ameasure

You lost me at `With terraform, my HCL modules worked no matter what language the service is written in`. With terraform your HCL modules only work if they are written in an obscure language called HCL.

Norvig addresses this at the end of f http://norvig.com/Lisp-retro.html . Basically these old AI techniques are now considered regular programming and modern AI is focused on ML. Both are useful but for different tasks.

I don't think it's always true, but in my case because the open source versions have more and better functionality, more flexible design, better documentation, are already known and used by thousands of people (easier on boarding), and maintained by a large community. It's true it has some functionality we don't need, but a couple megabytes of memory is pretty cheap relative to all the other things.

What is the rationale in making something like a hearing aid require a prescription? I can understand addictive drugs, you don't want them misused. What about the million other things that require a prescription?

Ok, that's pretty wild. Can it work on earth too? That seems like a good starting point.

Imagine if we invented a device that gave people access to all the information in the world and then made fun of them for using it.

Fascinating paper but the benchmarks seem incredibly weak. 5000 features for a bag of words model is nothing,these models normally have tens or hundreds of thousands of features.

Privacy, as it exists today, is entirely a modern invention. For most of human history people lived in small groups where everyone knew everyone else very well. It was not until industrialisation that we had mega cities where no one knows anyone.

You're right, Japan has a long and very interesting obsession with poop, primarily due to their geography.

Japan is a series of volcanic islands with, historically, a very limited indigenous supply of large poop producing creatures like like cows, horses, and pigs. The result is that there was a great scarcity of fertile soil. To supplement their soil they instead relied on human feces. So valuable was it that back in the day you could sell your poop to professional manure collectors who walked around town with large pots.

The cultural legacy extends well beyond toilets. You may have seen recent articles about people creating meat from poop, and poop powered motorcycles. It's no coincide that those are Japanese inventions. Funny how a thing like geography affects things.

You'll have to wait until those lectures are made available, but you don't have to complete the previous work to see the lectures.

It just started on Monday, there's plenty of time to join in.

There have been some huge developments in neural networks in the last few years, particularly with respect to deep learning. If you missed out on that you might want to try this class. Hinton has been involved in many of these advances.

The second half of the course appears to focus on deep learning topics so you might want to start there if you already know the basics.

Hinton is a huge figure in the neural network literature and an important researcher in deep learning. After going through the first week of lectures, I can say he's also an excellent teacher.

The syllabus, draft though it is, indicates the second half of the class will focus on deep learning, a field of machine learning that has demonstrated huge potential.

Hynix (2nd largest memory chip maker after Samsung) and friends were fined just a couple years ago for price fixing memory, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10126755. If competition isn't a problem, why waste money on costly innovation?

Reminds me of Eastman Kodak circa 1975 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak#Shift_to_digital.

That said, this is pretty weak evidence of collusion.

His point is that certain changes to the Google Market are making it harder for indies to get noticed. That is a legitimate concern that should be of interest to HN app makers. Whether or not you like his apps is irrelevant.

I went to a solidly 4th tier university (out of 4 tiers, as I recall). I now work and regularly interact with people from the best universities, Harvard, Princeton, etc, and I can tell you that as far as knowledge and ability are concerned, they have no advantage.

If you're committed to learning and improving yourself, you don't need the ivy league's approval.

And you automatically grant Craigslist your first born child and all future earnings and your left index finger. Laywers love to fill these things with unenforceable outlandish crap. The courts are more discerning.

If you're interested in comparing the various market shares, a simple bar chart is much easier to understand, just look at which one is taller.

With these rectangle/tree map things, I never know what to think: well this one is wider, but this other one is taller; you have to do multiplication just to compare 2 market shares.

I have 2 theories for why this happens:

1) The people drawing up these contracts know nothing about software. They are often non-technical, elderly, upper-management types that have never written a line of code in their life. For all they know, adding a link to a webpage is a 2 week project.

2) Congress punishes federal agencies for not spending all of their budget each year by cutting their budgets. As a result, towards the end of the fiscal year every federal agency goes on a crap buying spree to make sure they've spent every last penny.

Another basic tenet of democracy is that its citizens must be informed. I think it's fair to assume that those who lack access to written knowledge are at a disadvantage in this respect. For what it's worth, I upvoted the comment. Downvoting it to the point of invisibility strikes me as rather undemocratic.

Unfortunately, this is not just an Indian trait, but a human one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error. Kudos to those who can look in the mirror and see their faults. It is a rare and valuable skill.

I'm glad the world's scientists are working on the most pressing troubles of our times.

Forgive me for kicking the hornet's nest, but is all this outrage about privacy or about the abuse of government power?

The focus of the article and most of the comments here suggests it's government power. There's hardly a peep about the fact that credit card companies have giant databases filled with information about everything you've ever purchased, which they gladly sell to anyone, that retailers like Target know your daughter is pregnant before you do, or that Google knows so much about your personal emails that you get ads from 1-800-flowers while reading an email about a friend passing away.

Many of the comments here seem to treat privacy as some pure moral good, some innate human right. If that's the case, shouldn't government officials have complete privacy, after all, they're human aren't they? Shouldn't they be allowed to take unlimited amounts of money from unknown people without anyone knowing? Shouldn't they be allowed to make secret laws that are kept private? What about your employees and your co-workers? Shouldn't everything they do at work be completely private?

The obvious answer is no, there are clearly situations where some limitation of privacy is warranted. Society does not function with complete anonymity and it never has. There are reasonable arguments about where that dividing line should be drawn, but surely we can agree that privacy has both and bad, right?

Patent law is nice when it ensures that innovators are compensated for their work, but Apple has clearly been compensated. Perhaps it could benefit from an addendum -- not enforceable when you're already making a ton of money off your innovation.

Apple isn't getting 50-70% profit margins on its iphones without market power.

Dan Ariely is one of my favorite authors. He is both incredibly insightful about human nature and very funny, his first book is one of my favorites. Wikipedia has a great overview here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational.

No SAS users/haters out there? Lots of government systems are written almost entirely in SAS, despite little or no support for such basics as user defined functions and objects.

LOL, that was my first reaction too. What if people did have write access though? I guess it would just become another Wikipedia.

I am not claiming that anonymity is the source of all crime.

Perhaps some of the misunderstanding is due to the broad definition of anonymity I'm using. Anonymity as I use it is the inability to link a person's actions to their identity. This type of anonymity breaks a lot of our social institutions. For example, if you don't know that a person committed a crime it's hard to arrest them.

If Anders Breivik was anonymous he would still be wandering Norway because no one would know that he was responsible for the murders. Some of the information I've read suggests that he wanted (or at least expected) to be caught. In such situations anonymity may actually discourage crime. I would guess, however, that most criminals would rather not be caught.

Let me clarify.

1) Muggings - If you get mugged by someone you know, it's very easy to find them and punish them. It's no coincidence that muggings tend to happen in big cities where the chances of a mugger attacking someone they know is very low (anonymity).

2) Sexual predator - If a priest rapes a child and the child tells people about it (i.e. removing some of the priest's anonymity regarding his actions) the priest is likely to be investigated and thrown in jail. If you know a sexual predator lives next to the school your kid goes to (i.e. he has lost some of his anonymity) you might take additional protective measures that could prevent your children from being assaulted. Whether this is the most common scenario, or whether it is fair for sexual predators to be publicly identified, are completely separate issues. I am simply illustrating a cost.

3) Terrorists - If you were the pilot of a plane and knew that some of your passengers were members of an extremist group that had plotted to destroy airlines in the past (i.e. some of the passengers had lost some of their anonymity) you would probably kick them off your plane. Whether or not this relates to 9/11 is not the point, this is simply an example of a cost of anonymity.

As for your last point: I never said the costs of anonymity outweigh the benefits, I simply showed that there are costs.

Anonymity is about much more than people trolling each other. Anonymity is what allows a guy to mug you and then disappear into the wide world without consequences. It's what allows a child rapist to buy a nice house next to an elementary school. It's what allows a known terrorist to board a plane and crash it into a building.

I don't deny there are many great benefits to anonymity, especially on the internet, but people should be aware of the costs. Anonymity can allow people to do bad things and get away with it.