skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is that? Is it that surprising that two different people (just two!)
stumbled upon the same video, possibly from the same source? And neither of
the submitters seems like a sock puppet account, both having hundreds of karma
points.
Here’s How Countries Like China, Russia Control Online Dissent
The problem with that is that often times claims of brutality occur without a gun ever being pulled. Plus by the time a gun is pulled the situation has already escalated. There is no context to what happened prior to the gun being pulled.
Why not focus on something that can be fixed without need for extra budget, like, say, ending stop and frisk?

You don't need a police body camera to observe that abuse of power.
>department’s approximately 35,800 officers

>a company had been chosen to supply up to 5,000 over the next five years.

>The Police Department says it is committed to outfitting officers with body cameras

So the plan is to equip a whopping 1/7th of officers in the next five years? I must be thinking of a different definition of "commitment" than the one the NYPD seems to use.
I'd argue that some of the people who fall into "too many people with guns" referenced in paragraph 3 are cops...
This measurement is going to be biased somewhat towards zoom lenses because they cover multiple focal lengths in a single lens. In other words you might have a 24mm, a 50mm, and a 70mm prime lens that each get 1/3 of your time but if you were using a 24-70mm lens instead then all of those would count as one lens.

It's by no means entirely inaccurate, zoom lenses are very popular now, and there's still some merit in seeing which lenses are actually on cameras most of the time. Just bear in mind that slicing them in this way is inherently a little biased to certain lenses rather than slicing them based on some other dimension like focal length of the shot.
Default body text sizes on most sites are too big, resulting in systems that make 500 words look like an acceptable size for an article. The only time large body text makes sense is in an advertisement, and advertisements should have no place on the web.
Wow from Kickstart to DARPA funding! How did I miss that?
In law school we were taught that it's preferable to use simple English phrasing--so-called plain language--in legal writing, and to avoid terms of art. But look at what that has wrought in reality--legal instruments that are dozens of page longer than necessary, more often than not with dictionaries prepended. They're more inscrutable than ever, and arguably more difficult to approach for both layman and jurist.

Archaic legal writing relied heavily on terms of art. Terms of art, IMHO, provided many benefits, including 1) concision, 2) consistency, and 3) signaling. Concision because terms of art are a way to reference more complex concepts that you don't need to spell out. Consistency because widespread use of terms of art meant that there was only one way to say something; if you used other phrasing it was presumed you meant something different than what was meant by a related term of art. And signaling because using a term of art made it clear and obvious you were referring to some concrete legal concept, even if the reader wasn't familiar with it.

Notably the shift to "plain language" legal writing did not in the least change expectations in the legal community regarding the consistency and signaling aspects of legal language. Today, instead of using terms of art, lawyers literally copy+paste whole blocks of long-winded clauses.

IMO, all three of those aspects--concision, consistency, and signaling--should likewise be emphasized in an encyclopedic text, _especially_ in the context of hyperlinked text.

Different contexts require using language differently. You wouldn't criticize a musician for using a different style of prose, right? It's not just the medium that dictates how we phrase things, but the context and function of the communication.
Something I said before on a related topic:

> It is truly fascinating (and of course, terrifying) to watch governments expect, demand and enforce complete transparency and blind trust from the people, while providing absolutely none of either.

The constant flow of such news only makes this feel truer by the day. It blows my mind that so many of the people who defend these actions are the same people who will take any opportunity to disparage other "non-democratic" countries, while gloating about their supposedly unique freedom. The hypocrisy and the superiority complex are palpable.
Messenger has a billion dau. What are you talking about?
Do you normally use your friends' wifi? I do that when it's family, but generally not with my friends (don't do LAN parties anymore).

With LTE, I don't need wifi.
I started combining {} with zt zz zb. I feel like it mimics physical handling of a scroll. This requires some empty lines though. In case I work with dense text, I usually switch to H/M/L also (combined with zt zz zb).

I have to mention that for navigation purposes, f/F is only useful with ;, otherwise you could find yourself looking through the line for a suitable character which slows you down. With ; it's enough to pick a "rare" character on the line which is near to/in the desired object.

Next to c2f, ci" (and ci) etc) could be really useful when you end up being in the middle of a string literal and just want to change the whole thing. Or in the middle of an expression in parens - http://fuckyeahvim.tumblr.com/image/122373002741
Basically cardboard made out of metal?
4100 hours in about ten months (according to the PDF). Did you really put in 100 hour work weeks?
Google Introduces the Pixel, Its Own Smartphone
Criminal justice gags are usually hours to days depending on the case.

The longer ones are usually to protect the arrestee if they are being put into protective custody / witness protection or are released as an informant.

Since this is national security related who knows, I don't even know if these cases have been brought up to the supreme court before.
I wonder if software could assist progress here.

Anyone know if tools exist for modeling chemical behavior on a level that would be useful for simulating the assembly of 'machines' like in the article?

I see these researchers are jumping up a level of abstraction, thinking in terms of new primitives (e.g. 'rotaxanes')—maybe the software could begin its modeling in terms of rules obeyed by these new primitives (rather than starting from quantum mechanics or whatever).

Edit: added italics.
"Hitting Escape is usually unnecessary; Ctrl+[ is a lot closer, and more comfortable."

I agree with a lot of the things in this article, but wow, I could not possibly disagree with this quote more. Ctrl+[ is WAY more uncomfortable than using the Escape key.

Granted, I have many years of vim usage that have made hitting Escape a habit, and that probably plays a big part in it, but Ctrl+[ is downright painful for me (and yes, I sat and tried it for a while in vim to see what it would be like).

I can get from the home row to Escape and back with very little effort, though I understand that is not the case for many people. Perhaps it is due to the fact that I use my ring finger to hit Escape rather than my pinky (which would be a lot more work, I think).
> If interfacing with a driver is so hard, how will interfacing with
> hardware be easier?

It really depends. The key is to identify the proper ways to make the abstraction as safe as possible. This is a fairly new skill, in a new language. Said post was good, and the author has been using Rust for a long time, but one person failing to do so doesn't mean that it's impossible.

I'm still a noob at this kind of thing myself, but I recently wrote a (tiny) driver for a memory-mapped device. My first iteration had tons of unsafe code. My second iteration had three lines of unsafe code. My latest iteration has zero unsafe code, though you do need one call to an unsafe function outside of it in order to construct it. (to create a slice from the raw memory location that's mapped.)

That is, of course, pretty much the simplest possible case. But I believe the pattern will hold, over time, as people learn how to do it.

> Even rust can't take those thrones away from C.

Rust is faster than C on some microbenchmarks. We'll see what the future holds.
>This is an incredible time to be alive....

Yea? Why, because we have almost completely fucked up our home planet and will have to abandon it in few years. And we are happy, because we can see the associated fireworks?

Don't get me wrong. I like the progress with the space stuff. But I just don't like the idea just because of that everything else is sunshine and rainbows...It is not. And it is not really a great time to be alive. It is an extremely boring time to be alive. Imagine that you were living in a time period when electricity was invented. When radio waves were invented. Can you imagine how people felt when they saw the first cinema? When they heard voices that came across the town? When they saw the first locomotive? When they saw the first airplane? Imagine that you were living in a time when all the great people that we learned about in the history classes were alive.

Those were incredible times to be alive...

How many great people, how many great writers, how many great singers and poets of the current times do you imagine students after fifty years will be learning? Justin Beiber and Hilariy Clinton? How many great inventions of our times will they read with excitement? Elon Musks Hyper loop?

No. I really don't think so. So yea. We are living in incredibly boring times....

EDIT: This comment is not relavant anymore since the parent comment has been edited to include "time to be alive for space fans.."...
I don't know if you're using the accounting terminology correctly here. Their GAAP costs are higher than revenue, but a very large percentage of that is compensation, and almost all of that compensation is stock grants. If the stock were to go to zero, the company would immediately be profitable, even if everything else stays the same.
Here's the two, best books on it that I know of that are available for free:

http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/cpdt.pdf

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/index.html

Dependent-types are a more lightweight formal method. They're pretty useful as Chlipala et al showed in many developments. IDRIS and ATS languages use them for systems. Software Foundations is about the full thing.

Tried to find you an easy intro. Harder than I thought. However, this PowerPoint is an excellent intro to formal specifications in terms of what they are, why you want them, and many examples.

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszrq/files/1FSPintroduction.ppt

Once you see that, it becomes obvious that proving implementation matches such specs is beneficial. Took an hour to find an intro to that which was worthwhile and easy to digest. Here's one:

http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/~aeha/Railway/index/TSnotat.pdf

Anyone following along that wants a list of tools, esp open-source, should check out Wheeler's reference on high-assurance FLOSS:

http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/high-assurance-floss.html
All competition and politics aside, isn't this what Musk was ultimately trying to achieve? Turning this into a race to be the first one to put humans on Mars ultimately means we're jumpstarting the idea of a multi planetary species, even if it's done for the sake of competition.
I think this is as good an explanation today as it was in 1970. You are the nun in this story.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
Actually! We do offer a web interface for this exact thing. Many of our customers are small businesses who don't have developers to integrate the API, so we built a dashboard for them to compare shipping prices, print labels, and track shipments. (You can also use it even if you're not a business)

You can see a small gif of it working under "How you make money" in the interview. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*GDC26ygGdl49WKsb9Z...
Why do you think it's ok to spy on your users on a school network?
Because we have massive police abuse right there in the open, and nothing is done about it. And not for lack of evidence!

If the city won't deal with this problem, what makes anyone think that of all things, cameras will remove any roadblocks?

Without serious interest in tackling police abuse, cameras are a feel-good placebo.

Eric Garner was killed on video. Exactly what has been done about that? Nothing and nothing?
Security patches prior to N also required recompiling all apps, which takes more than "a couple minutes" for nearly everyone. This, along with not being able to adequately control when & how updates are downloaded & installed, has always been a major pain point. Imho, the new method is a huge improvement in both user friendliness and stability/safety.
This is a huge problem for Samsung. Individual recalls don't usually damage companies permanently; people understand that sometimes shit happens, and they quickly forget about it. But two in a row, when the replacements were supposed to be safe, is the kind of thing that etches itself much more deeply into public consciousness. Popular culture is now going to be associating "Samsung phone" with "time bomb" for a long time to come.
Isn't one of the main benefits of metric the ability to quick convert between the various scales? Converting between say 1.4m to mm is a lot easier than 4.5ft to inches. Or answering questions like how many square metres are in 5.2 hectares (vs square feet in acres). Arbitrary measurements of eggs and doughnuts (don't forget gallons) are not great examples - no one buys them for that precise amount, they buy them because that is what they are available in.

I've never understood why some Americans are so stubborn about the metric system. The rest of the world has essentially made the switch for various reasons but arguably the most advanced nation on earth can't?
I've had a very similar instance.

USPS ShipNClick, for example, has "fraud detection" that freezes all accounts you've ever logged into if it detects that you've created multiple accounts and switched between them. And worse, it's a silent detection, so after you've entered all the details for your shipping label(s), it gives a "Your payment method was declined" error. No warnings or anything, just a vague error message.

When you call USPS online support, they're aware of the issue but they can't unfreeze accounts without "escalating" the issue. You get a callback in a few days saying that your account was "cleared".
If someone objectively screwed up a published study, there's no room for feelings or social consideration. People might be wasting their precious time and money pursuing impossible goals based on the incorrect study.

Let's say someone finds a mistake in a math paper. Do they politely ask the author to fix it? What happens if the author ignores them? The scientific community doesn't have time to coddle and pursue every mistaken author. Everyone makes mistakes, and the scientific community knows that, but those mistakes need to be brought into then open, not (maybe) resolved behind closed doors.
Hah! You thought you would get us with that one.:-) Here is the link to the Erlang OTP developed at Uppsala University for Epiphany.

https://github.com/margnus1/otp
They went surprisingly silent after the KS boards. I falsely assumed they left the business or went employee. Delightful surprised they found ways to keep searching.
Some really interesting points in her negative review of Nate Silver's book:

"In baseball, a team can’t create bad or misleading data to game the models of other teams in order to get an edge. But in the financial markets, parties to a model can and do. ...Silver gives four examples what he considers to be failed models at the end of his first chapter, all related to economics and finance. But each example is actually a success (for the insiders) if you look at a slightly larger picture and understand the incentives inside the system. ...Silver confuses cause and effect. We didn’t have a financial crisis because of a bad model or a few bad models. We had bad models because of a corrupt and criminally fraudulent financial system.

...Silver has an unswerving assumption, which he repeats several times, that the only goal of a modeler is to produce an accurate model."

Her other examples are things like pharmaceuticals research.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/cathy-oneil-why-nate-...
Depending on the application this may be a reasonable trade-off.
It reads very heavy on the tinfoil-hattery. Particularly with things like Google Home's mute button. The single advertised feature of the device is that it's always listening and the author is somehow shocked or confused by the fact that you have to push a button to have it not listen? So much so that they thought it was worth cramming in some stupid sounding snide remark about "true intentions"? That tone immediately undermines the entire rest of the piece.
One thing that I think is lost in a lot of the comments here is that, to a large extent, privacy is experienced, not factual. That is, in many cases, the breach of privacy is the act of mentioning something that should be private, not whether or not the system (or the person) knows that thing. This is something we tend to intuitively understand in our human relationships, but one that somehow seems to be forgotten in the design of these systems (or, at least, the conversations about them). We need good ways to tell the Google Assistant that something is private (or for it to figure it out for itself) -- even if it still possesses the underlying data.

(There are, of course, situations in which the actual existence or not of specific data is what matters, but I think those are less relevant to the success of something like Google Assistant than the perception of privacy -- and that perception is important, regardless of the underlying data.)
Amusingly I left SFDC to join Twitter, and in my exit interview the VP of the group I worked in suggested to me that Salesforce might buy Twitter and I'd come back that way. At the time the proposition was absurd - Twitter was valued at $3B and clearly had a lot of growth ahead of it. And now here we are!
Who exactly are you trying to influence?
I will say that not all of those 35,800 are patrol officers, though I share your sentiment about the NYPD's level of commitment.
Would Americans be more or less secure in that world?

On account of (a) unjust governments being more likely to abuse power than just ones, (b) unjust governments are more dangerous than unjust actors and (c) the belief that just governments are plausible, I would say "more".

If you live under an unjust government, their curtailed power is a plus. If you live under a just government, your threat profile from unjust governments is decreased. The threat from unjust actors may increase, but that is a fair trade-off per (b).
No, this is not nearly strong enough for that. 1 square foot at 1 ATM ~= 1 ton of weight, in the video she was crushing a square in of this stuff between her fingers with relative ease.
You need think of it as aggregate memory, not as per core memory to use if effectively. Are you aware of a chip with more than 64MB of on chip RAM?
You can just tell it to stop. It's not hard.
Boeing's SLS rocket (which is, at its best, 1/4th the power of SpaceX's ITS) depends on NASA to spend ~$60 billion before it could get half a dozen people to Mars in the late 2030s. Updates to the Delta IV heavy could've gotten there sooner and for ~$10 billion, but Boeing is not able/willing to spend its own money to do it; it wants to use government money to get there, and the government wasn't interested in their existing hardware. It's a shame, really. [0]

From [0]: "Senator Orrin Hatch made sure the new rocket used solid boosters, manufactured in his state. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby insisted that Marshall Space Flight Center design and test the rocket. Florida Senator Bill Nelson brought home billions of dollars to Kennedy Space Center to “modernize” its launch facilities."

Yuck.

ITS, on the other hand, is claimed to cost ~$10 billion, and begin putting people on Mars (in lots larger than half a dozen, mind you) sometime in the 2020s. Yeah, it's ambitious. They've missed other ambitious deadlines.

I personally feel, subjectively of course, that SpaceX is more ambitious and "hungry" to go to Mars than Boeing is. But that's just my gut feeling, and I have no data to back that feeling up.

[0]: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/how-i-learned-to-stop...
I think there is some nuance here; not all screw ups are equal, nor are all ways of correcting mistakes equal.
> Green’s Note 7 is in the hands of the Louisville Fire Department’s arson unit for investigation. He has already replaced it with an iPhone 7.
Well, I mean, you can do anything at zombocom. The only limit is yourself.
I know someone who has his (common) first name @gmail.com as he was an early employee on Gmail, and he regularly gets grandparents guessing their grandson's name as the correct e-mail address. He told me this happens several times a day.
Banks don't like spending money. And their IT infrastructre tends to be awful.
> Hypothetically speaking, allowing those users to opt out would mean Twitter makes $0.20/month from the remaining users, rather than $0.55/month. Will enough users buy a premium subscription to make up that loss? I don't see the evidence that they would.

It can't work worse than operating at a loss until they go out of business, which is Twitter's current trajectory.
Thank you, that's a good point, actually. Keeping things lean can be quite tedious and tricky in some cases.

The first thing I had in mind was frameworks like PhoneGap, Exponent and the likes. I wonder if these have a big impact on app size.

But it's certainly true that it's not always extra stuff to slap on that makes things bloated. Could just as well be the stuff you don't go out of your way to keep out.
Developed in the same sense horned animals developed horns.

Inevitable name for an ancient concept of attachment.
That's the thing though. I reject the notion that you ever actually make a choice. I would posit that 100% of the actions you take are simply the deterministic reactions when the current world state is filtered through your brain. Then, after the fact, your brain gets busy inventing a reason that you took a particular action and calls it a "choice" when really you were just going to do what you were going to do anyway.

"I ordered this burger because I was hungry and it tastes good" vs "I ordered this burger because Google was able to successfully predict that I would be receptive to having burgers, or the idea of burgers, placed in my environment"
Theoretically, no, not this particular substance.

But anyway, the reason people are fascinated with the idea is that vacuum is a renewable and abundant resource. Heck, space is almost completely full of it.

All of the lighter-than-air gases I'm aware of have downsides, like hydrogen's permeability and flammability, or helium's rarity and price.
This seems a bit analogous to the treatment of attorney-client privilege (at least in the US.) If I have a discussion with my attorney in my house, or in my attorney's office, with no one else there, the conversation is generally privileged. If I have that conversation in the presence of a third party, the conversation is no longer privileged. So, if I'm in someone else's house, I may have implicitly consented to the fact that I don't control the environment and can no longer assume the same level of privacy.

(IANAL, YMMV, etc.)
Elected officials primarily, although I'd take a long hard look at the bureaucratic "lifers" as well.
> Much like a jewish person in Poland in the 1940's

or a Japanese in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

We tend to think that the nazi's were crazy out-there, but we weren't too far off not that long ago, and we can get back there pretty quickly.