skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the term "mathiness" for this, because it seems like exactly the same kind of thing that's complained about in economics under that name.

Namely, you claim (necessarily without proof) that a real-world phenomenon is analogous to a certain mathematical model. Then you prove some things about the model. Finally, you claim that the things you've proved about the model are also true about the real world. It doesn't matter how rigorous the mathematical steps in the middle are, the strength of this kind of argument is determined by the first step: how strong is the analogy between the mathematical system and real life?

In physics, we can build models where the analogy is very strong: when we try out new situations in both the model and in real life, we get the same answer in both. In (macro-)economics, we typically do something weaker, where we start with a set of models determined by intuition, and then choose the one that gives results most similar to real life in the situations we've already seen. Prediction of future events is really difficult.

It seems like the approach in Taleb's paper is even weaker. We choose a model based on pure analogy, explicitly disclaim the usefulness of evidence ("While evidentiary approaches are often considered to reflect
adherence to the scientific method in its purest form, it is apparent that these approaches do not apply to ruin problems"), and then attack anyone who says that we've done something other than prove a mathematical theorem about the real world.

It's too bad, because underneath all of the "mathiness" is one of the strongest arguments against GMOs that I've heard (and I say that as a GMO-eater). It just should have been an opinion piece in the NYT rather than a research article on the arxiv.
I was thinking about that too, when I read the article. It seemed the libav guys are perfectionists, while the ffmpeg guys focus on getting things done.

It made me wonder in my own professional work: should I also focus more on getting things done instead of trying to find the best solution? Will that approach give better results in the end? It's hard to tell if libav is more maintainable in the end, especially if no one will use it in the next few years, which might be the result of Debian backing down on libav.

Still, the fact that ffmpeg has more features and its devs fix bugs and security issues more quickly seem to suggest that ffmpeg is more maintainable, even if the libav maintainer claims otherwise.

---

In the end it's better to work on a (perhaps) less maintainable product that people use compared to a very maintainable product that no one uses.
Roads are not free, they are paid for via gas taxes. To support your claim that an appropriate gas tax would be large, do you have numbers suggesting how much road spending costs compared to revenue raised from gas taxes?

Medallions don't come close to solving the issue of people free-riding on roads - most of the cars on NYC roads are neither taxis nor ubers.
That's most of his writing though: throw a lot of complicated words at the reader and hope some naive ones start seeing mystique depth in his thought.
His writing is incoherent though. Even reading abstract of his paper [1]:

>>We present a non-naive version of the Precautionary (PP) that allows us to avoid paranoia and paralysis by confining precaution to specific domains and problems. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans", unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence. We formalize PP, placing it within the statistical and probabilistic structure of ruin problems, in which a system is at risk of total failure, and in place of risk we use a formal fragility based approach. We make a central distinction between 1) thin and fat tails, 2) Local and systemic risks and place PP in the joint Fat Tails and systemic cases. We discuss the implications for GMOs (compared to Nuclear energy) and show that GMOs represent a public risk of global harm (while harm from nuclear energy is comparatively limited and better characterized). PP should be used to prescribe severe limits on GMOs.

Leaves little doubt. You can't call him a truth seeker - he is a quack with some talent for wooing people.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787
Mike Tyson on Twitter: “Bitcoin ATM”
By this logic private cars should be issued medallions too. There are much more private cars on the road, than taxis. And private cars use more resources per drive, because they are taking parking space, unlike taxis.
If technology progresses but international treaties don't change, then hundreds of years from now this will be exactly correct. Robert Zubrin is not completely insane.
> differences in police training from Germany vs the US

To highlight this even more, Police in Germany used only 85 bullets in all of 2001 [1]. Given their population is about 4x lower than the US, the equivalent would be the Police in all of the US using only ~340 bullets for a year.

In reality, The police in the US have KILLED over 400 people this year already.

[1] http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/05/german-police-used-onl...
Making them toll roads (or charging congestion fees at peak hours) would fix individual incentives and help with general traffic issues. Existing gas taxes are a halfway-decent proxy, but that's becoming less true as more adopt electrics and hybrids.

Of course, it's important that fees apply to all vehicles. When London implemented a congestion charge, taxis were exempt. It wasn't long before people noticed that minicab registration cost much less than a year of congestion charges. The loophole has been fixed, but it's still an amusing example of incentives.
libav has less features and is less secure. If they can't keep up with fixing security bugs, I can't help but wonder on how they fare on less important bugs, probably not that good either.

Given how there appear to be no problems adding new features to ffmpeg, any technical debt the project has incurred seems to be within manageable range.

It doesn't look at all, as if libav is better, by any reasonable metric.
If you want to claim the price of driving is wrong, by all means crunch some numbers and show us. But acting as if there is a clear subsidy is incorrect.
"It seems plausible that banks at some point may start tracking bank notes by serial, or some other method"

I would be very surprised if this is not already happening.
> You need help. The one thing all successful founders have in common is that they found help early on from people in a position to help.

Isn't that exactly what JL and PG have made a career doing?
Hmm - so what would be a title that would not be a 'half-truth'?

There is only so much space in the title - you cannot load it with all available information. The article itself goes in much detail about what you describe shortly here - and what is the most surprising in it is the decline - it seems to me thus as a very good choice for the title of that article?
It's definitely been slow for Python 3 but in my experience most new projects are using it now. The mainstream distributions are planning to make Py3 the default Python in their upcoming releases. Almost all important libraries in Py2 have been ported or replaced by now. There are still some curmudgeons that haven't gotten the memo on Py3, but they'll become almost non-existent over the next year or two.

Python 3 adoption was a little slower than may have been ideal, but I personally think it was a very successful way to implement breaking changes, especially when it could've been a libav/ffmpeg-style mess.
People generally use logrotate. And limit the amount they keep.
Very strong evidence now exists, including a mouse model of bipolar illness controlled by light exposure, that extending your photoperiod is the principle driver of depression. You require total darkness (but red light is okay, see last line.) And rigid hours of darkness. Sleep is important for depression, but only affects the aldosterone cycle. If you sleep into the morning light, you're still killing your melatonin-controlled cycle. The pRGCs that control our clock were only discovered rather recently, so it will be perhaps a generation before you hear this from a front line doctor.

pRGCs cannot detect red light.
>AFAIK, NO mainstream OS is shipping python3 as the main python, or even as a default installed python, yet.

IIRC, Arch Linux does. Bleeding Edge. From the Arch Wiki:

>To install the latest version of Python 3, install the `python` package from the official repositories.
Looks like we just had different experiences.
I'm not saying it's impossible (because the lottery is also not impossible), I'm just saying I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
I want you to appreciate the cruel irony of this situation.

My problem was the gap between knowing and doing, but if I read about it, which I did quite often, I wouldn't be able to take advantage of this knowledge due to... that same gap!
What's the current state of the art in this kind of software and what is it called, anyway? I assume it should be natural language synthesis or story generation?
black people = thugs in most white people's minds. Of course there is always one black guy they like,"but he's different hey ?"...
Given the number of software patents and the sheer stupidity of quite a few of them, every project of significant size probably violates at least one.
They could have landed in a baby's crib, but that doesn't matter - http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/05/german-police-used-onl...
> One of the things that stuck out at me was the huge amount of hours they spend training to "not" shoot, and learning how to de-escalate situations.

I think that the likelihood of civilians being armed in the US is a lot higher than in Germany, so I can imagine why American cops are a little more paranoid. I've seen cops put a hand on their gun as they approach suspects, which I think is part of the training here.

I wonder how many cops in America get killed in line of duty compared to Germany.
That may all be true, but it's a reason to reform the law, not for some people to get away with breaking the law while others cannot.
You didn't pay attention: the totally unregulated market was the source of much violence in the 1930ies. History has clearly demonstrated the need for taxi regulation in New York, and the problem is that at some point the regulatory body stopped caring about the public need (and presumably the public never started trying to get more drivers on the streets)
I very quickly skimmed through that scala style guide and starred it on Github, but having used both Kotlin and Scala, I am of the opinion that Kotlin (once it reaches v1.0) would remove the need for ~50% of the content of this style guide.
I like the conspiracy theory that Square filed to IPO in hopes of forcing a quick acquisition by Google / Apple / Amazon / Paypal so that Jack could go take over the CEO position at Twitter. Clearly unlikely but the intrigue is fun.
Great project, I have been watching another similar project pretty closely:
https://github.com/h2o/h2o

I've always wondered, how many man hours does writing a small web server like that take?
Obviously the fork was politically driven. That doesn't mean that compromise was impossible. If both sides had more respect for the concern of the other, there's no reason an aggressive ffmpeg hygiene project couldn't have been officially sanctioned. They could've kept the mainstream API and developed a plan to release the cleaned, backwards-incompatible next-gen API in a way that would've actually seen adoption. libav is doing good cleanup work, but the fact that there is a political barrier the participants haven't been able to amicably dissolve is going to stop us from benefiting from it, and that's a real shame.
The former is by Jessica. The second one is not by Jessica -- seems to be an inspired imitation.

I'd suggest buying the former (at least at first).
I've been wondering when something like this would emerge... I'm excited to try it out on some side projects; seems simple and fast-- hard combo to beat :)

I'd also like to say, as someone who is quite ignorant of writing x86 assembly, the function hook example is incredibly readable and clear. I'm looking forward to grokking the rest of the code base in attempt to learn more.

Thanks for the hard work!
Yes - at least, from a sample size of 1 (me) I like the old cronolog way of doing this, and it means I don't get the rotate-a-day-later-to-avoid-trailing-lines-in-compressed-logfiles issue.
"CPUs are super restricted by the single threaded, branching nature of the code you run on them, and this is what makes CPU performance a little more nuanced, and not directly comparable."

Ironically, to really hit peak performance of a modern AVX2 or later CPU, you have to embrace many of the design principles that lead to efficient GPU code:

1. Multiple threads per core to make use of the dual vector units introduced in Haswell

2. SIMD-like thinking to remap tasks into the 8-way and soon to be 16-way vector units

3. Running multiple threads across multiple cores

4. Micromanaging the L1 cache and treating the AVX/SSE registers as L0 cache

Where the CPU prevails is for fundamentally serial algorithms that cannot be mapped into a SIMD implementation. Mike Acton's Data-Oriented Design covers this case nicely IMO.
Interesting discussion: Paul Davies on FQXi: The Physics of Cancer
http://traffic.libsyn.com/fqxipodcast/Physics_of_Cancer.mp3
From: http://fqxi.org/community/podcast/2014.10.02
So fast food workers and EMT workers get the same wages? Wow, I hope the EMTs at least get significant raises fairly fast.
Since they don't currently respect the law, it doesn't make any difference how you decide to change the law because they're still not going to respect it.
So the open question is, should you enter into a business relationship disingenuously? Do you really need an answer? I guess this post must be from the there's no such thing as bad publicity school of thought.

+1 Voted up. (comedy)
"nothing ... is more important than officers’ personal security"

I'm not sure this is true. If it were, why would they put themselves into potentially violent situations? It seems to me the priorities are

1. Make the arrest.
2. Officer safety.
3. Public safety.
4. Justice.

In that order. They are related, to get 4 you sometimes need 1-3. But not always.

'Militarised police' is correct, because this corresponds exactly to what we'd want of our warfighters.

1. Carry out the mission.
2. Be safe.
3. Keep 3rd parties safe.
4. Be ethical and moral.

It's a far cry from 'to protect and serve'. Personally I'd be happy with a squatter in an empty apartment getting away more often in return for not deploying an armed raid with no confirmation based on a single report.
I was talking in general about Open Source and design not about Plasma. But since you ask, here are some small things I noticed in the video

- Mismatched visual styles: when you tap the phone icon, you get a bar of three icons. Two are simple line icons (History and Contacts), the third is a detailed picture of a keyboard to denote keypad. A minor thing and easily fixed.

- Interface inconsistencies: I noticed that a large red X is used for closing a screen (which I like over the sometimes unclear Back button behaviour you get in Android). But at 3:16 in the video the Wallpaper screen has a 'close' button (with X) and below that in the tab bar is the larger red X for closing too. So you have two close functions on the same screen. You see the same duplication on the date and Time screen at 3:41. By the way, I think the way Windows Phone lets you change date and time is much nicer. It's a similar spinner approach to Plasma but less cluttered. Here's a video of it in action: https://youtu.be/kIsWgCX7qtE?t=54s

Also, the commands 'close', 'cancel' and 'delete' all tend to use the same X icon in many UIs so if there is no label for X, then it's meaning (and behaviour) should be consistent across the OS.

- Weather app: there is a 'hamburger' menu on the left and another slimmer hamburger menu on the right. They feel too similar visually. Presumably, the right-hand menu is equivalent to the overflow menu you find on Android. But are two menus needed here? Could they not all sit in one menu?

Obviously, this is a beta and these are relatively minor points. I can see some influence from Android, which is fine - there's no doubt that Google, Microsoft and Apple all study and are influenced by each others work. I just hope the OS stands up well as a unique UI rather than just a clone of bits from other OSes.

Overall, it looks quite polished for a version 1.0 and I hope the project succeeds. I would love to see an open source project take the lead in design/UX over existing projects.
You misunderstand me. I wasn't trying to diss FP but rather the naysayers who try to associate people who like FP with certain groups.
Before I moved down to MIT, I studied with Sergey, so the name is not at all coincidental. Nail tries a slightly different agenda. Instead of trying to make people design their formats in a reasonable way (which is excellent in the long term), Nail tries to allow people to get some (maybe most) of the benefits of parser generators, but for arbitrary formats.

I also made some different design decisions than Hammer, giving it a slightly different goal: code generation instead of runtime combinators, output generation, no semantic actions...
Fibers and coroutines are different uses for the same thing. If you schedule your coroutines based on the kernel scheduler, they're fibers. If you jump between fibers explicitly, they're coroutines.
"Enough" in that you have people on HN saying pretty much that most of the black people who get shot and killed by police deserved it and that black people are stupid violent criminals so it's no wonder they get killed so often, and that if only they were docile and compliant in the face of police harassment they wouldn't get shot so much.

It's fucking weird seeing that stuff on HN, and it's scary to think how those thoughts look in other less restricted forums.

It's the 21st centuary and there's only just a US president prepared to say "black lives matter". There have been a string of killings by police of innocent black people, and juries refuse to convict.
Limiting medallions creates market inefficiencies which is no good to anyone except the medallion owners. With $1 million medallions drivers have to pay a significant portion of their gross receipts for renting the artificially expensive taxi.

One taxi driver claims to gross $250-$300 for a 12 hour shift, but he pays $150 of that to lease the taxi (with medallion).

http://www.yellowcabnyctaxi.com/nyc-taxi/shift-life-cab-driv...

Thus, about half of our fares plus tips go to paying for the taxi with medallion, before paying for gas.
You clearly misunderstood the article.As I mentioned eariler Yes , there is no profit in selling Android products _hardware:some , software:none_( which indeed article talks about that) , but that is not Google's strategy at all.Please search and read about Google's making money strategy.

Remember Android is "strategy" for Google, "point" is to bring more and more people to cloud/internet.thats why Android as software developed and available from Google for free.
Conceptual Learning Guide
Video gamers face tournament drug tests
> ...doesn't it make more sense to apply alone than find what might be the wrong tech-co-founder?

It does, but it doesn't make as much sense as applying with the right co-founder(s).

See also e.g. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/615949374317723648 for a recent statement from pg on this. (Aside: holy steaming pile of crap, Twitter search really sucks.)

YC is generally looking for really solid teams -- people that know eachother well, get along well, have a history together, hopefully have been through difficult times together. Because a startup can be extraordinarily difficult and the odds of a home-run success will fall quite a lot if cofounders can't weather the challenges.

If you happen to be the rare true one-man-team, then by all means, apply anyway. (Or, apply even if you're not sure if you are; what do you have to lose?)

But ... maybe YC isn't the right thing for you anyway. There are a lot of different ways to start and run a business, and the startup model has some distinct disadvantages, not least of which is that it's difficult to spend much time away from the startup up until it has grown to its full size. Do you really want to spend the next, say, 10 years of your life dealing almost exclusively with growing a business? Because I get the sense that that's what investors are looking for.

Contrast this with a regular plain ol' lifestyle business. You gather a small amount of capital together, put together an early prototype product, find your customers, get the business to start making ends meet, pay off debt, and then go visit a beach somewhere in the world and have a beer and stare at the waves and think about how to grow the business a little bit more so that you can afford to stay at a nicer beach.
In the US the Police are a "Guns & Badges" Culture thru & thru. Only the truly "macho" are regarded with respect.
There is no concept of de-escalation.

The bigger problem is that the policies & incentives are built to reinforce this. They get promotions/assets based on forfeiture laws, weapons based on Pentagon Surplus & publicity based on Shootouts. No one ever got promoted for not shooting a (potentially innocent) suspect. Very very rarely does a cop get prosecuted for pulling a gun or inflicting other violence.

SO put a bunch of arrogant, power seeking people in a system which glorifies violence & rewards forfeitures. What else do you expect?
Haha, low :-) I got into WL after years of powerlifting and strongman.
It's now an option on ATMs.[1][2] Especially in China, where the People's Bank of China has required it for all ATMs.[3] "As at the end of June 2013, there are 197,800 ATMs in use on the mainland, of which 100,700 or 55.28% have been upgraded with the serial number enquiry function. According to schedule, by late 2015, the serial number of every Rmb100 note withdrawn from banks by members of the public can be traced."

Here's an overview of the available hardware.[4] Not only ATMs are recording serial numbers. So are cash counting and sorting machines.

[1] http://www.atmmarketplace.com/news/ci-tech-intros-retrofit-s...
[2] http://www.diebold.com/~/media/diebold/diebold-asset-library...
[3] http://economists-pick-research.hktdc.com/business-news/arti...
[4] http://currencypath.blogspot.com/
Looking forward we should ignore luck, because as you note it's not actionable. But when looking backwards we should take it into account.

For example: don't let "bad luck" prevent you from starting a company, and don't get discouraged by others' "good luck."

But, after failing or succeeding, you should be realistic with yourself and admit luck played a role.

If you've been successful: realize that your success is not 100% the fruit of your efforts -- be a bit humble about how you got where you are.

If you've failed: realize that perhaps you just drew a bad hand and maybe it's not the right environment for your idea -- don't be too down on yourself, and don't be afraid to try again.
Actually, I agree with the previous post; and I'm the former maintainer of the mini2440 architecture (which used the SoC that board inherits from).

arm9 are a bit lame, and /ancient/ -- you can at least get a cortex a8 or so. A 400mhz arm9 is also dog slow.

Also, on every single previous friendlyarm board, they tried to push their proprietary crap bootloader, until I ported u-boot in 2008 or so, but every single board afterward, they tried to push their binaries...
.. down to shipping kernel sources with '.fo' files for drivers (!!!) -- as object files!

For a bit of history on this, do read my old blog: http://bliterness.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/mini210s-and-open-s...
Show HN: Zen Player