skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
s/The Republican party/both parties/g

They don't want to be to aggressive so that when their team is in control they can utilize that power.

This is an affliction of both parties and to take a more philosophical view, "power corrupts".

One of the meta-arguments for smaller, less powerful government, is to minimize abuse of power or shift it more locally (state, muni) where the abuse can be more visible if not contained.

Good rule of thumb: Don't advocate for a power or control that you wouldn't be comfortable with in the hands of your political opponent. Unfortunately I think that the Democrats and the Republicans are more comfortable with passing many powers back and forth between them rather then eliminating them.
I don't think you can exclude 'racism' as the main or contributing factor in the achievement gap. African immigrants grow up believing that they are just as intelligent as the rest of the world and are free from the constant insinuation of intellectual inferiority fired at them from the media and other ethnic groups on a daily basis as African Americans are. I could be wrong but I believe this plays a major role.

I don't mean to take it out on you but it suddens me to read such hurtful comments on HN on a constant basis whenever the topic of race comes up, and I finally had to say something. Unfortunately you happened to be on the receiving end of it, and I apologize for it.
Couldn't we combine these options into disable webcam only and webcam plus microphone? I mean, if someone goes through the trouble of disabling a mic, they likely already disable webcams....
Downvoted for sharing my experience. Nice.
So people in concentration camps who werent enjoying it just had a bad attitude?
> that CEO could essentially be removed from his position, as that would not be in the best interest of the company and shareholders.

No. Stuff like this gets posted to HN all the time but that is just not how things work. In a public corporation, management has broad latitude to make decisions about how to run the company and shareholders have essentially no say in it. They can sell the stock if they don't like it.

If you don't believe me, consider that Tim Cook, CEO of one of the most valuable public companies on Earth, said almost exactly the same thing in a shareholder meeting and nobody batted an eye.
I'm a huge fan of Python and I use it for everything (to put it mildly, I've spent weeks translating MATLAB code from other researchers into Python simply because I believe Python is far nicer to work with), but I must say that in my experience SciPy's numerical libraries are still fairly inferior to MATLAB's own (it may have to do with the $2000 price-tag). Even simple numerical root-finding and integration of one-dimensional PDEs is nowhere near the caliber of MATLAB's.

Perhaps the most time-consuming thing I've found is that, to get NumPy/SciPy to work for some scenarios, you can spend your time tinkering around with a bunch of different parameters whereas the same functions work directly out-of-the-box on MATLAB. Rarely have I found the opposite to be the case, and I know this is the reason a few researchers I work with still don't use Python for their internal work.

Perhaps I can cook up a few examples from my projects, just to make a fair comparison.
haha, absolutely. It takes a lot of intelligence to detect non-informativeness. you might enjoy: http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf
I feel like evil institutions don't even bother trying to hide their evil any more.

If you look at a photo of the building, it's pretty much exactly what you would expect a dystopian secret police to operate out of. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street
Worrying about things out of one's control is decidedly unstoic (keeping in mind, in my case, that I live on the other side of the planet).

Google 'Stoicism and Trump' for some interesting other opinions.
I wonder how do they compare to digitalocean?
Glad it was helpful. If you do anything cool with it, please share! I would love to be wrong on it taking off. :)
It's more like an apathy of the people. The question in my mind is how much will it take until the people will start caring enough? This is quite possibly a lot sadly...
Could you elaborate? I'm not sure if I follow
If the vacuum is indeed mutable and degradable as was explored, then it might be possible to do/extract work on/from the vacuum, and thereby be possible to push off of the quantum vacuum and preserve the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum. It is proposed that the tapered RF test article pushes off of quantum vacuum fluctuations, and the thruster generates a volumetric body force and moves in one direction while a wake is established in the quantum vacuum that moves in the other direction.

...well, at least it's better than calculating the theoretical produced thrust by ignoring the axial component of the radiation pressure against the side walls. Which is how tapered resonant cavities like this were supposed to produce thrust when I was in high school.

But, leaving a wake in the vacuum should require that the vacuum exists in some particular reference frame. How's that supposed to work?

Or since the paragraphs immediately before that one discussed the vacuum behaving differently when there's stuff in it, are they just saying that something is being exhausted out the back (which should be visible by some sort of effect on the vacuum?) even if they have no idea what that something might be?
Most likely none at all.

The tl;dr is that some scientists investigate some fringe technologies that violate the laws of physics and based on some preliminary studies it looks like there could be something. However it's still vastly more likely that the studies are flawed than that we'll have to rewrite the laws of physics.
Long before internet porn, this pervy pixelated playground prevailed
In one sense, yes. After every terrorist attack there is always public outcry for intelligence services "to do more."

But, unfortunately the general public rarely thinks about the consequences and trade offs of increased surveillance powers.
A more equitable statement of the jealous husbands puzzle
That reminds me of this stellar Steve Bannon (the new chief strategist in the whitehouse) interview with CNN where he talks about "darkness" as being good and powerful, like "Dick Cheney, Darth Vader, Satan".
I had to check the URL maybe 3 time to make sure I wasn't reading the onion.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/18/politics/steve-bannon-donald-t...
Just search for new startups in your area on google. Send them an email directly saying you want to help them and love what they do. It's that simple...
Using a good mouse and disabling mouse acceleration I can certainly be quite fast, only a fraction of a second slower than using a keyboard shortcut. With mouse acceleration, or with a trackpad, I think I agree with you.

It also depends on the task.

I can select and move a piece of text from one place to another faster with the mouse than with any way of keyboard shortcuts.

For example, using vim shortcuts I have to count the number of lines I need to move the cursor before typing the order and it is always faster for me to just move the mouse cursor than to count the lines.
True enough, but in the common, modern use of the word 'indifference' can be a synonym for 'apathy'...
Twitter might be a good option, either engage with people working in the company or with the community manager.
I am someone who mostly works with dynamic languages. When I find myself "fighting the type system" and having a hard time prototyping, I am specifically trying to figure out what my data types need to be. In some situations I find myself in a situation where in order to define my data type I need to know what the data is, but to know what the data is I need to define it's type. With a dynamic language you generally have an ability to get the data, pretty print it, then crash. Then you can go and define proper data types for the data you're working with.
Possibly. Many people fall for the same old "I did nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide" crap.

Also, the fear of terrorism is pretty effective way of keeping masses in check and tricking them into giving up their freedom.

That's exactly why United States started all those wars in Middle East in the last two decades: without Iraq and Afghanistan, and now Syria there would be no terrorism, and no excuse to pass the "Patriotic Act" and other surveillance laws. Of course, other factors also mattered, but this seems to be most important of all.
Duplicated work is not necessary a sign of inefficiency, though.

My hope would be that they each learned something slightly different in solving the same problem. Eventually, things may converge to a single answer. However, there is no evidence to see that we should demand the convergence at the beginning.

So, the shame here is if folks are not comparing and contrasting the different solutions to the same problem. I confess I am guilty in that I have not read both papers. But I will try to see if it can help me understand.
Transparency is the key to democracy. Surveillance, politics, security... They have to be balanced with transparency. If the founding fathers fell short it was here. The next great democracy will ... Hopefully ... Enshrine transparency.
A) That task force did not cover all health care policy, in fact it was insulated from current policymaking in order to give it freer rein to think innovatively about the future.

B) The issue you mention does not even fall under health care policy, it falls under IP and trade policy, because the point of objection is when foreign nations nullify or nationalize U.S. pharma patents. That is an ongoing fight to this day, BTW.
> you can establish a service account with Owner level access

Never realized I could do this. Is my understanding correct that Google Cloud won't suspend a project as long as there's a service account associated with it?
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/nasas-impossible-space...

"NASA’s impossible space engine, the EMdrive, passes peer review -- But that doesn’t mean it actually works as advertised."

"What it means to be peer-reviewed is that an independent scientist who is an expert in the particular field read and reviewed the work undertaken, and found it to be of sufficient quality to be a valuable contribution to the field. It does not mean that the results and conclusion of the paper are necessarily correct, or even the last word on that particular issue."

In short, the paper wasn't so amateurish to be rejected -- it "looks" acceptable enough to be published. But it doesn't mean "verified." It doesn't mean that its claims are even repeatable by anybody else but the author of the paper -- and until that happens, it's just the claim of him.

The same astrophysicist who wrote the previous article also specifies the criteria that have to be fulfilled:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansiegel/2015/05/04/no-nasa-d...

"what I’d demand at minimum:

- A detection of thrust that scaled with input power: the greater the power, the greater the thrust, in a predictable relationship.

- A thrust that was at least many standard deviations above the measurement error.

- An isolated environment, where atmospheric, gravitational and electromagnetic effects were all removed.

- A reproducible setup and a transparent device design, so that other, independent teams can further test and validate the device/investigate the mechanism.

- And finally, a detailed results report with the submission of an accompanying paper to peer review, and acceptance by the journal in question.

What we’ve got, unfortunately, doesn’t meet most of these criteria at all."
Key quote: "All the classical philosophers that some alt-righters claim to revere put virtue before brute power. The Stoics, in particular, were cosmopolitans – they believed in a universal moral code that transcends race, gender or nationality."

In other words, some people wind up cherry-picking pieces of Stoicism, like equanimity in the face of misfortune, and ignoring others, like cosmopolitanism and considering virtue as the highest/sole good.
Johnny Ive has personally invested 10 minutes in beautifying the SSD, and 100 hours beautifying the PR video pitching the SSD beautification process. So fuck your concerns about replacability and other real world issues. Replay the PR campaign video 10 times over and covet the irreplaceable, soldered, genius of an SSD. Rediscover your inner sheep. Be the sheep Apple meant for you to be.
Edit: I don't think this thread is the place to discuss that.
It's interesting to point that it was at the center of Mr Robot season 2 ! Maybe they knew
Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Dropboxer. My opinions are my own.

I worked on the Desktop Client team. When I left Dropbox, the team was trying to move to a 2 week build cycle. The big focus at Dropbox was to increase the speed of iteration in order to get features and bugfixes in front of user eyes as quickly as possible. One of the compromises there was to cut back on the amount of time and energy the team spent on constructing public changelogs. I wasn't a huge fan of this change, but I understand the argument that it's probably better for the engineers and PMs to work on features and bugs than public documentation for the beta builds.

There was also a faction that wanted to completely get rid of the forum builds. Most of the engineers that I knew were strongly against this, as some really valuable first-touch feedback came out of forum builds.

I'm not going to defend forced automatic updates, though. I lost that argument, at least on Mac/Windows. :(
GCE is a great platform with many competitive advantages including networking, flexible configurations and sustained use discounting. However, I'd argue that using different data points and comparison criteria the opposite hypothesis could be made in favor of EC2 - e.g. burst instance/storage, spot and reserve pricing, local SSD and magnetic storage, and others.
Curious what you mean by "own our own lives again".

Are you planning to run your own email servers (or any other service that Google provides)? Or just switch to another vendor?
As a real life user of AWS I agree with this decision. RIs are not only a headache from a time perspective but we pay a non-trivial amount for a separate tool to manage purchasing them since AWS's built in tools aren't great.

Even with this tool we frequently make planning mistakes due to shifting business priorities or other reasons. Like - oh hay we have to upgrade our database instance but that needs a newer version because only the newer versions support something we need (i.e more than X GB ram). So engineering needs to modify the app to support the newer version.(Oh by the way AWS has a boatload of subtle restrictions like that.)

In this case we were sitting on a RI till EOY and for some reason you can't resell RDS RIs like normal ones (another subtle restriction) so we couldn't even partially recoup costs. Sometimes if you haggle with AWS Enterprise Support you can get them to help out if you're spending the money elsewhere but it's a pain. Good luck if you don't pay for that though (which itself is 15k a year or more).
No book. Build a product from scratch. If you've never built a product from A to Z, including having at least 1-2 users you're communicating with, then you won't land a PM job.
"Conservative Christians apparently think an admirer of Satan and the 1930s is a good guy."

That's a pretty sweeping generalization, wouldn't you say? Just considering how fractured religion is, if nothing else.
Singapore proves that a democratic surveillance state can command very broad social support, provided that the surveillance comes with stability and prosperity.
It is worth remembering that The Federalist Papers were written under pseudonym Publius. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay believed in the importance of anonymity as a tool for public discussion. A surveillance state can destroy this tool as well.
Haven't we been incrementally updating our understanding of physics since.. forever?
I had the impression that the laws of physics are seldom rewritten, more of a fix here, another one there. OTOH, one can hardly say that it violates such laws while we don't know how it works.
Using GPUs for server side rendering of billion+ row working sets
Doesn't it sound more like some sort of fatalistic nihilistic hedonism?

Nothing matters so just do the short term things that bring pleasure, or do long term things, nothing really matters (including the fact that nothing matters).

Eric S. Christianson-Ecclesiastes (Blackwell Bible Commentaries)-Blackwell (2005) academically show how various commentators perceived Ecclesiastes over the last few millenia.

Understandably up to mid 17-18th century most writers/commentators tried to show that Ecclesiastes was being critical of this nihilism / proto existentialism.

However, once you realize that Epilogue (12:9–14) is a tacked on commentary itself, then you are back to nihilism.

How do you progress beyond futily?
Well put. Are you aware of other examples of support for anonymity from that time?
What is the state of Blink getting upstream webkit changes? How much time would this take to land in Chrome development?
> US does not have a democracy

Hate to say this but I agree!

At the moment I have following feelings:

The Snowden moment is only but a point in time when democracy realized it had been subverted. The "act" of takeover happened way earlier than that when the idea of secret ballot was compromised with complete erosion of individual privacy. Naturally modern day people will not realize the looming dangers of a tyranny until the tyranny itself manifests into some form that affects them individually.

Two examples in the world exist where a surveillance state has actually succeeded: Singapore and also in some ways China. It only depends on what percentage of people feel they're prosperous and doing well; which is an odd metric because there is, for example, a significant percentage of people in North Korea who will be happy to attack America at first chance. Despite the economic disaster they've been forced to live into.

> Rampant individualism probably emboldens all this.

It does complicate the matter. But even in a group it'd be very difficult -- nearly impossible -- to take down a surveillance state with sweeping coverage and the ability to surgically dissect and disable strategies of any such a group however large. In my opinion it is very much a feeling of going after a "lost cause" that most people seem to have internalized -- not necessarily a selfish stand which kind of alienates them even more.
Could be huge, it violates our current understanding of physics, which is exciting in itself. But it also could enable fuel free space travel.
To me, it very much looks like a giant telco Central Office... where shifty surveillance stuff has been happening since at least 1885 [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Corporation] Note that The Intercept's article compared it in that manner.
DIARY OF THE LABADI BOY IN RUSSIA
A Muslim “registry” doesn't require a single registration, just data
So, indifference in the sense of non-indulgence, not "not caring".
At this year's DEFCON there was a lecture [1] about the sensors on a Tesla and yes - you can confuse both the ultrasonic and the millimeter wave radar and hide an obstacle or put one that is not there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvasj4qQ7Lk
For those new to this, the emdrive is very likely bogus.

1. It violates Conservation of Momentum. If the phenomena is real, a large number of basic Physics principles would need to be discarded.

2. It was designed based on certain principles. Those principles have been shown to be wrong. But it works anyway because reasons?

3. The results of each experiment are suspiciously close to the limits of measurement.

There are two choices here: (a) experimental error or (b) profound alteration to fundamental physics. Occam's Razor applies. Also, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and this evidence is far from extraordinary.

That this is being published in a journal which does not cover basic physics is not helping.
I disagree, RMS. For the same reason you've argued that open source is better than closed source, so is transparency better than privacy.

What democracy needs isn't privacy. Privacy has always been a false value. Privacy is disappearing- period. No amount of gum-flapping, law-making, or attempts to complicate our lives or burn more CPU cycles and create more latency with more layers of security will change that.

What democracy needs is respect and tolerance. Specifically, we need: 1. Surveillance being broadcast instead of going to monolithic corporations and governments, 2. To learn to tolerate and respect each others' wishes as to what is done with that surveillance.

We're living in a closed system, no different than the International Space Station. No one on the ISS wants privacy. They want sensors covering every God damn millimeter of the space station 24/7, and they want mission control analyzing that data around the clock, so that if there's an issue with atmospheric or hull integrity, they get plenty of warning.

What they want in lieu of privacy is respect from each other to be left alone when they want alone time and to not be judged for what they do with their down time. That's respect, which is very different from privacy.

Hawking is dead wrong about us needing to get off the planet in 1000 years. What we need is to learn how to live in smaller closed systems, such as underground bunkers, undersea habitats, and sealed buildings, because no matter what planet colonists end up on, that's what they're going to have to do. After we destroy our ecosystem here, it's what we're going to have to do to survive this planet keeping the pollutants and excessive weather and heat on the outside.

This is a much more profound psychological challenge than it is a technical one, but we can't make that first step until we come to understand that privacy is not a virtue. Privacy is asymmetric ignorance. It is a cheap hack workaround for what really matters: tolerance and respect.
Hard to say, certain conservation principles have been pretty constant.
Read Ladyboy
Some criticism on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5dqy9b/em_drive_is...
A few years ago I spent a while staring at the building because I had a hotel room on a night floor in the Marquis Times Square and it was right there in front of me. It looks like a typical concrete skyscraper but with no windows. At the time I figured it was a telecoms facility, architected in the local style of Manhattan. Some Googling and reading on the 'pedia confirmed that analysis.

There are similar, if not quite so large, buildings in all large cities. There's one in Chicago. There's even one in Silicon Valley, on the North side of Central, near to Bowers.
Intel took it a step further and shut down the Peak’s software support (including cloud storage), effective by year’s end.

And thus the reason I stick to companies like Garmin for my "wearables". If Garmin up and pulls out of the wearables market, then the market is well and truly screwed and my choice won't make any difference. But a company like Intel or Microsoft can just up and go "well, that hobby project didn't work out. Back to our core business. Oh, and pull the servers down." and you the consumer are left holding the bag.
Asteria's vision of the future of AI
Probably for tone. "Sad to see NASA involved in such shitty research" is needlessly judgmental of authors who, though they had read (and referenced) a paper, did not do quite as well at eliminating potential error sources as that paper.