it easier for customers to dispute payments made for online goods and services.

>As a business that sells intangible goods, you’ll need to respond to buyer claims for intangible goods, with ‘compelling evidence’ of the transaction. This compelling evidence could vary depending on the type of goods or services provided. Please refer to the User Agreement for more information.

>Although the expanded Purchase Protection extends coverage to buyers for intangible items, Seller Protection does not apply to intangible items. However, having proper Proof of Delivery can help a seller win a buyer’s Item Not Received Purchase Protection Claim.

As a service provider, I receive a significant number of fraudulent disputes through PayPal by customers who simply want to skip out on payment. We dedicate a fair amount of effort into our dispute responses and evidence, but there's only so much we can provide from our end. This is specific to PayPal as we win the majority of disputes/chargebacks through Stripe. I would gladly remove PayPal from the website, however, a lot of customers depend on it; removing it would result in losing a significant portion of our customer base, as well as many potential customers.

Has anyone found any specific methods or pieces of evidence that significantly increase the chances of winning a dispute from the seller's side?
> that’s disappointing, since a computer running the existing algorithm would take 1,000 years to exhaustively compare two human genomes.

I did a quick googling [1] and

> Our algorithm divides the problem into independent `quadrants' ...

> Our results show that our GPU implementation is up to 8x faster when operating on a large number of sequences.

It's still soul crushing. Why did our genome have to be that long :(

BTW, do you have numbers for setups with hundreds of GPUs?

I'm also left wondering about results using stochastic solutions. On how accuracy and problem size relate.

[1] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=tru...
I think they should be (especially as a polyglot myself), but there's also a lot of pressure to super specialize, and not just from employers. Having a network of like-minded developers is an invaluable psychological and career resource.
I don't know what the hell we're doing in the US

We've substantially and enormously empowered veto players at all levels: http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0... , in part due to the influence of Jane Jacobs and her fight against Robert Moses: http://jakeseliger.com/2013/07/03/jane-jacobs-is-everywhere-... .

That being said, there seems to be something about wealthy, industrialized countries that makes local resistance to infrastructure development powerful. Europe and Canada are suffering from the same basic problems.
I had no idea they made an hour long educational video on windows 95 with the cast of Friends! That is awesomely 90's. This is a really cool write up, clearly a lot of work went into it
Rant warning:

After working with Neo4j for about six months I would definitely NOT recommend it to anyone. In my experience it has been the least reliable and most buggy database solution I've ever worked with.

From the engineering point of view it has a host of core issues that make it really hard to write code, such as constant deadlock exceptions. These are caused by the fact that the database is largely incapable of handling two simultaneous upserts if those upserts touch the same node. Where most mature, decent DBs can handle this completely transparently Neo4j just panics and returns an error. This means writing Neo4j queries ends up requiring tons of boilerplate to wait for exclusive locks on nodes and/or retry upserts until they succeed.

From the devops perspective managing a cluster is also extremely painful, as there are frequent issues with replicas getting behind on syncing due to the server's pathetically slow write performance even with SSD storage volumes. We tried everything but the bottleneck was the server processes themselves, not the storage volumes, network connection, CPU, etc. We threw some really nice hardware at our Neo4j cluster but it still struggled to keep up with write loads in the range of 500-2000 writes per minute.

The final straw was their latest version 2.2 which they were advertising as a massive improvement in speed and reliability. When we upgraded it turned out to be the exact opposite. A few of our queries got faster but overall most of them got an order of magnitude slower. Their support basically told us that we'd need to rewrite many of our queries or manually set a flag to use their older query engine (and therefore miss out on the speed of the new query engine). Needless to say we decided if we needed to rewrite queries we were going to rewrite them to use a different storage engine entirely.

In my experience Neo4j was little more than a six month waste of time and dev resources.
Being in the non-profit sector, I have some thoughts on this.

Would you have someone to drop by and build you a bridge to satisfy their community service?

If you do something like programming for some agency, take into account the long term cost of what you do. Putting up a site with a framework is quick, but will there be someone able to support updating the code in the months and years to follow?

For programming I'd go with open source contributions. (also you can put links to your work and add to your resume)

Tutoring is good, doesn’t have to be in high school, there are local community centers that are looking for people to put on workshops and such.
I think you need to look more closely at the list of companies and their locations in the second paragraph, and the list of companies that actually replied to the letter.

But we don't actually have to speculate about what the silence of the american companies means: they are quite open about their policies: http://slashdot.org/story/01/11/28/173201/symantec-will-not-...

>Symantec chief researcher Eric Chien stated that provided a hypothetical keystroke logging tool was used only by the FBI, Symantec would avoid updating its antivirus tools to detect such a Trojan, echoing a similar stance Network Associates allegedly took with its McAfee anti-virus software earlier this week. 'If it was under the control of the FBI, with appropriate technical safeguards in place to prevent possible misuse, and nobody else used it -- we wouldn't detect it,' said Chien. 'However we would detect modified versions that might be used by hackers.
Well, the writer acknowledges what the foundation has done and how much it's helping with certain diseases and problems, but still the concerns it's trying to raise seem valid IMO.
Marketplace for returned items
Seriously? Am I glad this went nowhere. JS in the browser is bad enough but Tcl is a language much worse than JS. I might just as soon run BASIC or a shell script in the browser.
MediaWiki audio/video support updates
Kevin Rose seems to be very good at maintaining his "brand" as well as monetizing short term niches. Most things he's involved in don't seem to last much longer. Not saying there's anything wrong with that, he's certainly been successful in that regards. It just seems he doesn't (or doesn't want to) see further than that.

I certainly admire his seeming willingness/fearlessness to jump into new things. I imagine if I had that same willingness/fearlessness, I'd be more successful.
Just a quick comment on the spamfest side of things. Disclaimer that I never got into LoL. I've found over the years playing most of the different MOBAs that when I come into a new one I find it nearly impossible to delineate what is happening in a many-player fight. It only comes after some time playing the game that I'm able to recognise this shade of light in this pattern means this spell is being used, etc. After a point it becomes quite clear what is going on and looks a lot less like a spamfest.
The paper mentions an algorithm published in 1980 is O( (n/log(n))^2 ), which is better than the Wagner-Fischer algorithm mentioned in the article, even if it's not strongly subquadratic.
Scriptsharp allows you to write in C# and compile to JS
These things you mention are conditional variables - from a modeling perspective it would be perfectly plausible to build - think something like text-to-speech but instead of the sentence you input some characters representing the dynamics/feel of the desired song. You also have the issue of RNNs being deterministic - even sampling from the output softmax probably doesn't give enough to have interesting variations if you run the network multiple times from the same seed. Also choosing the argmax(prob(y | x)) at each step does not guarantee that the path generated is maximally likely. For that you need a beam search or something like it. But I don't think any of that is the key problem here.

In this case, an RNN meant for 1-of-K output is not well suited to outputting chords. It worked fine for single notes however! Check out this link from Joao Felipe Santos https://soundcloud.com/seaandsailor/sets/char-rnn-composes-i... . These are pretty cool - and he generated the titles to boot.

For chords you really can't model all possible combinations (2^88 for midi) naively, and you also can't really model notes independently - chords are highly structured and follow specific rules! Even bounding to only chords of up to 3 or 4 notes still makes a pretty large output space, which means more training data is needed, it is harder to optimize, etc. etc.

You should be much better off with some kind of conditional/factorized model strapped to the output of an RNN - this is the idea for RNN-RBM, RNN-NADE, LSTM-DBN, etc. You could also just try to model the audio representation directly using LSTM-GMM or VRNN, but this is pretty hard and an active area of research.
Winamp clone for Chrome browser
This, and eval are probably the two largest points of JS where unintended mutations and consequences happen. Also, by overloading this (which is something I always hated in jQuery), you lose the ability to compose functions together, and/or use other types of currying and binding for event handling and/or processing.

IMHO it's usually something to be avoided, not championed...
I'm not sure if I can follow - I'll give it some more thought and time. That said: You're doing something completely different as far I can tell. You build an ~automaton~ based on an input word. That's not what the paper does/what I struggled with. The paper describes a general automaton and creating a 'vector' based on the input word, that you use as steps.

At the moment I don't see how you could handle transpositions either.

I'm not saying that your approach is bad. But I do think that the 'I did it in an hour' comment was a quite a bit misleading, if you basically ignored the paper and did something that is different in most ways.

The tradeoffs are immensely different - the whole point of the paper is that you're precomputing a looot of stuff so that the lookup is fast.
An easy way for them to make money is to follow https://Discourse.org or https://ghost.org biz model.

These are Open Source, but you can pay them to host for you.
Are the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail associated? You're citing an example from the Mirror to illustrate why the Mail is not bad, which I don't quite understand.
I've had a few friends who were really into watches, and not like the high end bling bling type either.

They reminded me a lot of people I know who are really passionate about computer hardware. They knew everything about certain brands and their lines, their inner workings, how to fix them, how to get really obscure parts for the them, everything. And they wanted to share their information and talk to other knowledgeable people as well.

It's a pretty vibrant and interesting community. I'm not surprised he chose to get involved in the industry.
All of the investors are invested in other Bitcoin-related ventures. OpenBazaar has the potential to get people to actually spend Bitcoins, which people don't really do now. That then has the potential to increase Bitcoin's value, which will help their other Bitcoin-related investments.

For example, Andreessen Horowitz has invested quite a lot of money into Bitcoin mining operation, 21 Inc, who in turn have mined a lot of Bitcoin. If Bitcoin's price goes up, the value of 21 Inc's holdings go up.
Recruiting – The 3rd Crucial Startup Skill
Yep. And to some extent the democratic process is the thing that make it hard for public organizations to execute well. So there are some advantages to not playing that game - so long as your intentions are good.

But why does the gates's foundation has any say in intellectual-property for health care ? those countries should decide that by themselves.
WOW! I just looked this up using Tin.eye and the imgur link to locate this fiasco and how it happened.

This event happened in 2009 in Shanghai, China. The location was Block-7 at Lotus Riverside in the Minhang District. The building did not fall due an earthquake but rather due to very poor foundation planning. The coup de grace or death blow came when an underground parking garage was being dug below the building. (Why did not not dig out the garage first?) One worker was killed and no residents had moved in yet. (They want their money back)

Building a sky scrapper in just a few weeks or even months seems pretty rushed and quite ill advised. Each floor would have to be inspected and certified as safe and I don't believe that could be done in under a year.

Here is a page on what went wrong: http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2010/02/its-n...
(Disclaimer: Max from ArangoDB)
We have invested considerable effort to optimize each database. Obviously, we know our own product better than the others.
However, we have asked people who know the other products better, and we keep this investigation open for everybody to contribute and to suggest improvements. As you can see from last week's post, there have been very good contributions, we have tried them out and have published the improved results.
Online retailer develops humanoid robot army to help human colleagues