skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As I understand it, from all known rational viewpoints everything about our lives are entirely meaningless because the evidence shows that nothing about our lives will remain or will be observed.

I honestly don't think you do understand it if you think all known rational viewpoints see life as meaningless because that's simply not true. The lack of immortality does not make life meaningless; that's a belief your religion sold you.

"meaningless", you keep you that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

> Everything about you will not exist in a few short years.

So what? The same applies to everyone. Doesn't make life meaningless.

> Everything ever built by anyone will either not exist or will be no longer have any energy (and no observer) once the universe collapses or goes through heat-death.

Again, so what? Doesn't make life meaningless. I do not care what happens to the universe billions of years in the future and if you do, then that's something you could stand to reexamine because thinking that it makes life meaningless is not rational.

> To be a Christian is to accept reason - and then to have hope.

Hope, sure, but reason, I do not think so. You are basically asserting that lack of a God equals a meaningless existence, a completely foundation-less assertion entirely devoid of reason that can't be logically argued, only asserted as a circular argument that pre-supposes God's existence.
The current state of chat is depressing. The trend on the Internet today seems to be centralize everything. I think it's because centralized systems are easy to understand, maintain and take advantage of. Why maintain a library of media when you can let Netflix/Spotify/Steam etc. do it?

Unfortunately chat is no different. There seems to be a modest swingback with things like Conversations/Signal/ChatSecure, but that has more to do with Snowden than interoperability. I use Conversations on my phone, Gajim on the desktop, Prosody on the server with OMEMO over XMPP on everything, but the average user is going to make an account on Facebook and be done with it.

I think I'd even be happier if chat went the way of Email whereby everyone chooses between three or four big players that interop on a standard. The status quo is the same as any digital storefront. I can't watch a Netflix movie I paid for on an unaffiliated desktop client, I can't chat with a Facebook friend on an unaffiliated desktop client. Maybe we should start demanding DRM-FREE social relationships.

Edit: Enterprise was the last hold-out for this kind of thing. It seems like more and more companies are trusting Google with their email, Github with their code, Slack with their communication etc. "Embrace the cloud" ~== "Cede control of all facets of your business to third-parties".
I think S Korea has about 14x the population density of the US. See, for example, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST
If you use metropolitan areas then you're just proving the original point. Metro areas in the US are HUGE! For example, the Greater Las Angeles area is ~34k square miles. The entire country of England is only ~50k square miles! Understanding this is key to understanding why the cable and telecom businesses in the US are so difficult to enter.
Look, I understand that Thiel may have been on a kind of personal vendetta, but I can't really argue that what he has done is wrong. Gawker regularly does what a number of other journalistic outlets do as well, that being: printing these ridiculous and false stories and then some time later printing a correction in fine print at the bottom. There needs to be more accountability for these "journalists" because in some cases they ruin others' lives and act as if they have done no wrong because they "eventually" published a correction...
Scott Adams was talking about this exactly on Bill Maher yesterday, that people can be educated about persuasion techniques and they still fall victim to them.

I'm not cynical enough to think it applies everywhere, mass education about persuasion techniques is the only real hope for defending against them.
Russia has a new robot soldier and it's a little troubling
The Vive has issues, comfort issues especially, but it's a good setup. I can't say the same for the Rift, and the controls don't help.
I was going to preorder but ultimately I opted not to simply because there's no real use case, yet. It's still too early. I believe in a few years it will be worth it but I just don't want to be an early adopter on demo ware.
> I was wondering when I could have my search history be viewed as chat history, and I predict I'll use the chat interface more than google.com.

I've started using the Skype Summarize bot in the Outlook website and it's pretty cool. Rather than going to a separate site and deal with subpar UI/UX you just paste the article URL in and you get your summary via the chat window. I was skeptical of all of Google's messaging platforms but if they can come close to providing me this functionality I'm on board. Getting things done via bots vs going to a website IMO is the future.
I hear you but you can counter-claim it easily for high-speed Internet for business. Just look at how critical the Internet is to all kinds of firms these days. Even those that mostly don't need the Internet often have an expensive, leased line for main HQ. There's also the meme of traveling salespeople and such who benefit from higher speeds.

So, with so much dependence, it stands to reason a country's businesses can be a bit more competitive and efficient if they have high-speed, low-cost Internet. The Internet part is necessary for most even if other attributes aren't. They're certainly useful, though, as they increase capabilities and profit simultaneously.
“Perhaps books matter because they encourage children to read more and reading can have positive effects on school performance. Alternatively, a home filled with books indicates advantageous socio-economic conditions.”

"Alternatively"? I think the word is conclusively or obviously.
Yeah, exactly. I am actually solving problems with ML these days.
What do you think made it horrible?

I think it had a simple UI, which for many things worked very well. When I managed the Technical Support for a university using Google Apps for Education, gchat's simple interface was kind of a blessing in that everyone on the campus had it, it was unobtrusive, automatically saved and searchable (though the search could have used some improvements), and you could make calls/video calls without leaving your email.

When it switched to hangouts, a lot of the simplicity left with it in favor of a more social experience; large user-pics on by default (at the beginning I don't think you could customize this either), the windows were significantly bigger, and the text box lost space to the emoji/add picture buttons.

It was a pretty simple, out of the way, and concise chat option with, as far as I could tell, nothing really hidden. What you saw is what you got.
Unless they control for the heritability of intelligence this is a "wet streets cause rain" story.
How come you left out these ones?

spectral-norm 115% slower
reverse-compliment 121% slower
n-body 136% slower
regex-dna 235% slower
k-nucleotide 253% slower

Cherry picking your data shows you're either dishonest or really lost in your denial.
Good old-fashioned revenge. What's not to like?
That's the real lesson here: if there were less regulation then companies would compete with one another — which would cost them profits, which is why they lobby for more regulations.
Hard to agree. The author's point is Slack is gChat because both are asynchronous messengers, so we might as well replace gChat with iMessage/Facetime in this argument (or Skype, for that matter). No, the power of Slack is the API integration support, and for that you have to give credit where it's due to Slack.
My two cents on Vive after a short experience:

1. Video quality is better than google cardboard, but not much. Yeah, I am surprised too.
2. Headset and Control don't fit very well, at least for me.
3. You need a large empty room. Otherwise I can see myself running into things.

Bottom line: no way I am going to buy this.
Mysteriously disappeared? I don't know anything about it's history but I happen to use something that, at least, goes by that name [1].

[1] https://client02.chat.mibbit.com/?channel=%237daystodie&serv...
Not to mention the heritability of economic status. Rich families have rich kids that grow up to be rich adults. News at 11.
Strange they would censor that when the Salon piece that Harris is butt-hurt about is quite well argued. They could've just run his comments and allowed the writer to respond.

On another note reading that interview TIL that Harris is only a few degrees removed from the more rabid Islamaphobes. He certainly builds on the amateur dialectic of assuming that everything wrong with the Muslim world comes from the Quran and Sunnah rather than a flawed jurisprudential discourse amongst the ulema that offers vast possibilities for improvement.

"but if you had stood at the gates of Vienna in 1683, you could have not helped but notice the civilizational problem of jihad."
Gotta love that - the West pillaged, enslaved and exploited half the world but it's some other folks that have a problem with violence. Right. Maybe if Christianity had stopped Christian nations from wars of expansion we'd have some valid basis of comparison.

Good thing Harris is just preaching to his New Atheist choir (now powered by 50% more smugness!).
>I hope - and believe - that as game devs get more experience with VR, they'll design VR games differently to take into account its strengths and weaknesses.

Nintendo did this nicely with the Wii controllers - you can flail your arms around wildly, but it also works when you flip your wrist a little bit
Slack nailed it with the notion of teams. You invite someone into a team and there's an instant tachonomy of conversation to join. The ability to be in multiple teams at once is hugely helpful as well.
Do you consider basic telephone service a necessity?
You say "a bunch of lines" do you know why not all?
A few points that stood out to me.

1. He has the wrong headset. VR needs roomspace or it's just not going to be worth it. Yes gametime on the extreme end will go down in VR. That's very welcome by many of us finely aged gamers who don't have much time anyway for 6 to 12 hour sessions anymore (or don't want to invest that kind of time). I'd rather put in 1 to 2 hours a day of insanely immersive gametime than 12 hours of Civilization (which I already put countless hours into during the early 90s anyway).

2. He did nail the second thing that needs to happen when he said the cords were a mess: the need for a self-contained VR system with no cords. Cell phone VR for the basic setup and a more powerful and immersive but also wirefree all-in-one VR outfit is where it'll be at in the longterm. Think Powergloves and the whole deal.

3. Main issue here is that this as an author who doesn't know what he needs. But what he needs is a killer app.
Once someone figures out what that is, it'll explode.
How YouNow Keeps Its Community So Damn Nice
Nonsense. See Afforess's comment above. Read the history of Standard Oil.
They could be a shelf full of $2 novels. Owning a few hundred books doesn't cost very much (thanks printing press), and only implies an interest in reading not in being of a high socioeconomic status.
I think the best plan (for now) is to just have NN's et al as accessible as possible and have everyone try different things. It'd be cool to see accessible interfaces for pay-per-training on good hardware (TPUs?) tied in to some library. I think 'this time it's different' is right mainly in the fact that we can try things much more quickly, with a lot more people.
Thanks for the reply and the information!
Gonna derail this a bit, but what the fck is up with stock indicators in these 'news' posts? Seeing more and more of that lately.

Who even cares about that: https://i.imgur.com/TI5T7ah.png when they came to read a story such as this. Is this some useless bs marketing move or am I missing something.

Please explain.
But this particular case is the opposite: they got in trouble for publishing the truth.
What? For irc you can connect without an account, how is that harder than forcing people to register on github first?

Oh, you mean its easier for people who already have github account? Who are these people that create accounts on a hosting service for one of the more complicated version control systems but find connecting to ftp servers and entering cli commands too daunting?

If you want to talk about confusing, in gitter I can navigate to a room and see what happens in it but I need to press an extra button to actually be able to talk in it? What? Rooms, private chats and /me? Many parts of gitter doesn't make sense if you don't know the whole chat paradigm that irc created.

Gitter derives it utility purely in the better web client and its custom built integration with github.
Yep, sounds much more natural at the end :)
Web Application security – CSRF attacks
I almost didn't click the link because of this, then remembered I'm on my iPad and so don't have ad blocking. Holy crap there are a lot of ads on that story. I stopped reading after the third huge animated ad. How do people use the web generally without ad blocking?

Back on topic, the Vive's room scale tracking really makes the difference IMO. The Rift seems more like just a fancy display device, whereas the Vive enables a whole new class of experiences.
>...free/heavily subsidized daycare, tax incentives, and maybe even payments.

We have all of this in Germany.

Child care is not free but heavily subsidized, even more there is a right to child care for children from age one to six [1].

Tax reductions are more complicated, broadly speaking the tax exempt amount for every child is around 7000 EUR - not too bad [2 (in German, look for the table in the section "Höhe des Kinderfreibetrages")] .

Payments "Child benefit" are [3]:

1 Child	184 EUR/month
2 Children 386 EUR/month
3 Children	558 EUR/month
additional child 215 EUR/month

The source has a comparison with other countries and while
difficult to compare I think Germany is in the top.

[1] https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/politics/germany-europe/...

[2] http://www.kindergeld.org/kinderfreibetrag.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_benefit
Slack makes mobile work in a way that IRC didn't. IRC axiomatically assumes you're on a stable connection. There weren't any widely deployed solutions that allowed you to intermittently connect and see the conversation that passed while you were gone inline.
Because if you have an interest in Germany continuing to exist in the future, you need German people.

A country filled with Arabs, Africans, and Afghans isn't Germany, peoples aren't fungible in that way.
It was a Chrome extension, apparently related to XKCD. In fact I saw a little symbol for it in the bookmarks bar, and assumed it was just a link to XKCD, which I know my kids are interested in.
I had no idea that airport train ridership was so low – I suppose that explains their generally elevated prices. Even NYC's JFK AirTrain only carried an average of about 18,000 paid passengers per day in 2014, which seems low to me (though that also translates to about $32 million annual revenue, which might be sustainable.)
That's not a functional style, but an observation of how most (non-pathological) code behaves. If you're talking about escape analysis and stack allocation, the functional style doesn't help, because references escape all the time. That they're pointing to immutable objects doesn't matter.

In any case, whether functional or not, the observation is that many objects have limited scopes, that correspond to structural scopes in the code.
Did you read the article or just the first couple paragraphs?

The author's point is that Slack, Facebook chat (the dominant force nowadays), and many other such applications descend in lineage from Gchat, which preceded all of them by many years.

I thought gchat was an astonishing thing when it came out-- I couldn't believe I could just seamlessly chat with anyone through my email, and have it archivable and searchable. I spent years lamenting that very few people I knew used it. I am one of those hold-out classic style users as described by the article. I can still dream.

It might be commonplace now, but gchat was the first of its kind for an in-browser experience, and it was incredibly well-implemented given that it was 2005. Worked perfectly. Google did indeed have something big, and they never promoted it or advanced it in such a way as for it to gain popularity, despite the massive gmail userbase. The fact that even now gmail has over a billion users and still gchat is mostly overlooked and unused is just sad, a truly impressive failure.
PocketCHIP and PICO-8
There's been a lot of fighting between Vive owners and Oculus owners over which HMD is the best, but they both miss the reality that the biggest challenge to getting the average person to adopt VR isn't room tracking or motion controllers, it's getting them to even want to put the things on. There is very little compelling software at this point that would make anyone but an enthusiast want to use either of them for more than a few hours.
Hijacking a Sonifi Hotel TV
It's the same conclusion that the Freakanomics books made when they looked into why children who were to read at home had higher test scores.

It just turned out that parents who had libraries at home were the type of parents who were more involved in their children's academic life.
Larry Page spelled it out in his Google I/O q&a. Google tried for years and years to get interoperability but Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo would never do anything more than 1-way interop sucking users out of xmpp into their proprietary system. Gchat didn't have many active users, meanwhile the closed systems were getting hundreds of millions of daily actives.

I think mobile chat taught Google a lesson: the cultural Dna that "open always wins" pretty much leads to losing and having to play catch up.

I think at this point the biggest hope is that something like telegram can become the defacto new xmpp.
The thing is, without good a standard controller and tracking there can't be any good software other than tech demos.
Agreed. I generally lean towards freedom of the press but I'd like to see an outfit like this go into more depth on the privacy issue. Does it matter it wasn't his house? Does it matter it was in the other person's house? Does it matter he probably knew there was video recording in progress? Does it matter the other party definitely knew? Does it matter that the other party or the other party's spouse leaked it? Does it matter that only 3% of the "tape" was published? Does it matter that it revealed key events such as the presence of the husband? Does it matter that the really incendiary content was never published (Hulk commenting on his daughter's boyfriend)?
It's Forbes. That's their industry and target audience.
XMPP is a poor protocol. I can completely understand why they would want to break compatibility.
TypeScript with tslint solved the specific problems mentioned here. That said, experienced devs know JS sucks, but we use it because it's popular. We need a better language that rivals JS in popularity.
No, they are different.

One feels like IM and the other feels like IRC.
Yeah, me either.

At first I kind of thought of disabling stuff so I Could read Forbes but I've found so much crap lately that I don't bother anymore.
So maybe someone from that industry can comment if that helps anyone at all?
It's interesting that the "gz" column, which reflects the amount of source code required, shows a very slight trend towards C being smaller, although there are big exceptions like regex-dna and reverse-complement.

I'm not seeing the 400x more memory - there is a 40x though. But if you add up the columns for the programs that have both C and Java versions, you get this rough summary...

secs KB gz
Java 76.33 2004048 12775
C gcc 37.32 793652 11651

...that Java is on average half as fast as C and uses 2.5x more memory, while requiring slightly more source code.
Yeah, it'd be nice if IM just settled on some interoperable basis. I think there is an eternal need for a new chat app (as each new generation of school children create their first accounts on some service their parents aren't already on, and someone will fill that gap) but I liked the years when I could just add another account to adium and manage it that way. These last years it just been accounts dying off, and the new smartphone apps not really working well in my desktop client :(
The comments on that video are pointing out that the title is misleading, and the video description isn't reassuring.
Per this link [0], there's 10 million homes (out of 90 million with broadband) in the US with fiber to the premise, versus 250k in the UK. The number seems a bit suspect, but I generally trust Ars.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-th...
It's especially a problem if you live in a hot and humid climate like I do. No matter what I did I could not prevent the lenses from fogging over and I tried everything from antifog sprays for ski masks to stuffing paper towels into the sides of the headset.

The steamy, foggy, bad-smelling experience contributes as much to the nausea, or at least it exacerbates it in my experience.
Yesterday's Phone Cancer Scare Scares Me a Little About the Future of Journalism
The Geneva Free Port is crammed with storage vaults that contain great art
I don't disagree with the sentiment, although I think you go a little too far - not everyone can be an expert in everything, and journalists have a genuinely hard problem of trying to a) learn something well enough and quickly enough to get it to print within a few hours, and b) manage to reduce it to a form that the average reader will understand. These are genuinely hard problems.

P.S. Either way, the house rules here are to "be nice". You can argue (and many do in this thread) whether this is a good policy, but it is the policy.
I'm not sure where you got your numbers. The 10 largest cities in the US have a population of 26M (2015 estimates, Wikipedia). Generally population estimates are given for the metropolitan area. The 10 largest have a population of 73 million. There are 53 MSAs with a population over 1M with perhaps a total population of 150M. (I was too lazy to do all the addition.) The US has a large area, but it is primarily urban.
He works in a consulting company in Texas. You need to project a certain level of professionalism to make your customers feel comfortable. Sometimes looking weird can be positive, e.g. for designers, but it can be a distraction.
Because this is how hangouts looks on a 4k monitor: https://imgur.com/lPkNnhR

This is its default size and behavior when in a browser:
https://imgur.com/bXL1Ezn

This. Is. Horrible.

I have some very, very unkind words for the person or team or manager who decided to make hangouts show as few lines as possible. It didn't used to be this way.
If you can pick the time, flights can be very, very cheap. Like, €50 both ways cheap.
Look no further than mother nature, where bright colors often mean WARNING, I WILL MESS YOU UP. A few things to look up as examples:

* Rosary Pea

* Coral Snake

* Stag Beetle

* Jerusalem Cherry

* Phantasmal poison frog

* Strawberry poison dart frog

* Bittersweet nightshade berries