skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The complexity of the problem was increased by the necessity of providing migration paths from legacy encodings to Unicode and back again; without such a guarantee, bootstrapping the world into using Unicode would have been a much more difficult proposition, but that constraint also means that many oddities of legacy encodings have had to be preserved in Unicode in order to be able to preserve that round-trip mapping.

While I agree that preserving round-trip integrity was essential for Unicodes success, I'm not sure if the approach taken to achieve that was the best one. I would have preferred that the complexity tradeoff would have been shifted to software converting between Unicode and legacy encodings by having more complex mapping tables and cleaner code point space.

I also think that Unicode Consortium should have been more aggressive in segregating (and discouraging the general use of) legacy compatibility features/codepoints and the stuff that is actually supposed to be used. My personal pet peeve is precomposed characters.

In a more general note, I sometimes wonder if it would have been beneficial to have separate layers in Unicode and have more focused on providing generic primitives. As a simple example it is mighty convenient that I can type 2³ = 8 in plain text, but arguably it would be even nicer if instead of special 'SUPERSCRIPT THREE' codepoint there would be generic superscript modifier codepoint that could be combined with any character.

Speaking of superscripts, they demonstrate well one aspect that I dislike in Unicode, the way they have absorbed legacy encodings verbatim. The numeric superscripts (e.g. ⁰ ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶) happen to have inconsistent look on my machine because the superscripts for 1, 2, and 3 are from Latin1 while the rest are in their own block.
I have been accused of irrational thought by humanists, by voting for Ron Paul, and other libertarian types, despite my atheism.
Like everything else in life, everyone has their own style. I'm with you - typing is not an area that I worry about efficiency. I whiteboard high level designs, think things out in my head, go for a walk and think out the code, and finally sit down and type it out in a fairly short time. Later, when updating and debugging, navigating via keyboard gets more important, but still not a critical path for me.

But I do know other people who really do just type immediately when they start to code. They use the keyboard and screen as part of their thought process. For them, perhaps it makes a bigger difference.
For me, at least, it's not so much a "raw LOC output" thing as it is a comfort thing. When I go back to IDEs or text editors that aren't Emacs, even though I can be productive there are lots of movements and tricks that I miss. It's less time spent text editing and more time spent looking, reading, and thinking.

Rarely, I'll be in a situation where I have to do a series of complex edits. At my old job if we were crunching, some of the people that were junior to me would look over my shoulder and see me rushing through a ton of different files to make them. I think if you're familiar with a tool/setup it's easy to do this, but it's not totally necessary.
It really doesn't rain much at all: http://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/mountain-view/californi...
Well, it's not very meaningful to compare a good example of something with the bad example of something else (one lines are generally considered bad practice also for this reason).

If that line would be "optimized for readability", there would be at least one or two intermediate variables.
I agree re: lack of theory. No easy answer on that one other than "keep looking and get more people to help". We are making major practical gains along the way (although many are quick to discount those--"that's it???"). It's science in practice, theory follows.

I disagree re: the 1000s of titans thing. Google, Baidu, etc are building large GPU clusters and have basically shown "similar resources = similar results", but everyone else is mostly using single machine--maybe multi-GPU--and doing fine. A single Titan X is a BEAST for deep learning--nobody is using 1000s and you only need 1 for great results on most datasets I've seen.

On the subject of Schmidhuber, I saw him speak once and he spent half the talk explaining how he invented everything he's talking about (EVERYTHING!) and the other half talking about how no one gives him credit. I'm half joking, but I think there's more to his story. Or it's a miscarriage of justice.
> I'm no biologist, but I don't think our brains are going around trying to do a grid search for the best hyperparameters.

Is that not essentially the process of evolution through natural selection? One giant optimisation problem?
I'm a bit surprised you don't recognize the reference. I'm not big on gaming, but even I know the term is used by PC players to elevate themselves above the Xbox/Playstation console flamewars.

But yes, I'm not a Nazi and I don't support the idea of master races (aside from ebooks and PC gaming).
That will change though. I receive hundreds of IPv4 connection attempts every day, as more systems move to IPv6 so will the attacks.

Interesting though is that covering the entire IPv6 space is a much larger task. That should hold down the volume of random attempts for a while, just by dilution effect.
I also flagged it because it's egregious. Sure, most stories on politics can be off-topic but that doesn't mean you should organize voting rings to flag all political stories like tptacek suggests.

Also even if 99% of political stories are off-topic that still leaves some gigantic number on-topic, and some handful of them are part of something more interesting that would gratify one's intellectual curiosity.

I think it would be more pragmatic to just submit stories you want to see and regularly read the New page to upvote stories you like.
Crowdfunding Follies: Proof That Ohm’s Law Is Arcane Knowledge
That sound you hear is the laughter of Toughbook owners.
> And again, no proof was presented to indicate that this is the case.

That what is the case? That the full archive contains information that would compromise ongoing operations?

We already know that the archive includes operational details. For example, the IP addresses of NSA targets in Hong Kong and China that Snowden released[1] in order to (as Greenwald put it) "ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China”[2].

Besides, if the archive didn't contain any such information, why didn't he simply dump the entire archive onto the Internet, WikiLeaks-style? I seem to recall that the stated reason for releasing it through newspapers was so that they could redact any such information before publishing it.

1: http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-sn...

2: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/25/greenwald-s...
That has more to do with the usability of trackpads on Macbooks vs. PCs. It isn't an age thing. It might be a hipster thing.
I wrote my first book in what was then Star Office, but everything since has been in Emacs and some sort of markup. I agree with the annoying variations Markdown. reStructuredText is, at least, predictable. I do still outline in org mode though.

It seems like anytime I interact with a traditional publisher, just like the editor in the article, they want MS Word. They then want to give me edits as Word change tracking.

My compromise is to go back and change my source and regenerate. It works, but at night, when the world is quiet and dreams are less threatened by reason, I imagine a world where editors send me patches or pull requests.

I'll have to try the method described in the article. That might be much better, but I'll have less chance of negotiating it than with a freelance editor.

I don't think there's a technical solution to this problem and certainly not a profitable one, because it's a matter of getting people who couldn't care less about diffs and source control to use unfamiliar tools for the benefit of someone they are paying.

I can't even get some developers to use source control.

Maybe GitBook will change minds.
I'd disagree that FP is niche; the concepts are used throughout business, and more and more back ends are being written in an FP language. Front ends using JS are being written more and more in an FP style as well.
Looks nice, but skimming through it I saw loads of typos. Makes you wonder how much effort was put into this.
Everyone I spoke with about Import.io said it was pretty inconsistent.
"Europe" isn't nuke-averse; French nuclear plant designs are considered among the world's best, and Germany only backed off nuclear power when Fukushima happened.

In light of Fukushima I wish EVERYONE were more nuke-averse...
> I ended up thinking about every possible error.

Exactly. In Go you can't just wrap code in a try/catch block and not deal with the fall out. You can ignore errors with _, but you still have to explicitly write out _, so you visually see what you're ignoring.

I think this is Go's simplicity is actually helpful. It feels like boilerplate at first, but there is something to being _forced_ to handle edge cases sooner rather than later.
Given the hell that is morning traffic on the 101, the bicycle path is actually the easier and more pleasant commute alternative for a lot of people. Before claiming that only "a very small percentage of the population" benefit, we should look for numbers on how many people actually do use the bike path.
There seems to be a pattern in Asian languages that try to equate symbols that represent things to the physical respresentation. I recall a friend stating the Korean word/character for balance looked like a person holding jugs of water on each shoulder.
If these are the most interesting results, then it's not. Most of the work seems to be in the (human provided) search for happy combinations like these. Are they typical? Is the whole space like this? Is there a consistent metric for deciding that these are in fact clever and it's not just the human doing the work in making it make sense in a funny way?
So, like what happened when SGI left (and Google eventually moved in)? Or Sun -> Facebook?
This is very cool, but it isn't really "playing" the game. Instead it's "memorizing" how to complete a specific level through trial and error.

If you took this neural network and tried it on another Mario level, it would fail miserably.
The article implies that the 0.25 house edge was calculated before the rebates were considered, still leaving the ~0.08 house edge as a mystery. The quote below follows the quote from my original comment. The author of the article may have made a mistake, though.

When Johnson and the Trop finally agreed, he had whittled the house edge down to one-fourth of 1 percent, by his figuring. In effect, he was playing a 50-50 game against the house, and with the discount, he was risking only 80 cents of every dollar he played.
This is a person who died in the custody of the Uzbekistan government (extremely graphic photo, do not click):

http://www.interet-general.info/IMG/jpg/Muzafar-Avazov-4.jpg

You can decide for yourself what you think the manner of death was, but it wasn't "natural causes".

Here's a NYT story on sending people to Uzbekistan to be jailed/tortured:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/world/us-recruits-a-rough-...
The guy didn't just wear it in his workplace, in which it would be mainly up to his workplace.

He wore it while representing a major scientific effort to the world. During a period where we are working very hard to drag our culture out of millennia of patriarchy, race-based dominance, and other primitive idiocy. And while a great number of people are trying very hard to solve the diversity issues in science.

So no, it was not blown out of proportion. He was unlucky in that this is a moment of transition. 25 years ago nobody bothered would have felt safe speaking up, and 25 years from now things will hopefully have changed enough that one mistake won't be emblematic of a major societal problem. But today's today. And today we have a lot of people whose toes have been stepped on all their goddamn lives.
Let us not speak of things like expanding BART all the way to San Jose, and the traffic relief which that could bring.
Gives me a certificate error.
There's no more Uruguay 10 Centesimos anymore, what will you do without the soda!
> any tips on sensitive ways to bring such things up?

Sorry I don't have a good answer. I got finger pointed when I was young, they were older than me so they thought they could educate me.

But I guess eventually culture differences will diminish. Americans use chopsticks, Chinese people watch NBA & Hollywood. When the younger generation rules, there will be less misunderstanding.
> And Microsoft won't curate nor provide a mirror for popular open source binary downloads, right?

Developers will be able to upload regular desktop applications to the Windows 10 app store once they have converted them into the AppX format. I don't see why open source Windows apps couldn't be hosted there.
The Food of the Future: Stir Fry Crickets and Sauteed Weeds
It's a sizable issue for me. I write every piece of code several times: once to get a sense of the problem space, once to prepare it for review, once to incorporate feedback review and once to adapt it once a new customer has as similar need, an tweaking my code for a couple hours saves him a couple of days. The technical ability to type fast is critical, thus having good tools is critical. Several areas: typing comfort, code search, autocomplete, code refactoring, plus high signal / noise language.
AsciiDoc is an often overlooked markup format, which implements all features of DocBook. It is a perfect fit for writing a book. Markdown and reStructuredText were not designed with books in mind.

It's a pity that the popularity of Markdown made it hard for the author to even consider AsciiDoc. It wasn't even in the list of contenders.
I've played with word2vec, and it took nothing to get really interesting combinations.

The first thing I tried was computer : server :: phone : ?
I didn't really have a great answer for that in my head before I ran it. Word2vec decided the closest match was "voicemail". It breaks down when you feed it total nonsense, but what would you expect it to do? :P

I'm constantly super impressed by properties of the vectors.
I wonder about this every time the subject of editors comes up. There's a perception of efficiency for sure, but I wonder how much actual efficiency is gained in most cases. I just don't spend a lot of time on actual typing when programming, vs thinking about the code or testing or debugging or sifting through documentation. Plus I'm not on the same machine all the time, so lots of customization requires extra effort every time I have to jump on a freshly installed system.
Maybe, if you own a significant amount of property, which is extremely expensive. So, in other words, if you're rich AF; yes.
It is pretty much everywhere.
As many already suggested, having documentation and a "chaperone" are a great start. On the technical front, found Docker to be a god-send for painlessly giving a new employee their own copy of the production environment.
Seven-Month Wait for Lunch: Overhauling the food aid delivery system (2013)
Well, for some definition of fail miserably:

> Yeah, I think it wouldn't generalize super well, but I did try it on another easy level and it was able to get halfway through it.

- the author, at http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/39qel5/top_super_mar...
Erlang processes are shared-nothing and, by design, data must be copied when processes communicate:

> All data in messages between Erlang processes is copied, with the exception of refc binaries on the same Erlang node. [1]

But I have to agree with you that the paragraph about Erlang in the article overstates the issue. In most cases, messages should be relatively light and then the copy is not issue. It's an issue only when you need to transfer or share a complex data structure.

If I'm not mistaken, in the current implementation of BEAM, each lightweight process has its own heap and this is the reason why data must be copied. But it could be possible to allocate memory from an arena shared by all processes, and because Erlang data structures are immutable, messages exchanged by processes could contain only references. The cost would be a more complex garbage collector, with the related latency issues.

[1] http://www.erlang.org/doc/efficiency_guide/processes.html
Precomputing all shortest routes uses O(n^2) memory with the size of the map, though as opposed to the O(n) memory that this uses. For a Starcraft map that's the difference between a MB and a TB.
It might be that Mac trackpads are a really good solution. For me, I try to avoid pointer devices, but when I do have to leave the keyboard, it's nice to only travel a couple of inches to the trackpad instead of a foot to the mouse.

I had my laptop pinched last week so I've been on a Mac desktop with a Mighty Mouse. The gesture control is so clumsy compared to what you can do with a trackpad.
Which is why the maxim "don't hold locks while calling untrusted code" exists. Holding a lock while invoking a callback is extremely dangerous. Some situations demnd doing this (but not that often), in which case you need to document it like crazy.
Looking strictly at salary maybe not, but the entire package of benefits, retirement, paid time off, near-impossibility of being fired, etc. is far from the worst.
Why Does a CS Degree Require So Much Math?
It's a bit incorrect to replace "Unreal 4" with "UDK" because UDK is only free version of UE3.
I'm not sure of all the parameters yet, I'm coordinating with our corporate partners to see what they would find most useful. I'll be posting the RFC to the users forum and reddit once it's done. You can also give me your email address and I'll notify you when it's ready. :)
MX3D is to 3D-print a steel bridge over water in Amsterdam
You're right that Europe isn't homogenous, but it's not like every country in Europe has its own independent space agency. They have the ESA, which is nuke-averse. I was using "Europe" as a linguistic short-cut for the European space efforts, which are unified.

Per someone else's comment, RTGs don't have to be heavy. Wikipedia lists one as light as 2.1 kg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... Keep in mind that RTGs replace not just the solar panel and electricity generating systems but also a lot of the heating system as well.

You can see the breakdown on Philae here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae_(spacecraft)#Design It uses about 16 kg total between the power system and thermal control system. You could fit in an RTG with the same or higher power output as the solar panels for the same mass. Philae in total is around 98 kg, which is definitely above the size threshold of craft that could be powered with an RTG.
When I read this, I nodded. But now you've got me wondering if I just want to believe you.
Eh, I think many people still get that it's the "database" icon. http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/31784/what-is-the-orig...
You did the work to compile Go to arm64? Thanks for that then!
I'm pretty sure that voting in national elections at all is inherently irrational.

The odds that your vote will swing the election are unbelievably remote. Votes matter in aggregate, but matter almost not at all individually.

The rational course of action is to take the time and effort you'd put into voting and instead use it to try to convince irrational people to vote for the candidate you want to win. That must have more bang for your buck than voting yourself.

Even if you ignore all that, then what exactly counts as voting in accordance with your own views, the facts, and the choices given? Does that mean that you vote for a third-party candidate who closely matches your views but has no chance to win. Does that mean that you vote for the major party candidate who's closer to your views than the other one, even though both are distant?

And then there's the problem that limits on who is allowed to vote have historically always been about oppressing people. For example, it used to be common to forbid illiterate people from voting. Sounds totally fine in the abstract, right? If you can't even read, how can you vote intelligently? Except that in practice it ended up being, you're the right sort of person (i.e. white) so we'll just do this test as a brief formality before you can go vote; you, on the other hand, are the wrong sort of person (i.e. black) so you have to name every single county judge in the state to prove you know what you're doing.

If anyone thinks we should be testing voters, please outline what kind of testing regime you'd use to screen out people who believe that, say, the Earth is 6,000 years old, but couldn't possibly be used to screen out people who believe that every citizen should be given $10,000/year basic income with no strings attached.
To help build your intuition when learning math you might find these articles helpful [1] as supplemental material.

[1] http://betterexplained.com/articles/category/math/
Do they ever? This is likely one of many reasons for eroding confidence in those same organizations.
Good timing. What's it running on?
The "deep" in deep learning refers to hierarchical layers of representations (to note: you can do "deep learning" without neural networks).

Word embeddings using skipgram or CBOW are a shallow method (single-layer representation). Remarkably, in order to stay interpretable, word embeddings have to be shallow. If you distributed the predictive task (eg. skip-gram) over several layers, the resulting geometric spaces would be much less interpretable.

So: this is not deep learning, and this not being deep learning is in fact the core feature.
Red isn't a dialect of Lisp, nor exactly of Rebol. Red is descended from Rebol, and the two are very compatible. Rebol, in turn, has its heritage in Lisp, Forth, and Logo, with prototype objects as in Self. Both the Red and R3 teams see compatibility as a good thing going forward.

And you have C interop today, though it will get easier in the future.
> It looks like lxqt_wallet is even worse on that front in terms of UX - yes, its more secure for every program to have its own secret stores and require prompts to unlock them, but average desktop users just want to login and have that unlock their secret stores, pretty much like Gnome does it.

lxqt_wallet supports 3 backends: kwallet,libsecret and internal one that gives the behavior i explained above.

Each backend has its pro and cons and the project lets the user pick which one works best for them.

There need to be a general purpose secure storage system that can accommodate users who wish to not have their secrets that are meant to be used by only one application be exposed to all other applications.
Mikolov, et al. 2013 [1] do a proper evaluation of this. E.g. they found that the skip-ngram model has a 50.0% accuracy for semantic analogy queries and 55.9% accuracy for syntactic queries.

word2vec comes with a data set that you can use to evaluate language models.

[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3781.pdf
Is it? Isn't the bakery algorithm a demonstration of how to build a lock, not how to coordinate multiple locks?
84-Year-Old Volunteer Rebuilds and Sends Linux Laptops to Africa
This only works right if none of the frameworks you use log anything by themselves - messages will get garbled otherwise. Logging through the main queue exhibits the same issue, but at least Cocoa logging (which is always in the main thread) is dealt with.
Norbert Wiener released "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" in 1948. 65 years later, people are still debating the issue and constantly come up with fancy new terms for the subject (i.e. titles for grant proposals).

What I take away from this group is that deterministic communication is required for deterministic system behavior. Well, everybody knew that.

The only thing that surprised me in the field since a long time is that reasoning about continuous and discrete systems is essentially the same [1].

[1] http://symbolaris.net/pub/freedL.pdf