skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Leopards (or jaguars) are complex 3-dimensional shapes with quite a lot of degrees of freedom (considering all the body parts that can move independently). These shapes can produce a lot of different 2d contours

My son keeps telling me that infants are fine with, say, a truck transforming into a clown (when it emerges from the other side of a visual barrier) but not with it transforming into TWO of something. Apparently, babies subjectively experience this (visual transformation) all the time -- mom moves a plate and what seemed like a big circle is now a flat line or whatever.

So humans apparently get tons and tons of experience with visually mapping 3d reality to mere 2d imagery. I have been thinking somewhat about this of late, in terms of physical attractiveness or "image" -- that pictures of a woman posted on a blog capture a 2d version of her but people interacting with her are interacting with a 3d living, moving creature who also has smell and a voice and her movements may be elegant or may be not elegant. Which is a thought process relevant to a project of mine, something people here surely will have no interest in. But where it is relevant to this article is that we are doing this wrong: Humans have thousands of hours of practice of looking at 3d reality and figuring out how it to interpret 2d images as representative of that 3d reality. Image recognition software is just dealing with 2d images. I don't see how it can hope to compete. Humans don't come preinstalled with the software to make that distinction. We acquire it with enormous repetition.

When do we make a robot and give it some baseline parameters and a learning algorithm (and set it loose in 3d reality and have to learn)? That is when we can get scared about human like AI that can compete on image recognition.
Sure contemporary capitalism has achieved some positives for the living standards of people globally (it's also destroyed others such as Amazonian tribes etc) but I think it's quite clear that it has run it's natural course and that it will be replaced by something either more efficient or more egalitarian soon. Hopefully any new system will have elements of both and probably it will also have heavy capitalist roots still.
This may well be what happens. The hospital informs the agency that they've used SN547825482 and that agencies database triggers a text message.
It could be that the dataset is so large there's very close matches to any common given picture, and the algorithm is actually awful at picking up details.

Giving it an image that we know has all the relevant details of a sofa, but it likely won't have close matches in the dataset, can give us an idea of how clever it is.
Very easy-to-read article; will send this to my friends and family so they finally understand some of the words I mention from time to time (botnet, malware etc)
Hello,

I created itch.io about two years ago. I originally launched it on HN too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445029

Would be glad to answer any questions.

Naturally the tech stack of itch.io is very cool:

It's powered by MoonScript http://moonscript.org/ , the transpiled language I wrote. Using Lapis http://leafo.net/lapis/ , the web framework I built. It's running on top of a custom Ngingx build called OpenResty http://openresty.org/ (I didn't make that)

Because Lua is not something you typically see running websites there a lot libraries that I had to write to facilitate the basics: talking to APIs, uploading files, storage management, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Mailgun, etc, etc. Check out my GitHub, I opensource most of it: http://github.com/leafo
For private sector unions this is true, because employers have a vested interest in the success (or at least survival) of their employer. In the public sector, prison guards don't have a vested interest in reducing the prison population (quite the opposite), police officers don't have a vested interest in keeping themselves accountable for use of force (quite the opposite), and so forth.
The Morality of Language
The High-Tech Battle Against Pirates
The people constructing the prisons also construct schools, hospitals and buildings that society needs. There isn't a lobby of people solely benefiting from the construction of prisons other than the owners that the prison is built for.

Prison unions are a big problem, as well. They bring many of the same problems to the table. California's is a great example of just how easily these groups can manipulate the system for their benefit.

The state at least can be swayed by representatives and public initiative. As an entity, it doesn't exist only to turn a profit.

It isn't perfect, but handing the entire system over to people who only care about the bottom line will accelerate the problem.
Daily email with awesome freelance gigs
Ghost is actually really nice!

For the moment I still would like to give it a shot at building one to improve some skills with Meteor, but I'll certainly look into Ghost for inspiration.

Thanks!
Actually aren't you supposed to adjust your beliefs according to Bayes' theorem? That's what the origial Bayes used it for.
Unfortunately some negative aspects are so heavily ingrained in US culture and politics (incarceration and bondage being examples) it will take a long time for things to change. I have been reading about American history recently (mainly 1800's, gold rush etc) and some of it is very disturbing, almost dystopian. It has been very interesting to look at contemporary American culture with this in the back of my mind.
I don't have any statistics readily at hand but I have reason to believe that it is more dangerous to be a guard than a police officer.

Consider the Attica prison riot in which roughly 250 died.

Guards generally do not carry firearms because they could be snatched by an inmate. They do carry Tazers these days but they have a very short range and are limited to two shots. If a bunch of inmates all gang up on a guard there's not a whole lot he can do to defend himself.
I don't see how we disagree. I wasn't downplaying the importance of the geometric picture, I was just disputing the idea that you could avoid teaching coordinates, or that the coordinate picture was somehow infectious in the sense that it would displace a geometric picture.
> I seem to succumb to the temptation of making things overly complex

>I sometimes think the biggest problem with C++ is not learning the language but developing the discipline to use it properly

I think it sounds like you need to crank out some C++ code for a few years (like any other language) before you start internalizing what works and what doesn't.
You are missing the point. Let me make a mathematical example. Suppose the population distribution is $[-100000 (1M people), 100000 (1M people), 200000 (1 person)]. Then anyone with $1 in net assets has more wealth than the bottom 2/3. In particular, the top person also has more wealth than the bottom 2/3.

All this fact says is that a bunch of assets minus a bunch of debts adds up to small numbers.

(Also note that I said "about half the world" - I don't claim to know the exact cutoff.)
Sometimes your intuition is wrong, and you can follow the wrong path for a very long time because the reality doesn't fit your intuition (the history of science is littered with examples).

But yes, the scientific method is: make a hypothesis, collect data, test your hypothesis, revise, do it again.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Benford%27s_law

Now that is a weird Wikipedia URL. The normal one's /wiki/Pagename, and you sometimes see /w/index.php?title=Pagename, but /?title=Pagename? What produced that?
I don't know the technical details but how would "different parts of the wavefunction experience different clock rates due to gravitational fields" ever not be the case?

Every particle in the universe is acted upon by every other particle, via gravity, so does this not mean that every particle, in some small capacity, "observes" every other particle?
But what if you want to make money by selling your app to people? Is the idea to test/iterate your app quickly on Android before bringing the finished product to iOS for revenue? Most sources I find online show a big discrepancy between expected app revenue from the iOS and Android worlds, so developing a for-profit app on Android first seems a little iffy to me.

EDIT: Hi downvoter[s]. Is it taboo for me to bring up the aforementioned revenue discrepancy? As far as I know it’s real, and should be a consideration for anyone who’s trying to follow the money. I’d appreciate insights and discussion instead of anonymous downvoting.
ConvNets have gotten popular because of their strong empirical results. All the recent work on visualizing CNNs suggests that the community working on Deep Learning still has a lot to learn about their own algorithms.

But high-level notions like a Jaguar is a cat-like animal aren't necessary to perform well on an N-way classification task like ImageNet.

What's more important to note is everybody knows there's plenty wrong with a pure appearance-based approach like CNNs. Every few years a new approach pops up that is based on ontologies, an approach inspired by Plato, etc, but these systems require a lot of time and effort. More importantly, they don't perform as well on large-scale benchmarks. In the publish-or-perish world, you can jump on the CNN bandwagon or start reading Aristotle's metaphysics and never earn your PhD.
You mean that users (those who install the software) would create documents to model their own data, something in the line of Rails migrations?
Sure. Think of Ethereum as a global computer that coordinates human interactions. On top of it, you encode the rules that those interactions should follow, and a mechanism for recording who has been following the rules and who hasn't.

A decentralized Uber would have logic that records how often drivers show up when they offer a ride, how often they're late, how clean their cars are, etc. It would have similar logic for riders to handle their end of the interaction like the one you pointed out: did they pay what was agreed on?

The payment mechanism is irrelevant. Driver and rider satisfaction is what matters, and that's easy to track without putting any limits on their real world interactions.
Because no values your time or sacrifice unless you control the frame.
Am I the only one who constantly has nytimes website flip to another page due to scrolling? It's every time I read an article.
I guess so. If your product is expensive (for example, running "big data analytic" it makes sense to target at big corporate users, whereas companies like DropBox were competing with other big SaaS or on-premise solutions and they had to gain popularity via average consumers by offering free service at the beginning.
Protest ICANN's Proposal to Kill WHOIS Privacy
The paper is behind a window, it is not a receipt and you don't take it with you. It is secret.
The 500 Euro is suspicious. It's not enough make a significant effect on a serious proposal.

On the other hand if that is what they really need, they should either gives you shares for it or have it structured as a loan to the company.
A lot of them. A large fraction give 10%+ of their income per year.
A lead gap might be a better term.
That's been our experience. The move fast and break things approach works well on Android, and is disastrous on iOS. When updates are only possible every 2 weeks at best, it's more like move slowly and don't break anything or your ratings will tank.
Unisex Names – Data Analysis Use Case
Saudi Arabia, Russia sign nuclear power cooperation deal
So much open source enthusiasm seems to come out of Europe...am I wrong on this observation? Are there reasons behind this (distrust of the US, desire for independence, etc)?
The input is sanitized:
https://github.com/prometheus-ar/vot.ar/blob/master/msa/voto...

It's just that people are too eager to scream "vulnerability!" without properly checking it before.
Casual Sex May Be Improving America’s Marriages
This is awesome.

Very funny first comment

So, just to see how hard it is to make the longest span between article and comment :)
Question: after reading about Omidyar's duplicity, does that take away from the integrity of The Intercept? Can we trust that guy to not be spinning another big hoax?
Indeed, arguments like "My mother didn't have to purchase 30,000 mugs to teach me what one looks like" miss the fact that we humans spent so much time (almost all of our waking time in fact) interpreting 3D reality, an endless stream of repetitive tasks.
So apparently Ghost uses Dillinger... or at least they are really similar.
> the problem won't be solved by collecting even larger datasets and using more GPUs, because leopard print sofas are inevitable.

The models have room for improvement, but it's not clear to me that larger datasets won't solve the problem. Larger datasets and more processing power is exactly why neural nets have surged in effectiveness recently. Who knows how much further current models can go with more data and processing power?
This analogy doesn't hold, because the whole point of these classifiers is to classify things the same way humans would.

The fact that all classifiers -- including human beings -- fail in some cases is a separate issue. The goal is to create a computer classifier that succeeds and fails in the same cases humans do.
The "official" translation on the English version of the site is:

> We are a federation of microbloggers who care about ethics and solidarity and want to quit the centralised capitalist services.

Which is a bit more political and perhaps radical.

Twitter allows private DMs. Are you sure gnusocial can do that? I'm not sure how you'd keep private data truly private over a federated network.
Market Research Survey Takes 2 Minutes
The equations of geometric algebra can be represented using matrices (perhaps with a non-euclidean metric for the inner product depending on application), so in that sense you don't gain the ability to do anything that you couldn't do with regular linear algebra.

The "big wins" are that the notation is simpler and easier to reason about, and everything is coordinate-free. As an example, there is a model of 3 dimensional euclidean space that can be represented using a 5-dimensional GA (with 4,1 metric signature). Within this model, you have lines, planes, circles, spheres, etc; but you also have rotations, reflections, translations; and all of these things are just standard elements of the mathematics with no special cases. So you can multiply a translation and a rotation and you get back the composition of those two things. Or you can multiply a sphere by a translation and you get back a sphere that has been translated by the specified amount. Or if you want to smoothly interpolate a rigid body motion (translation+rotation) between two points, you can take the logarithm of that motion. And again, this can all be done symbolically without resorting to coordinates - except at the very end, perhaps, if you want to map it onto an actual coordinate system :)

In terms of people applying it to more "advanced" subjects like Minkowski space or differential geometry - I'm not so sure. I haven't spent too much time looking into that.
There is a lot of public information available about this stuff. I would start with looking into Zone Integrity Program Contractors (for Part A and B), Medicare Drug Ingretity Contracts (Part D), and Recovery Audit Contractors (Part A and B, mostly focusing on over and under paymentments through periodic auditing).

There are also groups you can find out more information on that handle fraud for medical labs that fall under CLEA regulation (Labs/PINS group) and ambulatory services fraud. There is also a contractor that's focused on provider screening services.

It's a pretty big subject to sum up how they're doing this but it does involve some interesting analysis techniques and there are plenty of pain points that could probably be improved.

It's really interesting and exciting work for technologist who want to get in on it.
No, it doesn't depend on what you believe, it depends on what is actually true. There is no rational justification for believing things that are not true, so there's no way to effectively argue for them.
I don't have 3rd party research but I've been personally logging the names and locations of paid sections for the past two years.
Several startup ideas, how to do?
Hi, I happened to have a few startup ideas that I believe are relevant tech and business wise, how to proceed?
One option would be to simply pick up the most promising one, wait some years, sell the company and run the next one, providing it's still relevant. But isn't it possible to run them in parallel in a way while still maximizing their success and without losing too much equity?
Too many Ubuntu reboot required updates lately
It seems to me like that past 3 or 4 months, around the time the Windows 10 announcements started heating up; Ubuntu has reboot required updates at least twice per week.
> I simply do not understand why c99 wasn't fully supported 10 years ago, much less in the latest VS edition

MSFT doesn't need it and 99% of the compiler's users do not need it. I'm not happy about it but I can understand why it's not a priority for them.
Man Buys 10k Undeveloped Negatives, Discovers Important Street Photographers
There is a long history of people suggesting various solutions to aging. The SENS Research Foundation has little to suggest it's better than any of the other wastes of cash.

Step 1: Drugs, invasive procedures, and diet are completely off the table as viable solutions.

Step 2: ? (Nanite/Magic)

Because we really don't have many other options right now.

PS: A lesser goal involving tradeoffs may be possible with drugs, but flow out slow aging so you keep a 25 year old body for longer that's not going to happen from drugs.
Which is the real scam, but somehow billing $20 for an aspirin pill is A-okay.
It's only a guess, but I think some OSS projects are more often "based" in Europe as we do not have Software Patents here.
You don't need to translate it, you can choose different languages (top right).

I want to highlight that your translation sounds more professional and less militant (radical?) that the current one I'm seeing in gnusocial.de

>We are a federation of microbloggers who care about ethics and solidarity and want to quit the centralised capitalist services.

"no longer want to use centralized commercial services" sounds better than "want to quit the centralised capitalist services".

Maybe is just me.
Ok, we added "PCRE" to the title to satisfy the unsatisfied. Though now it's like "PIN number".
I didn't know either, but found this: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer

Scary and fascinating.
10 years ago we were told not to write software for the huge Windows market because Mac owners buy software unlike those cheap PC users.

10 years later we keep getting told not to write software for the huge Android market because iPhone owners buy apps unlike those cheap Android users.
We're creators and its about making difference in other's life than just your's.
Workaholism: ass in the seat mentality
Democracy is supposed to be the power of the people. By definition. Moreover, most lay people will understand it that way.

When the government makes a decision that contradicts the will of the people, it is not democratic. Period. If the people really held the power, that decision wouldn't have been made in the first place.

The way the government was appointed doesn't matter, once you know of its actual decisions. Being democratically elected doesn't magically make all of your decisions democratic! Even if you stick to lawful decisions, I might add. Besides, there are a lot of ways for elected officials to have different interests than the general population.

---

That said, "democratic" does not mean "good". It is quite possible (though unlikely in my personal opinion) that the will of the people was wrong, and that European treaty was a good thing. In which case it was a good thing to go against the will of the people.

Serious. I'm not saying this particular decision was bad. I'm just saying it was undemocratic.

---

One last thing: you say our "democratically elected" parliament had, among other things, a mandate to ratifying European treaties. Only problem was, the entire political class wanted this particular treaty to happen. Very few thought otherwise. And those had other opinions about other subjects that often made them a big no-no for most people (extreme right and extreme left, mostly).

We did not have much choice when we elected our officials. It was like, this guy who wanted the treaty to happen, and that gal who also wanted the treaty to happen, and maybe that crazy fellow who did not want this, but had also a couple insane ideas we did not endorse.
Definitely agree here, want to add a link to this paper which shows how far we still have to go (and questions whether the current models will ever replicate human vision): http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1897
What would be a better title?
Banks don't normally give bank accounts to robots.
Unfortunately in this case it does. Many, many people consider criminals to be subhuman.
> but not with it transforming into TWO of something

I suppose that's why Banach–Tarski is considered a paradox.
We use the new Apple TestFlight, which enables iOS testing with 1000 users, and fast iterations.

For public apps, Apple offers expedited review for public bug fixes, and in my experience these are very fast, within 24 hours.
That Math Problem in 'Good Will Hunting' (2013)
read the Hinton paper cited in the OP -- no amount of processing power will make CNNs represent structured latent variables
That's another thing that many Beats-critics miss: there are features in addition to accuracy that headphone buyers evaluate. Mic, detachable cable, looks, comfort, portability, etc. For many/most people, marginally better accuracy isn't near the top.
As jacalata described, the actual income differences in dollars are not distributed linearly across the y axis. Each percentile interval represents a different dollar interval.

The y axis uses percentages, too. But it displays an absolute number of people, so the number of people in the 10-20% bracket equals those in the 80-90% bracket and so on.

The actual number of children won't be the same for each income bracket, but the are evenly distributed on the y axis. I think :)
Yeah, it's been my impression as well. And on the opposite end, so little coming out of india, despite the size of the IT industry there.

My inkling is that it has to do with wealth of the society and social protection. In many countries of Europe, people aren't as beholden to companies for livelihood, and can thus better afford to spend personal time on projects they care about. There's a better social conscience. In India, at the opposite end, those same skills put you above social average and are a valuable tool that you wouldn't want to give away for free (unless you're from an affluent background).

This is, of course, just my feeling and not backed by any actual research :)
"But for physics, it is absolute essential that you are also able to think about vectors in terms of coordinates if you are to connect them to the real physical world, which has rulers and T-squares and so on. Physicists are trying to understand the world, not the abstraction."

This breaks down the second you encounter, for example: Fourier transforms, wave equations, or hyperbolic geometry. Physicists are trying to understand the world, which in many cases does not comport itself in a way which is considerate of our naive intuition about mechanics and geometry.

The nth dimensional component of a vector still has a specific meaning within the context of the parent model, but it's far easier if you stop trying to force that and learn to deal with vectors as vectors instead. This allows for abstractions which are portable between the very many places where vectors are useful, instead of trying to force each value to fit an ad hoc cognitive model, with whatever flaws and conceptual limits that it introduces.