skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting trend, based on Flurry analytics :

“…only 10% of the time spent on mobile is spent in the browser, down from 14% a year ago. The rest of the time, 90%, is spent in apps.”

So if you're on your phone, you're probably playing games or using some other native app, but not the web browser.

Does make me wonder whether average folk (especially younger people) have any love for the web, or if it's just this functional, sometimes-adequate thing they use when there's nothing better/easier.

There's a (sorta) counterpoint to this article from Morgan Stanley saying that for the "top 50 mobile properties" their web traffic (measured in visitors, I believe) is increasing faster than their app traffic. Not sure I agree agree with their optimistic conclusion, but, maybe. I feel that there are probably good (obvious) reasons, based on typical usage, for why most people hit Zillow or Yahoo Answers of WebMD in their browser. I dunno if I'd use that stat to conclude that the browser is in a position of strength…

Link (PDF) : http://linkback.morganstanley.com/web/sendlink/webapp/f/e490...
> So, if American society 'increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth' and 'as recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory', why are the more intelligent, if anything, less likely to be successful when we go from 1920 to 2000?

Because gwern, we're in a technological stagnation and have been for many decades. The end of world war II temporarily gave America a boost, and the end of Communism temporarily gave the West a boost, but we're all being dragged down by a decline in meaningful technological progress (ex-Computation). This could be because US/West looked good in comparison and/or because a threat to the existing order evoked a competitive response that resulted in artificial rubber, jet engines etc.

I'm not claiming conflict is a good idea. I'm claiming that the above overshadowed a pattern that would have otherwise been much more obvious to us.

When circumstances diminish prospects, what use is there in higher intelligence? That would only be adaptive to express were the environment suitable. This is true whether we're on a timescale of decades (culture) or centuries (biology).

Note I do not claim we're zerohedged into oblivion. Just that the rate of technological change has changed to slower speed. It's a long term secular stagnation that has received relatively little attention until relatively recently because we are biased to notice things when they affect us and not before.

My pet hypothesis is that modern education, which became prevalent in that period you mention, is at least partially responsible for this. That modern education has a failure mode that reduces our prospects while demanding that we endorse more of it is suggestive to me of a bad memetic parasite that has infected the host and makes it do maladaptive things. Like how religion invariably starts with some transcendent quality but ends with the Inquisition and the One True Way.

In truth I think we all recognize that 'education' and education are not the same thing but one has gone from a proxy for the other into a masquerade for the other. If I'm right, then the evidence should be that a new form of education, perhaps as yet unrealized, will be able to dramatically supersede the existing institution. It is at least interesting that Silicon Valley is the only place that I know of that is successful and that takes the traditional education system much less seriously than other places. To overcome the inertia generated by the extant education system with its credentialing must take a powerful force.
To be completely literal-minded for a second, what you're describing is called a "firebreak" and is a standard part of the firefighting arsenal.
Then why didn't you hire them? Is it a case of "we needed more but never advertised that we were looking" or "we want to hire Linus Torvalds and John Carmack for 10k"?
Yes which is all based on the premise that the outer borders works, which they don't. This is why several countries now have border patrols again.
New ‘Extinct’ Meteorite Hints at Violent Cosmic Collision
I do not understand Ethereum well, but it seems like bigger contracts (with 10$ million worth of value) could be built on top of smaller ones which have been proven (with time) to be correct and not contain mistakes.

We all know that smaller pieces of code can be more easily reviewed and understand. I think that this applies for simpler contracts with smaller value. If a contract has been running for a while without being exploited, then it means that it is pretty solid, and others can build on top of that contract.

It is an interesting dynamic, because there is an incentive to exploit bad contracts, and the contracts that have ran a long amount of time and and that have not been exploited yet are thus trusted to be unexploitable (because no-one exploited them)

If that is how it works, it means that Ethereum will eventually because a fail-proof system. However, one should not mistakenly create contracts from the ground up or using untrusted sub-contracts. The ones who do so will see their contract exploited and everyone will learn from that mistake.

Edit: Seems like Vitalik Buterin asking people to get that patch if they agree for the Ethereum ecosystem to move in that direction is just creating opportunity for fragmentation in the community. It would make more sense to let that "exploit" become a lesson instead of trying to work around this non-issue.
Ocean acidification happens when CO2 dissolves in the ocean. If that carbon is fixed first by algae then it won't cause acidification.
So why do those things keep happening in the US and not in, say, Canada or Japan? Do they have scarier armies?
> It's up to the consumer to be clear about rejecting, and if an elderly isn't of sound mind to do so properly, their relatives should've been there to do the thinking on their behalf.

My aunt was his caretaker, and she would've been there... But her 'job', for the last ... 10+ years, was caretaker for her parents, and it was easier for her emotions to allow the doctors to keep her father going.

My other grandfather had his defibrillator replaced when he would have liked to have been pushing daisies. I think his reasoning was that replacing the device would hopefully keep him from being even more of a burden to his daughter/caretaker.
Mine is a very similar solution, but yes, this is another nice solution.

Personally, I prefer the amp version on mobile, and this on desktop.
Who remembers the Tibetians?
I agree. I mean, Dishero was very young. I doubt that in a market as conservative as the one they were in they'd find the magic bullet in less than two years.
I image you do not speak to many libertarians then, because it is talked about alot, with a wide range of solutions.

It is ironic you feel government is the only solution to the problem, when many people both in and out of the US die waiting on government care.
There are two fundamental problems with Etherium contracts.

1. They're executable programs. They could have been a set of declarative rules listed in priority order, but no, the designers went overboard and made them general programs with loops and recursion. There are straightforward ways to analyze sets of rules; they're usually amenable to case analysis. It's hard to analyze programs.

Writing a declarative contract language is a challenge. But doing so forces the designers to think through what they want the system to be able to do, and what they don't want it to do. Doing contracts as executable programs is punting on the problem. It says "we don't know how to do this, so we'll dump the problem on the users."

2. The stack overflow problem is idiotic. The system should have been designed so that if a program aborts, anything it did is rolled back. That's the design flaw this attack exploits.
Well, obviously it doesn't matter how expensive your violin is, or how good you are at your music genre -- it's about how popular the genre/tune is, and when busking, how likable you are (plus, putting on a good entertaining show, with emphasis on the "show" part, e.g. not subtle classical skills).
It reads like the debugging that you've done a million times if you are working with ordinary, mutable, C-family code.

To start off with, you think you're developing a valuable skill in being able to follow a call stack along with a bunch of variables. It certainly has its uses, but after a while you come to wonder why it always ends up this way. Sure, you can understand every bug eventually, but surely there's some reason why you're constantly reasoning about the state of the variables and the order of the function calls. You can write unit tests, but of course you can't think of all the undesired behaviours beforehand.

The author does mention that something functional with strong types is necessary. Probably a good idea.

As for the split function, there's a question of whether it is really necessary. I wouldn't have thought an investment fund would need a split function. An ordinary fund doesn't; if you're in, you're in for whatever proportion that you've put in. Why not just make a second fund with the same (reduced) code if you have some other group of investors? More functions = bigger attack surface.
If you stipulate that payment is required for commercial use, companies will pay. My experience is that commercial companies by and large are honest and quite willing to abide by the terms.
Yes, Chinese people who went to school do mostly know the characters. And yes, given that knowledge characters are more helpful to the reader than a phonetic writing system is.

But memorizing a decent inventory of characters is a process of several years, and the boost in ease of understanding is under normal circumstances too small to notice. I notice that communicating in characters is easier because I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, and the semantic content the characters come with helps gloss over my lack of vocabulary and poor grammar. I can already understand English; I would get minimal help from extra semantic annotations to English text.

The total savings in terms of ease-of-reading in Chinese characters compared to an alphabet, summed over a person's entire life, will never pay back the effort it requires to learn them.
Well there's always the Taiping rebellion in the 19th century [1] if you want an example about what happens when thing go bad with religion in China.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion
And location.
Plus it beats working your ass off in most professions...
How can code on a blockchain decide whether an eBay listing was fraudulent without paying humans to make the determination? Unless you have a general AI up your sleeve!
Steve here. That guy is great! Perfect idea for a trumpet. He's always standing on a bench/podium in the northwest corner of Union Square. His sound really projects; you can hear him from inside the 2-Muni bus that rides on Post.
Especially since in C# as soon as you are doing this it involves a lot of inconvenience, odd syntax, and is going to not be popular internally.
Yeah. He would have faired better in some Vienna subway station around Christmas time...
And perhaps you are severley underestimating the effort large-scale world assets take to create.

I agree that doing procedural generation properly takes a lot of work, but there's a reason that AAA open-world games like GTAV cost hunderends of millions of dollars to develop.
More competition the better for us all (the consumer)
How funny. In some Korean websites I visit, I regularly see posts about Chinese workers carrying knives everywhere and how they're being a "menace" to the Korean society.

I guess demonizing neighbors is a universal human tendency.
Thanks for clarifying. I read "Pentagon", and think, "military industrial complex" (in more ways than one).

Those are good things, and I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions, based on my own very strong bias against US militarism.
There is a lot of documentation about the Alto. Are there also complete circuit diagrams? I am just curious because the processor was made in TTL at a time before the 6502 and Z80 were born.

Sooner or later the last functional Xerox Alto will cease to work (sadly). In that case it could make sense to replace the dysfunctional parts with modern retro circuits. I wonder if a project to build a functional Alto clone (with TFT as screen) would make less effort than the famous monster 6502 which was presented recently.
The important question is can refugees communicate better in Germany and Sweden than in Brazil?

One option is German or Swedish. It's very unlikely that a refugee will know either language.

A large percentage of Germans and Swedes know English. If a refugee also knows English, that's one language possibility.

Also, French is another widely spoken second language in Syria, though less common than English. (Remember, Syria was a French Mandate.)

There is an existing minority population in both those countries which speaks Arabic. If a refugee also knows Arabic, that's another possibility.

On the other hand, in Brazil, fewer people know English (5% says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s... , compared to 64% for Germany and 86% for Sweden).

And far fewer Brazilians know Arabic, or refugees know Portuguese. (I don't know the mutual overlap in French.)

In any case, you can see it's much more likely that a refugee from Syria can communicate in either Germany or Sweden than in Brazil, even without knowing German or Swedish.
I haven't personally noticed that, but I attempted a VPN comparison like you did. On one hand, it would would make it harder for neighbors, regulators, and law enforcement to take action against Airbnb hosts, but on the other it would also make it more difficult for guests to hop rentals when they are visiting a city and choose to extend their stay.

Of course, Airbnb has been accused of manipulating data before, when it was noticed that they removed a large number of listings just before handing a dump to the NY attorney general, so I wouldn't put it past them by any means.
There is an error in script.

seed = 'tweer'
obj = generate_spaceship(seed)

Python can't redefine functions as variables. Seed is a function.
Why work harder than necessary? What do you think the advantages of implementing the UI in Objective-C or Swift would be?
I'd guess a human judge would be able to do the math, no?
Bassoon and Miami Bass style hip hop.
Warning: Pay-walled a article.
It all depends on how quickly the climate changes. Populations move and food production changes over time anyway, so a sufficiently gradual change in climate is probably not going to cause anything remotely resembling a catastrophe. I think climate change believers do a disservice when they overcompensate against climate change deniers by making claims about impending doom.
It's such a simple, wonderful game. There's a few key details that I think distill it into a masterpiece.

1. A three year old could learn to play in minutes. Simple to learn, harder to master.

2. Your best runs last the longest, so as a fraction of your overall time played your better ones are the biggest portion. You remember winning a lot of the time.

3. It's absolutely pure animal player vs player. There is no chat, no real teams, no organization, just outplaying one another.

I hope future game makers learn from this.
It should be possible to define that you need e.g. 90% of the shareholders to approve a change to the contract. The 90% could still steal money from the 10%.
I cannot wait until I can do UNIDROIT[0]-compatible contracts in Rust using Parity[1]. building an implementation of UNCITRAL Model Law[2] would be the biggest market disruption I could think of. Imagine being able to do ex aequo et bono (think Judge Judy/small claims rules) arbitration; even with human (flawed/biased) arbitral tribunals, this would be amazing.

ROSS is killing the need for lawyers, and this is the path to killing the need for judges. Software is eating the world, and i couldn't be happier.

0. http://www.unidroit.org/english/principles/contracts/princip...

1. https://ethcore.io/parity.html

2. http://www.uncitral.org/uncitral/en/uncitral_texts/arbitrati...
So some rockets and mortars were smuggled in? Let's ban most civilian use of road and kill the economy. At least that's what the Wikipedia article on the west bank says. It's compared to Apartheid South Africa for good reason.
Music is not "noise pollution". Especially in a city like NYC.
Could someone paste the text somewhere please?
One of the first Macs I ever saw back in the early 90s had a Radius pivot display which could be switched between landscape or portrait.

As it was mostly used for DTP it made loads of sense.
I rather see people invest in harder world problems (battery capacity, co2 sequestration, habitat preservation, humane recycle programs, cancer research ) rather than the next copy of x.
Imagine the response were some terrible person to edit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
In the same vein, as a kind of adjunct to my will, I recently put up a memo on github to be given to the beneficiaries and trustees of my estate, when it should come to that.

https://github.com/nickgieschen/investingguidelines

Feedback welcome.
Right after I commented it was edited to it's current state. Before it said something more inflammatory like bombing and killing people overseas.

I guess I need to start quoting all of my replies to prevent that.
Thanks for your kind words.

You still don't see the point though. I am not simplifying regexes one single bit. The regex syntax is quite simply broken. It is fragmented as hell, and its escaping and context rules stem from a time when all we had was ASCII. This might have been acceptable in the eighties, yes?

These have nothing to do with whether or not underlying regex theory is mathematically deep or not. I am not touching the theory. It's simply the syntax that is broken. You can go exactly as deep with Regex UCR as you can with traditional regexes. It's the same regex. You just don't have to torture yourself while doing it.

We need to move forward from the single-eyed view that everything must be done in text, even if it means wasting countless hours in man hours and loads of cognitive processing. We need that energy for fruitful work. You are currently just advocating bureaucracy.

Your looping example is yet another example of a theoretist making enormous assumptions the context of usage. How do you write a loop in the search/replace field of a text editor or an IDE? How does proneness to bugs matter one single bit if you're just using the tool to avoid a bit of manual work? Which [warning, hypothesis:] seems to be mostly what regexes are actually used anyway.
In every .NET shop I've seen they will take Java experience & vice versa. There just isn't enough difference not too.

Recruiters are pretty uniformly bad but this seems a weird example of it.
> It seems a bit crazy that the processor was running microcode to copy all the pixels to the display

It seems crazy today but not in context. There wasn't video hardware in today's sense. There were either mainframes (with channel controllers) with the terminal doing the "rendering" or minicomputers and microcomputers in which the CPU did everything (which is what I guess it was like before the mainframe era).

You can see this reflected in Unix, and therefore in Linux: unix was developed for the PDP-7 (and later -11), a reimplementation of some of the ideas of Multics, which ran on a mainframe. So C's IO was "user mode" (I seem to remember a funny line in the original version, something like, "You mean you I have to call a function to do IO?") and the kernel had expensive, primitive IO capabilities and involved the CPU in everything. Well, there wasn't any alternative in the smaller PDP line (FWIW PDP-10 were larger machines than the -7 or -11, though only the later models had channel IO).

Memory mapped IO was not uncommon on minicomputers.

> I'm confused about your portrait vs landscape comments, though. The ADM-3A, Hazeltine 2000, VT-52, 3270, as well as Datapoint, Four Phase, Viatron, etc had a horizontal display, not a portrait display.

I'm confused / unclear. Those terminals had more columns than rows, true, but the character positions were rectangular. So the ADM-3 and the Datapoint were rather square, actually, because TV tubes were squarish, not paper-like as I claimed. I think I biased my memory because I used a bunch of hacked terminals like AAA Ambassadors which could cram 80x48 rather than 80x24 and because of the rectangular characters were portrait-ish. Unfortunately it's too late to go back and edit my comment.
Not really. The problem with procedurally generated content is making interesting iterations. Sure, you can have a million space ships just as easy as one, but will anyone care about them? It is a different sort of work, but of equal effort, to "just" modeling the content.
Sounds a wee bit like 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad'. Probably not helpful to someone who understands personal finance reasonably well, and wants to pass on that knowledge to their heirs... but that said, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater—all of these self-help-with-a-little-finance books are better than nothing, since most people (at least in the US) have little or no financial education.
Full interview transcript with alleged DAO attacker
He also kind of shittalked his cofounder. Implicit in the setup of the piece is the fact that his cofounder was essentially clueless about everything.

"I asked my close friend of 20 years how he was doing. Dmitry answered, “Awesome! I love what we’re doing these days!” ... It was obvious that my most sarcastic friend genuinely meant every word. Little did we know then, that Dishero, the company we had co-founded a year and a half ago, would be shut down within the next 72 hours as a direct result of his answer."
Laws that protect affordable housing?

Shouldn't that be considered a band-aids to actually increasing the supply of housing?

I admit the solution, 'building more apartments' is a political problems. Humans are making it far more difficult than it has to be.
Really like the site. But you need to work on html entity decoding :)
As it's a TTL (with 4 74181 MSI chips) wouldn't it be possible to just grok it from the circuit board..?
>I think what is different about the DAO is that it's a corporation that is foreign and unregistered in every jurisdiction.

>Normally a corporation is registered in one or many countries, but how can it be registered in none?

Not exactly without precedent. Example 1: I conduct business individually or as a group without having created a corporation, that is a sole proprietorship and I/the group would be personally liable for the actions of the unregistered business. Example 2: I am lawfully registered as a Delaware C-corp but I am physically located in another State conducting business (without having properly qualified my DE C-Corp to do business in said jurisdiction), I will not receive the corporate protections for the activities I conduct in said State. Example 3: I have a lawful corporation, but I forget to file my annual report and said corp is administratively dissolved by the State, again I would loss corporate protections and be individually liable for the business activities.
>before going around spreading hate and supporting cruel, inhuman dictators.

I'm doing what now?

BTW: Western countries didn't give a fuck about Gaddafi's human rights violations (except from condemning them verbally) until he started to lose power. Then suddenly they decided they should invade Libya.

Of course Libya has a lot of oil reserves, so this is to be expected. Can't bite the hand that keeps your economy running...
Reminds me of "macaroons".

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41892.html "Macaroons: Cookies with Contextual Caveats for Decentralized Authorization in the Cloud"