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Google Trends can tell you a lot of things :)

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=2014-01-01%202017...

More seriously though: others have pointed out that finetuning is pretty popular in some subfields, but it's just one hammer in a of a whole toolbox of techniques which are necessary to make neural nets train (even when you have a tonne of data). Standardisation, choice of initialisation, and choice of learning rate schedule all come to mind as other factors which seem simple, but which can have a huge impact in practice.

Of course, each tool has its limitations. The most obvious limitation of finetuning is that you need a network that's already been trained on vaguely similar data. Pretraining on ImageNet is probably not going to help you solve problems where the size of objects matters, for example, because most ImageNet performance tends to benefit from scale invariance.

I wish you luck with nanonets.ai, but I think it's irresponsible to market this as the "1 weird trick" to bring data efficiency to neural nets.

"The Royal Family" gets similar treatment. I suspect that it's a language thing---there are only two Anglosphere countries with presidents, and the other one (Ireland) has ~1/50th the population of the US and lots of Irish speakers, so if you see an English language post about "the President", then there's a good chance that it's referring to the US one. I'd like to see speakers of other languages (or Anglophones from outside the Anglosphere) confirm or refute this hunch.

> ...its hard to not think that Bin Laden won.

Only if bin Laden's aim was to strengthen the US surveillance apparatus and step up American military involvement in the Middle East.

A trip to Alpha Centauri would be decidedly intra-galactic; the distance from the Sun to the edge of our galaxy is on the order of 4300 times the distance from the Sun to Alpha Centauri.

If you still like the idea of buttons, but don't want to give up using the vendor-supplied buttons themselves, you can use the "two clicks for more privacy" jQuery plugin[0], which only loads the actual button when the user enables it by clicking a greyed-out placeholder.

[0] http://panzi.github.io/SocialSharePrivacy/

Let's see:

1) Served over raw HTTP so that Uncle Sam can add your request to his database.

2) Twitter and Facebook buttons up in the top right-hand corner in case you feel like associating your real-world identity with trollthensa.com.

3) The Big G's analytics running in the background just in case Twitter and Facebook didn't collect enough data.

4) All Javascript and typefaces served from CDNs.

5) Email hosted on... GMail. Because Google haven't been accused of granting the US Government carte-blanche access to their users' emails. Ever.

But don't worry, because they got their domain through DomainsByProxy, notable champions of Internet freedom!

This is why the PRISM leak won't change anything. It's all well and good to say "I'm OUTRAGED over what's going on", but it doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to start taking privacy seriously and reducing (or eliminating) your dependence on services which could trivially compromise your users' data.

> To win, we must fight the threat (government).

Yes, because governments are the only entities that want your private data.

Here[0] is where Facebook defines what they consider to be "hate speech":

> Content that attacks people based on their actual or perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or disease is not allowed. We do, however, allow clear attempts at humor or satire that might otherwise be considered a possible threat or attack. This includes content that many people may find to be in bad taste (ex: jokes, stand-up comedy, popular song lyrics, etc.).

Granted, it's a horribly distasteful image macro, but Facebook acted according to their written community standards, so I'm not sure why their response is "shocking". It's also important to bear in mind that the page is titled "Offensive Humor at its Best", so I'm not sure why it comes as a surprise that the images are, well, offensive.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/help/135402139904490/

> A better critique would focus on whether the language actually needed an Enum construct.

This isn't a new construct, or a syntax change, or an additional builtin. It's just an addition to the stdlib so that you can go:

  from enum import Enum

...which isn't quite as earth-shattering as some people in this thread are making out.

> ANd thanks for the cliche that poor = robber/criminal

Parent was pointing out that a reasonable government welfare program does a lot less to foster resentment than a free market "fend for yourself" approach.

> I am sure many honest poor people appreciate your point of view.

Honest people still have to eat. Poor people don't (usually) choose to be poor, and if you force them into a corner with no other alternative, they will either

a) Die

or

b) Resort to crime or some other undesirable activity to prevent themselves from dying.

> I hear you can actually run Linux on it if you put some effort in

Some time ago there was someone who decided to hook a RAM chip up to an 8-bit micro-controller---like one of the ones in the various Arduino models---so that they could run Ubuntu on it. Their write-up (http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linu...) is actually quite interesting, though watching it boot is less so ;)

The problem is that well intentioned suggestions like "eat dark leafy greens" tend to sew doubt in the minds of patients, and as a result you have lots of cancer sufferers on batshit insane diet regimes because "a friend-of-a-friend said this would help"[0]. When someone is staring down death and you say "hey, I bet this would help", they're going to listen very, very intently, regardless of what a rational person might make of your suggestion.

At its extreme, this mentality can be actively harmful. I know of one person who does "spiritual healing" over the phone, charging a handsome fee to pump your telephone line full of good vibes. It may sound stupid (the cynic might even assume malice on the part of the giver-of-vibes), but things aren't so black and white when the chips are down.

[0] This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that crazy diets compromise your ability to enjoy life without delivering any discernible medical benefit. It's all well and good to adopt a fighting attitude and say "I'm going to beat it!", but that attitude may not result in an optimal payoff in the long run.

> people of average or below average intelligence probably aren't served very well by the high school curriculum.

Explain. My experience has been that high school is little more than a legal straightjacket to prevent the archetypal hormone-addled teenager from going off and doing stupid shit or otherwise causing potential problems for themselves.

> The high school curriculum should have alternate vocational and tech skills tracks.

This doesn't happen already? What's the pipeline in your education system for someone who wants to become, say, a diesel mechanic? Can they leave school early and get an apprenticeship?

Battery life "up to" 30 minutes according to preliminary specs. Impressive.

http://www.proxdynamics.com/products/pd_100_prs/

The Australia remark is utter bullshit. From Wikipedia:

> In Australia, carriers can choose whether to SIM/Network Lock handsets or not and usually tend to only SIM/Network lock prepaid handsets. There does not appear to be any regulation or law on SIM locking in Australia.

Most phones can be unlocked for free by the carrier after a few years, but if you want it unlocked upfront (usually before passing n years or sometimes $k of credit in the case of prepaid phones), you'll have to pay the carrier.

That's an interesting line of reasoning, and not one that I had considered before. Thank you.

> Because the state has the monopoly of violence.

I'm fascinated by this viewpoint, but I'm afraid I've never fully understood it. How many weapons to the population have to have before the state is no longer considered to pose a threat? Do we stop at clubs or knives? Small arms? Assault weapons? Explosives? Armoured vehicles? Missiles?

> How many deaths in 2012 due to complication related to obesity? How many due to guns? How many due to road accidents?

Those three are almost entirely unrelated. Complications related to obesity almost only ever affect the physical wellbeing of the obese person. Road accidents arise from the operation of a useful tool by many millions of people, every day, and generally aren't malicious (and thus are more difficult to prevent). This doesn't make these two causes of death any less tragic, but the sort of gun violence the current US administration wishes to legislate against is wanton slaughter of humans, pure and simple. To paraphrase Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine"[0], assault weapons and armour piercing rounds are not useful for hunting[1].

[0]: Now there's something you could call "propaganda". That movie had a lot of good information, but it was often obscured by horrible misrepresentation and questionable conclusions.

[1]: Contrary to popular belief, gun control does not preclude those who need weapons in their day-to-day lives from purchasing them. Gun control is not a binary.

> You're coming across as quite the bigot.

Why is it that preventing the old from voting is "bigotry", whilst preventing the young from voting is merely an act prudence? You must remember that democracy is governance "by the people, for the people", not governance by some arbitrarily selected subset of the people. There is an age below which the majority of people are unable to make informed decisions about political representation (either due to lack of understanding or pressure from third parties like family), but I'm not convinced that 18 is that age.

Mind you, age cutoffs aren't the only way of tackling this problem.

> I don't know about you, but I learn more every year, so I imagine by the time I'm 75, I'll know at least three times as much as I know now.

Unlikely. Net knowledge growth rate usually decreases significantly with age. You'll likely accumulate more knowledge between now and when you're 75, but certainly not three times more[0]. Ask a 75 year-old ;-)

> Nor do I think being in school adequately prepares or informs anyone to be a citizen.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, that was the point of my proposal. I don't think that today's youth take an active enough interest in politics, and I believe that allowing them to participate in the democratic system could increase their motivation to become more informed citizens.

[0]: At least, not by any measurable metric. "Common sense" is completely different.

The difference is that having to avoid certain public places for fear of being assaulted infringes on your personal freedoms. Locking down a server does not.

I disagree. Whilst I don't think that voting rights should be taken away from the elderly, I do think that giving a greater range of ages the ability to vote (say, optional voting between 13 and 18) could be beneficial to society. That extra 5 year gap isn't a large enough number of people to reshape the political landscape in most Western nations, but it is sufficient to stimulate a healthy interest in politics at a young age, thus (hopefully) producing better informed voters who can in turn elect better governments.

With good reason, too. The primitive societies you're talking about (and, for the most part, the ideologies that drove them) are dead, so to write articles about them would be daft. OTOH, many PHBs and their various ideologies are still very alive (i.e. [0]), so it would make sense to write an article about them.

[0]: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/154733/my-bos...

This is highly amusing. As the developer on the official AOSP ticket for this said, Java apps get their random bits from RandomBitsSupplier, which, quite clearly, does not read from /dev/urandom, as evidenced by line 72 in https://android.googlesource.com/platform/libcore/+/master/l...:

  private static final String DEVICE_NAMES[] = { "/dev/urandom" /*, "/dev/random" */ };

Searching for "sqlalchemy sql injection" brings up this: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=783305

They do, but what we're talking about here is an ORM, so there will always be machine generated SQL somewhere. Or do you believe that GP is suggesting that developers use parameterised SQL queries instead of an ORM?

And yet Google is still the easiest way to search for pirated content. I think that the most interesting part of this article is that the biggest alleged infringer, FilesTube, doesn't actually host any infringing files! It's simply a search engine which uses hyperlinks and iframes to embed results.

The pseudo-C used in the Quake 3 VM had no malloc()[0] and they wrote a frigging AAA game with it. I suggest you check out their source code[1].

[0] http://wiki.ioquake3.org/Getting_the_most_from_Quake3_C#No_M... [1] https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena

This XKCD[0] explains the issue with Hurd perfectly, more-or-less echoing the ideas rogerbinns expressed. Note the mouseover text, which makes the observation that the Hurd loop is the loop in which you "code right" and the Android loop is the loop in which you "code fast".

[0] https://xkcd.com/844/

If it has GObject as a dependency, then it's not designed for "low-level systems programming". Hell, just having a GC more-or-less discounts it due to the associated problems with runtime size and performance[0]. As a general rule of thumb: if you can't write a kernel in it, it's not a systems language.

[0] It is possible to write a systems language with these features, but low-level systems stuff is not what Vala was designed for.

> So in your opinion everybody who drinks in public always makes a mess? I go to the lake with friends and drink often, but we clean up and put it in one of the public bins.

I was a bit harsh on drinkers. It is more smokers whom I have a beef with. What I should have said is that I feel as though a consistent approach to regulation of where glassware can and cannot be used is required.

> Also one could argue that if the park is publicly owned it should be publicly cleaned.

Perhaps that might be possible where you live, but it would never happen in my city. Most people here (including myself, I admit) simply don't have the necessary motivation to pick up broken glass unless it's in a place where they can't afford to ignore it (a playground, for example). I cycle-commute each day, and there has been a broken bottle sitting on one of the roads I use for the better part of a few months. The road in question has relatively little vehicle traffic, but is next to a small University and is part of a major bicycle corridor used by hundreds of cyclists each day. It would be trivially easy for just about any of the people who pass it to try and dispose of it properly, but nobody ever does. Annoyances like broken glass, buckled footpaths, etc. tend to just be ignored until somebody gets hurt. I'm not convinced that it would be possible (at least, not in the short term) to get a large number of residents to voluntarily take responsibility for fixing problems which they did not cause.