proofofconcept

Good for you both! That is so awesome :D

Reminds me of this vid by a guy who did a romhack of Chrono Trigger to propose to his then-gf who was playing through it for the first time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_HMLvLB7b0 "I proposed by hacking Chrono Trigger (Oct 24, 2008, 6m 57s)"

He writes in the description about what he was going for as far as making it seem like part of the actual game while still referencing their romantic history, and how well it worked (good for them!).

As I remember it, this was an option you could enable in Netscape Navigator back in the dialup days. In practice it meant that every time you went to a new website you'd have to click ok on a dozen popup menus asking for permission to store each individual cookie before the page would load. I'm sure there are ways to make that process go a little more smoothly but in practice it's still probably something that most users would immediately turn right off.

there is a follow up paper to the DL via Hessian-free optimization paper by James Martens that develops a variant of AD which calculates a special curvature quantity which is useful for efficient second order optimization

Deep Learning via Hessian-free Optimization: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jmartens/docs/Deep_HessianFree.pd...

Optimizing Neural Networks with Kronecker-factored Approximate Curvature: http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05671

James Martens' list of publications with links to sample code for the above two papers, slides/condensed conference versions, etc: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jmartens/research.html

Pretty neat stuff

If zero rating wasn't allowed then the ISP would still be doing that sort of thing with popular content providers anyway, just the ones that their users prefer instead of the ones their users are being railroaded onto by the ISP itself, so as far as I'm concerned it's a wash.

This is putting the cart before the horse. Competition is what drives down prices. When companies aren't allowed to zero rate content then they're all offering more or less the same product so they have to compete with each other on price.

Also keep in mind that zero rating is itself an explicit admission that network capacity and overhead aren't factors in the price. The whole deal is that the wireless company lets customers on those plans use unlimited data at no extra charge as long as it's for zero rated content. Allowing customers at that same price point to use that same unlimited data without arbitrary restrictions would ultimately be just as profitable.

These problems are all tractable using traditional computer vision methods. There's a sizable body of published academic research from the past couple of decades that addresses tackling these and other computer vision problems in the specific applied context of video analysis of soccer games. Considering the amount of knowledge out there I'm kind of surprised that any clubs at the premier league level are still in a position where they aren't able to extract useful information from their library of game footage. With so much money at stake I figured that even if clubs weren't developing their own analytics tools in-house there would be no shortage of third party tools out there by now.

I have people inside a Premier League club just waiting for me to be able to throw OpenCV at an archive of video

How extensive is the footage in their archives? i.e. is it just what winds up in the broadcasts, do they keep every second of footage of every game taken by every camera in the stadium, or is it something in-between?

But groups like Senior House, which define themselves by being different, also run the risk of becoming highly conformist, Packer says. The punk rock movement is a particularly vivid example of this phenomenon. “They self-describe as being different, but from the outside they all look the same,” he says.

They don't want to look different from each other; they want to look different from people like him. It's really not that complicated. Spinning that into alarmism against the idea countercultures in general like this guy does is just ridiculous, and there's absolutely no way he's doing so in good faith.

What else am I supposed to do, curl up and die? <- a note on my tone: I say this with a shrug, not a sneer. And yes, it's reductive, but that's because that's what I personally have found that the question ultimately reduces to.

I'm glad that the general public is growing more aware of privacy issues but the more cynical part of my brain tells me that, since the government and a very large industry share an interest in eroding privacy as much as possible, putting stronger privacy protections into place won't be easy no matter how many people say that's what they want. I want to feel confident betting on privacy, I really do, but I won't until I see some evidence that growing public awareness is getting politicians to address privacy issues directly instead of brushing them aside to focus on other, politically sexier issues.

If you've already sloged through Dune Messiah and Children of Dune then you should consider giving God Emperor of Dune a chance because it's very different from the first two sequels. The setting has dramatically changed, so there is a lot of new worldbuilding; the overall narrative shifts to focus on a new central character; there is a return to the more philosophical content of the original as opposed to the strictly expository content of the first two sequels; and the writing itself is (in my opinion) much more lovingly crafted than the prose in the first two sequels which seemed to me as a reader as if it was rushed like he just wanted to spit it out and be done with that part of the narrative. I know I'm really just evangelizing on the basis of my personal reaction to the books but again, if you've alrady read the first two sequels, pop into a Barnes and Noble or something and give the first few chapters of God Emperor a chance.

Which (if any) of the Dune sequels are "good" is one of those Kirk vs. Pickard or Joel vs. Mike caliber sci-fi debates that gets unreasonably heated since people get very attached to their opinions on creative works that resonate with them on a personal level. (For the record, I don't really like the first two sequels but I really really love the 3rd-5th sequels; I realize it's a big ask of new readers to get that far just on my say-so though.)

I've heard people say they find inspiration in the Litany Against Fear (Fear is the mind-killer...) but I prefer the stripped-down version introduced in the 5th sequel: "Face your fears or they will climb over your back."

I find that if I think of military/intelligence project names as being in part a form of marketing for which I am not the target demographic, and then imagine the sorts of people who are in that demographic, they make a whole lot more sense.

Labels are important to the way people think and the word "manager" has inherited a lot of baggage from American corporate culture at large. Giving the position they are trying to define a new name isn't wrong-headed if what they are trying to do is avoid a clash between the attitude they want their "lead links " to have towards employees and the attitudes attached to the title "manager" that people may otherwise import into those relationships (not to mention qualifications, compensation, etc). This isn't to say that it will take, or lead to the results they want if it does, but I can see how starting from scratch would look easier to the Zappos executives than fighting against a ingrained cultural expectations would.

At the very least, it's encouraging that the NSA feels the need to do keep up this sort of damage control because it suggests that people in the agency feel its public image continues to be damaged (or at least threatened) by the leaks. I doubt they would be actively trying to massage public opinion like this if the story had died by now, or if only a negligible portion of the public cared.

When I see "experiment X backs up/supports/proves conclusion Y" in a headline I always mentally correct it to "experiment X does not definitively disprove conclusion Y" where X and Y are random variables operating on whatever the actual scientific experiment and conclusion respectively are.

I don't know what you thought you read but I did not at any point edit the post you replied to. If that's what you're getting worked up over then you can calm down now because it was just a mistake and I'm not trying to manipulate the discussion to make you look bad.

All this does for me is raise the question: why, if it's so easy, wasn't the translation posted to begin with? Keep in mind that the user who dropped that untranslated brick on us has massive karma so that low-effort post is now parked at the top of the thread.

If you actually want to have a discussion of those differences then you're going to need to point them out yourself instead of dumping a homework assignment in everyone's lap since: 1) I don't read Chinese, and I doubt I'm alone here when it comes to that 2) Google translate is far from perfect, and unless the differences are clear to someone who merely gets the gist of the Chinese article they probably won't come across

More like they are accounting for any source of human error which is impossible to completely eliminate even with a top-quality staff.

Possibly a brief spike in civic participation in the local government process, lasting for exactly as long as required to yank automated enforcement tools back out of local cops' hands.

This sort of spin is marvelously effective because, even though it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of anyone who recognizes it for what it is, it allows people in Karp's position to dig rhetorical trenches out in front of the substance of their actions and redirect any discussion into one about defining terms. It doesn't matter one whit that making it prohibitively hard for anyone to access content is just as much censorship of that content as disallowing it entirely is; nothing sucks the air out of a discussion faster than an extended yes-it-is/no-it-isn't headbutting contest over the meaning of a word.

There is no real logical alternative to Tumblr because what makes Tumblr Tumblr isn't just a set of features that define the blogging platform it offers, it's the larger community of users that has grown there. Even if there were an identical mirror of the service at tumbls.com right now, that unquantifiable "feel" that made tumblr uniquely appealing is going to be lost unless more or less the entire tumblr community migrated over simultaneously, which is impossible. edit: clarity

Storage is getting so cheap so quickly that this is a disappearing problem. Also, glossing over the barriers to implementation, your solution to the stated issue makes the overall fidelity of files on the network much less predictable, particularly for those with fewer up-votes. To compensate, the minimum number of copies of each part of each file that the network would have to cache to be reasonably certain of its ability to completely deliver to new downloaders the files riding the minimum up-vote threshold would have to go up. This would in turn push the minimum up-vote threshold up and make it more difficult for obscure content to survive on the network.

I find this attitude dismaying because to me it just screams out "I AM SCARED!!!" You are suggesting that society place a permanent mark on this young man's criminal record and force him into course of treatment designed to change who he is because one sentence he wrote puts him in the category of "different than you ever were." You know nothing about this person except that he is in jail for one sentence which was a joke; this is not right even if you feel the joke was in poor taste. If you think that a person's making one joke you don't like is enough information about that person to prescribe such dire consequences then you should seriously reevaluate the way you think about the world around you. Supposing a heckler had shouted to George Carlin that he was insane in the middle of a performance, and he responded the same way this young man did -- would you be calling for the same consequences as you are for the young man in the article? A disproportionate reaction to something like this is the grown-up equivalent of being frightened of monsters under your bed at night, and nobody deserves to have his or her life ruined because of it.

For a single sentence written in response to a direct insult and immediately labeled as a joke by the guy who wrote it, there is no legal strategy that sounds right to me because this is not something that should require a legal strategy to begin with. This situation is preposterous and criticizing the error in legal tactics made by a minor who had no reason to believe he had done anything wrong is completely missing the forest for the trees.

edit: apparently he was 18 at the time, so he wasn't a minor, but I don't feel that makes the situation any less ridiculous

The form of the argument depends on the two not meshing. The Snowden leaks provide evidence of the former case. The contradiction between that and the latter case suggests that perhaps the NSA is not being completely forthright with the public about the scope and purpose of its domestic surveillance. It's not that hard of an argument to follow, and given how tight-lipped the executive branch has been so far it's a pretty persuasive one.

No, the relevant issue is how the DRM is designed and executed. The substantive differences between MS's scheme and how Steam does things are too big to simply gloss over. The marketing could have been as slick as you please but they would still have been trying to sell a shit sandwich. It's no surprise that gamers sniffed them out.

There needs to be a comma in between 'Vegetarian' and 'Chinese' in both phrases to clarify that whichever is the former modifies 'lawyer' as opposed to the latter.