skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Brazil it worked out in a similar fashion: poor people would seek for aluminum cans inside garbage and then sell it for recycling companies. So it was a cheap source of aluminum, companies would get enough profit to continue in business, and some people made a living out of it.

After some while, giving more marketing about "going green" and calculating that money was being throw at the garbage, some stores like restaurants and supermarkets began to collect those aluminum cans. Profit for then, recycling still being profitable to companies, poor people lost this income they have fomented.
>The transition from 'a grain' to 'a pile' to 'a heap' where those terms are actually useful is normally clear in the context of whatever problem we're trying to solve.

That's the position of pragmatist philosophers, the existential-phenomenologists and the analytic philosophers influenced by the later Wittgenstein.

In Western philosophy, there are two competing ideas about the metaphysical status of basic concepts. According to one, as in Platonism, dualism, and materialism, concepts concerning the real world are perfect, like mathematical ideas. In the other view, concepts are the products of the great complexities of human living, and so are inherently vague, complex, and contextual. In the last century or so, I would say the later idea has been winning out, though many philosphers still hold the former one.
The only assumption that I made was that when erichocean said something that began with a social buzzword and ended parroting the theory that reflects the definition of that social buzzword, that he was referring to the actual theory defined as "effective altruism":

> effective altruism indicates I should stay in tech and give money to helping fisherman transition to seaweed farming

Offtopic, but since when did contextual assumption become something people weren't supposed to do?
The Argument Against: On fake news (from 1996)
>I'm not sure about cheap labor

Cheap labor is possibly relevant. Salaries and the cost of living are dramatically lower in Malaysia so apparently large numbers of Malaysians work in Singapore, often illegally, while essentially commuting from Malaysia.

Having a large pool of cheap possibly undocumented labor would certainly seem to make getting repetitive unskilled tasks done easier and cheaper.
This mentality can be a little dangerous. You're training yourself to cater to your moods. This can result in important but not urgent tasks that you're never really in the mood to do never getting done. Or, if it's a task that has to be done, a lot of resistance because you're used to waiting for motivation to kick in.

For me, a better approach has been to consciously force myself to do things I don't feel like doing. I push through low energy, distractions, or boredom and just get it done.

You might expect this to lead to sub-optimal performance or suffering through unenjoyable tasks. Sometimes it does, but in my experience, a more common result is the good feeling of having pushed through a barrier and found a second, or third wind.
Yes, Nokia's Symbian (my first smartphone the 5530, little brother to the 5800) and Maemo OS (N900!) were great, and I somewhat miss that era.
As someone with a PhD in CS and working at one of the 'Big 4', I would like to disagree with you!

I am still afraid of calculus..

The type of math you need for CS should not be too difficult after you get some intuition in programming.

In combinatorics, for example, you just need a clear head to think through the cases, just as you would do when writing a program.
Can you provide research that shows upside from hiring diverse candidates for the business (aside from benefitting the actual diversity hires)?

Are there examples of business staffed by diverse staff that outperform boring white/asian male companies?
I'm working on a project with this purpose:

http://hackertribe.io

(It's still work in progress, launching soon)

Here's my vision for the ultimate platform:

- Discovery system 1 is based on upvotes, like reddit.

- Discovery system 2 is based on reposts, and works like twitter.

- Subscription functionality works like RSS. You can follow people and see their posts in a reverse-chronilogical order on your front page.

- Publishing tools work like on Medium - beautiful editor, tags, publications.

- This platform is open source and decentralized. Anyone can easily export their data and spin up their own instance, which will be automatically plugged into the network(that functions like GNU Social).

- It has an API that enables developers to do everything they wanted to do with twitter API.

- The community instance that I'm going to launch will have strict moderation, like Hacker News, that will optimize for the quality of the discussion. But anyone can launch their own instance, and that will enable the absolute freedom of speech.

- I am going to monetize it by offering easy and effortless hosting, the way Discourse does. That will take care of the development and server costs, while keeping the platform ad-free.

I think this sort of system would be perfect, and the only thing required to build it was the right decentralization protocol, which has appeared recently - ActivityPub.

At the moment I have implemented all the functionality aside from the most challenging part - decentralization with AvtivityPub, which I am still figuring out.

If you are interested in testing out this platform and would like to give me some feedback and shape it's development - send me a message(raymestalez@gmail.com), and I will invite you to the beta version.

If you would like to contribute to it's development - you can find the code over here:

https://github.com/raymestalez/nexus

(I am currently cleaning up the backend code, and rewriting the frontend in React).
Nothing other than my monitor keyboard and mouse.

I set a goal of cleaning off my desk every night before I stop working.
There seems to be a lot of thoughtful, educated comments here, while all I'm thinking is: spontaneously combusting cows #southpark
One thing to add (and it's pathetic that it's even needed): headphone jack (yes/no) and location (top/bottom).

And power/USB jack location.

Nobody should be voting with his money for a phone that insults consumers by omitting a headphone jack, but sadly some do. And the headphone jack and power port should be on the bottom, so you can plop the phone into a dock or cradle and charge it and get audio without wires messing up your car.
Please don't post only snarky comments. We ask that HN users comment civilly and substantively or not at all.
The problem with talking about the science of global warming is that there is no scientific proof for global warming. For general and special relativity you can explain time dilation, gravity waves, or gravitational lensing to a layman and so long as they trust the experiments carried out to verify those findings it conclusively proves the theory to them.

There are no such proven predictions made by modern politically funded climate science. All they have are computer models which are constantly being disputed for being fudged to produce any result you want, and cannot even begin to predict past climate phenomena, let alone future ones. So to attack people you see as misinformed as 'not discussing the science' doesn't make a lot of sense. Global warming stops being a scientific issue when you start demanding forced government action. Especially action that would cripple the world economy and send humanity back to the stone age if it were taken enthusiastically.
We live in the future.

This is amazing and I hope the tests go well so they can introduce genetically modified mosquitoes everywhere.

Mosquitoes add no value to the world, and the sooner we can make them extinct the better we will all be.

You can't measure or quantify suffering, but if you could I'm guessing that mosquitoes would be responsible for the lion share of it across the globe.
Odd how that isn't an argument.
Good article, but a quarter page nag screen (on mobile) I can not dismiss is pretty annoying and I nearly gave up reading.
I think a critical point to consider is that an "industry" is often not as monolithic as it may first seem. In my experience, people with similar interests in statistics / machine learning, and psychology / neuroscience regularly rename old terms (sometimes without even realizing there's an "old term" to rename).

Once someone has put language out there, and is benefitting from brand appeal, they're not always motivated to rename everything, especially if no one pointed out the old term until long after their work was out there. Once people have invested time in learning the new terms, they might not be strongly motivated to remap them onto old terms.
The sociological landscape is irrelevant and employers pandering to liberal nitwits is the height of stupidity.

Frankly I think affirmative action is disgusting and it devalues us all.

Progressive extremism truly is a cancer upon the tech industry (and humanity as a whole) and I hope the Western world gets its collective head out of its behind, no other section of the world buys into this garbage and for good reason -- it's empty gestures that serve only to stave off the wrath of violent SJWs that seek to pervert society with their backwards ideals.

It's a policy borne of fear, fear of being smeared on Twitter and other leftist propaganda outlets. There is no other rationale.
"Nuclear power isn't 100% harmless" is a bad argument here, given the number of people that due from coal mining and processing and coal-originated externalities on an annual basis.

The number of deaths (including future cancer cases) due to Fukushima is estimated to be in the hundreds on the high end. Chernobyl is expected to have killed around 4,000 after cancer takes its toll. That's a miniscule drop in the bucket compared to the number of deaths directly and indirectly attributable to coal power.
But if it's a 2 lane road (4 total), then you'll have 4 feet for the bike lane.
Because nuclear leaves toxic waste that lasts over 10000 years in the best case; and because wind, hydro, solar, and tidal are better alternatives in most cases.
You don't have contact info on your profile, re: study buddy.
If that was really valued, then you wouldn't have your day cut up with meetings working in an open office either.
Don't be so sure that its from something you heard and imagined that you later incorrectly recalled as a memory. You can also have retroactive interference, which is when a real memory gets contaminated by events that happened later.

So it's possible you do have a "real" memory of your mom telling your father she was pregnant, but that your brain substituted details from later.

Retroactive interference is a very established phenomenon. My guess is a lot of things like what you described are real memories, and people assume they're imagined events recast as memories because they simply don't believe in early memories. I doubt your parents were discussing details like that later, but you'll probably never really know.
The last step is to run sphinx-build, and that is what uses conf.py.

Before that, the following is done:

- Compile the code/module

- Run the example code capturing various pieces of output, putting the final result into a generated .rst file

- Generating more .rst files from various C file sources

- Some additional doc updates (eg inserting some version related info, updating help sections with current --help information for cli tools). These are up to date in git, so rtd wouldn't need to run them, but I do for each release
On Google and Oxford's cases, I don't think it is common to broadcast among your colleagues in different groups your proposed ideas before you actually go into it. So I think it may happen even in the same company/university.

For the meta-learning papers, you may have interests to read the related work part of the RL^2 paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.02779.pdf.

Quoted as follows,

"Our work draws inspiration from a particular line of work (Younger et al.,
2001; Santoro et al., 2016; Vinyals et al., 2016), which formulates meta-learning as an optimization
problem, and can thus be optimized end-to-end via gradient descent."

"Another line of work (Hochreiter et al., 2001;
Younger et al., 2001; Andrychowicz et al., 2016; Li & Malik, 2016) studies meta-learning over the
optimization process. There, the meta-learner makes explicit updates to a parametrized model."

Inspired by the same works, apply the meta learning idea into RL problems, meet the ICLR deadline together. Still make sense right?
Ransomware victims able to thwart attacks
A year or so ago I read "The World Beyond Your Head"[0] which also tackles the questions "Where do we direct our attention and why?" Ever since then I've become acutely aware of where I choose to focus my concentration and why.

It's exceedingly difficult to take charge of one's moment-to-moment experience of the world, but in those rare instances when I achieve it it's very rewarding.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374535914
Wow, the trump train reached HN.

Note to myself: Do not engage in political or economic discussions on HN. It is not a save space and one should not expect scientific maturity from its readers.
$1,000/hour is over $2 million/year for a 40 hour work week. Google tells me that a GP makes about $200,000/year here in Minnesota.
Google's smart contact lenses won't be available soon
I think you might have just grown up. And also became less arrogant.
As far as I can remember, this being 3.5 years (and several projects) ago, I had a lot of problems putting things in lists, because some list functions seemed to be cavalier about turning things into strings, and I'd end up with my carefully-constructed list of Tcl objects turning into a list of strings that were all "" :(

The obvious thing to do is just turn an object into a parseable string. So if you have a Texture object, which is a struct Texture at address 0x12345678, you might let this become a string, "(Texture * )0x12345678" (or similar). And then if you're expecting a Texture object you can check for not just a TclObj struct of the appropriate type, but also a string of the right format. I'm sure I found this unworkable, though, my recollection being that Tcl would call the free callback on the original object after turning it into a string, and so you'd quite possibly end up with a string representation of a dead object... but now that I say that out loud, it sounds super insane.

So maybe I'm recalling rightly. And then Tcl is still insane, and I stand by everything I said. It happens.

Or maybe I'm wrong... and that's good! Because I otherwise really did prefer it to Lua. I know exactly why Lua's C API is the way it is, but that doesn't make it any less horrid. And Tcl's shell-style syntax is way better for interactive use.
Maemo was simple genius. Way better than anything even today.
Ah, thanks, you can email me: kaspar.emanuel@gmail.com.
I used to try this method, but it's never worked for me. My productivity is so incredibly low when I'm trying to work on something I don't want to do that it's just a big waste of time.

If it's something actually important I'll do it eventually. If it's something I truly dread, I might do it at the last possible moment, but I'll do it.
Probably faked by the same people that faked the moon landing, I suppose?
Doctors have malpractice insurance, paid for by their employers. Also, from what I've read, the malpractice insurance companies are largely doctor-owned.
My first phone was Nokia 1100.

The first time I used internet was in Nokia 3100 (which I love the most).

And what helped me learn programming was Nokia N70 (which I still own). I still remember the (g)olden days of pys60. :)
Did I say that? No.

Maybe you should check your cold war mindset whereby pointing out a limitation of the free market necessarily gets a response about the USSR. As though that were literally the only possible alternative.

To recap:

ori_b: How to disincentivize fossil fuel use? [a current policy goal]

briandear: The free market! All we need is magical energy tech that doesn't exist yet and makes oil obsolete overnight, haha.

me: The free market actually doesn't solve the externality problem.

you: The USSR wasn't perfect either!
"On the wrong side of history" is a phase that draws from the ideas of Carl Marx, and is very popular among Marxists. It is an emotional argument that means to appeal to the universal human desire to be accepted by others. Be very careful when you see people use that phrase to make that point. If Hitler had won, would that have put the free people of Europe on the 'wrong side of history'? It is a logical fallacy.

I have seen no evidence that China invented climate change. I chalk that up to Trump's propensity for hyperbole, but who first came up with it is irrelevant to what we do about it now. Also a fake-certificate is about the easiest thing to fabricate.
Giant rats could help fight wildlife smuggling in Africa
Mathematically I don't know if it is possible to eliminate all returns from ad spend market wide. Then again, negative interest rates should have been impossible.

Every trend I see points to greater ad reach. AR + automated transportation means the web expands from your phone to your surrounding. Regulatory intervention could just firewall behavioral targeting and e-commerce in to existing platforms, making Google, Facebook, and Amazon far more powerful.
Thanks to technology, this solo act can perform live
Stock is centralized, but not in that way.

There is no single ordering of transactions. Exchanges (which are distinct entities, i.e. decentralized) are legally required to report their trades, but the order actually happens at independent places.

What is centralized is the record of ownership of the shares. All publicly tradable shares in the US are in a technical sense owned by Cede & Co., a partnership related to the DTCC. When shares change hands, all that happens is an entry in the database at the DTC.

Since we're talking about the blockchain, it's interesting to know how this system is secured. The mechanism is that both parties report the expected transactions to DTCC, which ensures they match before the money changes hands. The trade that happens during market hours is only the agreement to trade, and the actual delivery happens three days later.
GCP pricing is far simpler than AWS - just visit any of the product pages to see the unit costs.

And they have a calculator: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/

If you're talking about Compute Engine utilization for billing discounts, they just mean how long you have it running continuously over the course of a month.
Can you elaborate on which types of math you believe one needs for CS?
Do you think a time zone will be an issue?

What else scares you?
> To me, it sounds like he doesn't like or know much about the algebraic side of math, and resents how much it dominates in math today.

You do realize who you are talking about here right?
Interesting Observation from Testing Conversational UI in Rural India
I think universal healthcare would definitely improve the system. So in the US, healthy, employed by big corporation people, pay about $17k / year for family healthcare. Then, when they turn 65, they join medicare and the insurance companies laugh bc they received premiums for 40 years and then when people need services, they don't pay.

Imagine if medicare started receiving payment at age 20. By the time someone turned 60 the return on investment / interest would more than pay for their care. Insurance companies don't want the average american to know that. I think that either 1) offer medicare plan for anyone, regardless of age and discount based upon years of contributions or 2) make insurance companies allow individuals to pay medicare rates once they turn 65 if they've participated for, let's say, 15 years.

I'm almost 50 and have used less than $400/year since 21. Yet, I pay $4400 for a $6000/deductible plan. So I've given my insurance companyn $100k at least in my lifetime. But when I turn 65, all my care will be covered by medicare. Trust me, I know what symptoms to say and may have multiple bad symptoms from age 62-64 and undergo lots of tests, instead of medicare paying for preventive tests.

The system is broken, but so is politics, so nothing will change. Even Trump ran under the pretense of allowing us to buy pharmaceuticals overseas, allow purchase of insurance plans across state lines, make hospital costs transparent ---> all that would lower costs, but apparently, they won't happen.. Just like with the democrats. The US healthcare system is controlled by the pharmaceuticals, suppliers, and hospitals and nothing soon, other than a Bernie Sanders, will change it. The 3 competing hospitals in my area, serving less than 1million people have a CEO cost of more than $7 million! So across the US, I would imagine that total CEO cost is in the billions.

I don't have solutions, only depressing facts.........
NSA employees, this is your chance to shine!
There is currently a bias of preferring men over women. I think a policy like this can help you be more conscious about the candidates' actual qualification.

Over-representation of a minority race isn't an issue. The goal isn't to have a workforce that matches racial distribution of the whole country; it is to have more diversity.
Good post on how to hire somebody. I'm more interested in an experience on how it was. If you have a team which works for you several months you see some challenges. Which are they?
Nor is reading (or writing) blog posts. Or comments.
It depends on the quality of the water. Where I live there's too much chlorine in it (nothing harmful but I brew beer so I need good water) and a 30$ brita filter seals the deal. In places with really shitty water distillation is a good place to start.
There's a new Netflix Original called The Crown, and a few episodes in the London Fog of 1952 is a prominent plot point (no spoilers beyond that, though if you're a history buff it shouldn't be much of a spoiler anyway). Made me think considerably about how far we've come in terms of environmental regulations and our understanding of weather patterns.

I had honestly completely forgotten this even happened until that episode (though it gets a few of the finer details wrong, but nothing catastrophic.)
But truth is inherently constructive.

What I am saying, is that software with political implications, can have far greater effects than software which directly controls physical objects. Not sure how this is illogical, but open to hearing views.

It would be nice if downvoters explained their view, in addition to downvoting.
The same old thing peope talk about thousands of time. This is just a marketing article to promote the $59 seminar: https://www.bewaymoreproductive.com
"Renewable energy is great, but its not replacing fossil fuels this century"

That got me thinking about how quickly primary energy sources can change (how quickly was whale oil replaced?), or how quickly industries can change (how quickly did industry change in response to the Clean Air Act of 1970?).

A century is a long time. What are you basing your statement on?

Renewables have already supplanted coal:

http://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2016/october/iea-raises-its...

China is leading in increases of renewable energy:

https://edgylabs.com/2016/11/10/renewable-energy-growth-iea-...

Granted, this isn't the entire picture. If I had information pro or con this, I'd provide it. Though renewables overtaking one of the fossil fuel sources is pretty significant, as is one of the largest populations leading growth in renewable use. If you have information supporting the idea that renewables won't be over at least, say, 60% of global energy production by the end of 2099, please share. I'm flexible on the 60% as well. What number would you consider "replacement"?
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