skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was arguing neither for nor against it.

My original conclusion wasn't that it didn't work, it was that the amount of actual research done was surprisingly small, and so that we didn't actually know what was being proclaimed as a done deal.

It turns out I was wrong, and that there has been more research than I thought.
In Australia we were supposed to have tranche 2 ("covering real estate agents, lawyers, accountants, car dealers and others") of the anti-money laundering regulations introduced over 10 years ago. As this article details, it is "comically" overdue:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/slated-an...

While political parties can wallow in the extra taxes garnered from sky-rocketing real-estate prices and sizable party donations they have no incentive to introduce this second tranche.

For example, any party in power in New South Sales will keep its budget in the black simply from "stamp-duty" taxes collected on real-estate transactions.

The Foreign Investment Review Board was and is a farce and that's how the government likes it.
Ask HN: Why are flash memory prices going down so much faster than RAM?
You can now buy 128gb USB sticks or SD cards for around $20. Meanwhile, 16 gb RAM sticks still are $100+.

Are the performance specifications for RAM that much more stringent? Is the demand for SD cards and USB sticks that much greater that there's more economies of scale?
But there is a pattern. It's just a simple sum over all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann Zeta function[1]. It will pop right out at you if you take a look at the proof for the Riemann hypothesis (an exercise left to the reader). Also, speaking of Riemann, division by zero is also spoken for[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_formulae_(L-function)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere
"All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware" (October 19, 2016)

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
Microsoft Trackball Explorer – The World’s Most Comfortable Trackball (2007)
I'm a fan of 1Password and use it on desktop (mac/win) and mobile (ios/Android), mandate it for some of our employees, and recommend it to family and friends. I am however not a fan of their push into to 1Password for clouds/teams/families/whatever. I demoed it and thought it was a vastly increased cost for marginal additional functionality compared to buying licenses. Worse is they appear to be devoting resources to the 'cloud' product while features of the stand alone software are put on the back burner. Could be a great business move from them. Who doesn't love MRR? (Well, besides customers). I still use and recommend it when the opportunity arises, but their new direction worries me.
It needs to be invested. Chinese cultural attitudes around investing tend to favour real estate. Chinese real estate is too risky given the communist government's propensity for eminent domain and the possibility that they would confiscate it on the basis of corruption. That leaves foreign real estate in countries perceived to have sound government, rule of law and low barriers to entry for foreign investors.
This is a relatively big problem in Australia - there has been talk of a housing bubble in Australia for the last few years which in part has been propped up by Chinese grey money buying whole apartment buildings for investment, which drives up prices (they can just dictate prices) and keeps young locals out [1]. I cannot afford a house and I have a well-paying job.

The government looks the other way since building is one of the last big job creators now that the mining boom is over.
For example, there is a government body for foreign investment breaches (rules like you're not allowed to buy 'used' property if you don't have permanent residency, but I've personally talked to quite a few Chinese students whose parents did that for them) but it has never once initiated court action [2].

So everybody profits in the short term - Chinese corruption can move 'dead' money out of the country, Australian government gets to present itself as a job creator. Except young Australians, who have to rent and cannot rely on real estate property for their retirement.

In the long term, the bubble is going to pop and then you have dead cities with empty high rises falling apart (but then again, people have been saying for at least 10 years that the bubble is going to pop any day now and it's still inflating)

[1] Contains no numbers: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/grey-money-from-china-helps-bl...

[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-27/foreign-buyer-rule-enf...
I don't think this can be answered safely. Recent models (like the one I ordered in November) have additional sensors, but until there is a safely working full autopilot, we won't know whether additional/different types of sensors will be needed.
Warning: Pure speculation ahead.

I think it might be because in Japan at least, there's a very different approach to music consumption. In the west we basically moved from CDs to iTunes to Spotify but in Japan, online streaming and digital purchase never really took off. CDs are still, even today, the biggest music medium in Japan, accounting for 85% of all music sales in 2014 [1].

I think the Japanese tendency to own physical media, the lack of a good way to stream physical media you own and the insane prices of storage for mobile phones may have led to Japan sticking to MP3 players rather than moving to their phones like we have.

So after they stuck to MP3 players and competing in that market became important, I think to differentiate their product, Sony started pushing higher quality audio. I'm not sure how true this is but it feels to me like Sony is the Apple of Japan in that Japanese will typically eat up whatever Sony sells them. Sony sells higher quality audio, Japanese buy higher quality audio. People want higher quality audio, labels start to publish it.

It could also be that since CD purchase is so entrenched, online stores needed something to make their product more desirable than a physical disk and the way they found to do that was higher quality audio (note that I'm referring to the "Hi-Res" audio, which is typically 96kHz + 24-bit).

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2014/09/21/85-perce...
2016 was the year I ended up reading most books that I have ever read in any year of my life so far! These are the ones I liked the most:

1. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch. It makes a bold claim that we will always be at the beginning of the infinite progress that lies ahead. History has proven again and again that whenever people said all progress has been made, so much more progress unfolds. I liked this book so much that we gifted this book at my startup to the entire team of 170 people!

2. The Innovator's Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor. This is a sequel to the popular Innovator's Dilemma book. I like the sequel much better because it tries to give solutions to the dilemma. The book packs tons of counter intuitive insights. Highly recommended.

3. The Big Picture by Sean Carrol. The best cosmology book I have read in a long while

4. First break all the rules. If you are a first time manager, I highly recommend reading this book.

5. Deep Work by Cal Newport. This book changed my working habits and life. I was constantly distracted before, and now I am able to focus a ton.

6. Feeling Good. This classic is again a must read. Even if you are not depressed, it will help build your mental immunity against future depression.

7. Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark. A very interesting book that makes the claim that our universe is actually just mathematics. No physical reality exists because physics and mathematics are interchangeable.

There were many other interesting books I read (I read a total of 60 books in 2016!) For those who are interested, here's my entire list of books that I read in 2016: http://shelfjoy.com/paraschopra/books-ive-read-in-2016
The primary target for Fat Man was Kokura; Nagasaki was an alternate. As for its military importance, to quote Wikipedia:

"The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest seaports in southern Japan, and was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The four largest companies in the city were Mitsubishi Shipyards, Electrical Shipyards, Arms Plant, and Steel and Arms Works, which employed about 90% of the city's labor force, and accounted for 90% of the city's industry."
Rule by law.

Reasons for moving money and children abroad: diversification of investments, security, prestige, less pollution, schools.

Source: dated wealthy Chinese women.
Type 2 here, as well. Care to share your experience with this, offline? This is a huge struggle for me.
Better than going to zero.
Oh, awesome. If you are a curious person, it feels good when someone proves you wrong; now I have a whole lot of new things to look into :-)
Yeah, the usual xenophobic geoblocking approach.
Daemon by Daniel Suarez

(and also the second book in the series - Freedom)

Excellent present day info sec realism. Deeply explores the concept of technological disruption in several interesting and unique ways.
Developed countries are a safer investment. And the standard of living is higher.
Yes, Teslas manufactured since mid-October all have the hardware for full autonomy[0]. It will be interesting to see how long it takes and what technical and legal hurdles are involved.

[0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
The article had the word "blind" and I thought OP meant home automation for the vision-impaired.

Combine Alexa and the tech for the Amazon supermarket that tracks shoppers and they could have a talking, listening assistant that can be your pair of eyes at home.
Except young Australians, who have to rent and cannot rely
on real estate property for their retirement.

This is orthogonal to the money laundering, but what's stopping the young people from investing for their retirement? Houses are not the only way to build savings.
Oh, that's a great solution! Webhooks are probably the missing link, since I've already looked at and used generators. I could even host a text editor on a server for them; there are enough decent HTML5 editors that the UX wouldn't be an issue. Thanks!
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

Incredibly well written, touching and also an insider look at a period of American music that I'm really interested in.
> You seem strongly attached to the free market concept - what if another system worked better?

None has yet, not even close. And it's not for lack of trying other systems. Me, I'm familiar enough with history to be disinterested in trying other schemes and risking mass starvation.

Keep in mind that Kansas in the 80s was known as the "Breadbasket of the Soviet Union". See "Ronald Reagan" by Broussard.
Yeah I had the same problem. I actually found this online course at ylanguage.com it was really effective.
Video is incorrect. Russian is South Slavic language. It's much closer to language used in Montenegro (which is South Slavic) than to Ukrainian or Belorusian languages. Russians have troubles with understanding of something written or spoken in East or West Slavic languages, while they have much less trouble with South Slavic languages. It's because Russian language is based on Church Slavonic language[1][2], which was develop by Saints Cyril and Methodius[3] using South Slavonic dialect spoken in (now) North Greece.

Also, samples of history are incorrect, causing multiple LOL's.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Cyril_and_Methodius

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Slavonic_language

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic
But above ground doesn't matter as long as it is grade-separated, which is what every new foot of rail laid for Sound Transit 3 will be. (That's also one reason for the long time-frame: A new tunnel needs to be dug under downtown and a new bridge built over the ship canal to Ballard.)

A very large chunk of the Sound Transit 3 cost will be interest paid on borrowing. Because Washington State has no state bank or infrastructure bank, Sound Transit has to "borrow as it goes" by issuing bonds, building, paying back, issuing more bonds, building, and so on. It doesn't get the funds in one up-front chunk--like Vancouver did for its light rail system, from the BC and Canadian federal governments--so it's fund-as-we-go.
A friend of mine has in their house a full fire alarm system, with pullboxes and flashers and everything. (No good reason for this, he thought it was cool and likes running wires.) He wanted to add to this system a way of sending emails when the fire alarm went off; the standard addons for his system to do this weren't readily available on eBay so he asked me if I could build something. "Easy," I said, "I'll just rig up an Arduino Ethernet[1] and grab an SMTP library."

This turned out to be a mistake. Problems encountered included:

- I don't know C++ all that well (for example, I was returning pointers to memory allocated on the stack). This is mainly an issue because you can't just attach GDB to a microcontroller, so debugging becomes guess-and-check.

- With the Ethernet and SMTP libraries initialized, I had barely enough RAM for the rest of the program, and wound up having to do some contortions to get everything to fit.

- Whenever there was a minor network hiccup the entire thing would freeze for twenty seconds. I had to rework the UI to disable itself before network operations, so it wouldn't freeze in the middle of a beep and screech loudly for the duration.

- GMail doesn't support non-SSL SMTP connections, and the Arduino isn't powerful enough to handle SSL. We had to install an SMTP service on a local server to act as a gateway.

After all this effort I finally got the whole thing to work, and installed it in his house. A year later something stopped working (I don't remember what, I think it was something about the SMTP server) and he asked me to fix it. I decided that it would be easier to redo the whole thing instead of trying to patch this new issue. I built an addon board for a Pi that had the same connector as the original Arduino shield I had built so it was a drop-in replacement (they even both run off the same 5v USB power supply!) The effort required to develop the Pi-based replacement was about a quarter of the original. This included getting rid of the separate SMTP server and adding some extra features like a web UI. To top it all off, the original Arduino Ethernet cost $65, whereas the Raspberry Pi that replaced it cost only $35.

On the other hand, the ESP8266 might start to tip this balance back in the other direction, especially with NodeMCU which provides a Lua environment.

[1]: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardEthernet
The Rise of Political Correctness
I've always wondered after reading this:

"Sampled signals are often depicted as a rough stairstep (red) that seems a poor approximation of the original signal. However, the representation is mathematically exact and the signal recovers the exact smooth shape of the original (blue) when converted back to analog."

The image attached to this looks basically like a sine wave and it's clear that if you do some basic interpolation on the sampled signal you'll get something that looks the same as the original.

But what happens when the signal you're sampling isn't as simple? What happens when you've got numerous tones overlapping each other out of phase, making the wave uneven and jagged? Will the signal still be accurately reproduced? Can humans distinguish the difference?
The Soccer Mom Problem: How Parents Fail
Not sure why in the the mind of some people streaming started being equal to loss of backup, or in other words to renting. Renting indeed doesn't need to provide the lossless original. Why not view streaming as convenience, and still be interested in backing up what you pay for? That's functionality of original CD (but in digital form) + streaming benefits, instead of replacing original CD with not really equivalent to it streaming.

In this context I agree, that increase in DRM, causes decrease in availability of lossless audio. But why wouldn't same users want DRM-free as well (in which case, lossless is a logical addition)? Stores like Bandcamp cater to these users.
Interview with Linda Rising
Every STEM student at my university learns enough to do this as a freshman, I don't think most are ever actually asked to though.
Subjectively yes, I feel more confident. I've re-listened to the book every couple of years as it helps me focus on continuously improving what I see as an important skill set.
This looks great, thanks. I look forward to the future books that talk about technology from a geopolitical pov.
I did a quick analysis of the two projects and it looks like the changes between them are quite massive. Here's the overall breakdown.

Graph of commits over the last year:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/year.png

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/year-cummulative.png

Less noisy graph that only shows master vs master:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/master-vs-master.png

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/master-vs-master-cummulative...

Total commits:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/total-commits.png

Changes in the last 3 months:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/summaries+trees.png

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/trees.png

Contributors in the last 3 months for Gogs:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/gogs-contributors.png

Contributors in the last 3 months for Gitea:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/gitea-contributors.png
That's true, the Australian system of superannuation is actually pretty great, your job pays a portion of your income into your super which gets invested for you, you have some choice as to where it gets invested (high risk vs. low risk etc.)

However what I fear is that if the super isn't managed well, inflation hits, or you just don't build up a large enough investment the high rental prices in Australia will eat up the majority of your investment returns.
Helen Keller's Teacher - https://www.amazon.com/Helen-Kellers-Teacher/dp/B00411LE6S/r...

I can't remember if I read this in 2016 or late 2015, but it's the best book you're not going to see on a recommendation list in one of these threads.

It's for children, and it tells the story of a little girl who catches a disease largely forgotten in the first world and loses her eyesight, then is sent to to the literal poor house as a child. I don't want to spoil too much, but the thing that makes this book so good is that it tells a story that is deeply deeply tragic in language that is plain and simple so that a small child can understand it. Taking this in contrast to the sheer horror of what the protagonist is experiencing makes it a harrowing spiritual experience.

I found it volunteering for a booth giving away books to kids at an event. The line got slow and I didn't have anything to distract myself with, so I rummaged through the books and picked out something that looked interesting. The booth didn't get much work out of me after that because I couldn't put it down, reading it all day and into the night until I was finished.

I'd recommend it to anybody, especially people who like to reflect on the bad old world we've largely escaped from.
Because you still have to pay rent - if you could buy, your housing costs would be earning equity.
In the interest of the "minimum viable product", perhaps.

Why provide features most people don't care about, or don't know they could care about.
+1 His Master's Voice
Haven't worked with fuzz testing myself, but it sounds like something I'd lean towards writing. Those obscure test cases are exactly the thing you don't tend to find in manual testing, and AFAIK fuzz testing is random enough that you can't be sure that every run will exercise the same bug.
Find a cyclical, ritualized behavior that you can engage in as a way to ramp up towards your main task of the day. For example, first you clean your tools, then you do a warmup, and then you are prepared for something high intensity. You can learn a lot of things by engaging persistently in the warmup activity, and as you feel able, you can "break through" to deeper levels. Don't jump around to different intensity levels or try to force calendar time on them; smoothly build up and then break.

This is how I'm trying to make it work, at least.
Towards Haskell in the Cloud (2011) [pdf]
I'd ask the opposite - why not provide such features if it's trivial (i.e. producing a DRM-free digital copy costs practically nothing). Artificially crippling the product to make "minimally viable" is dumb.
Property investment in Australia has a huge amount of subsidies that make it an extremely lucrative investment category compared to things like shares.

If you get into the property market, you can count on capital gains tax benefits and negative gearing against any other income you have. Additionally, other benefits that are means-tested often exclude property (at least primary residences).
Former company: comparison shopping engine / website, used for transferring e-commerce offers from merchants to our database. CSV is vastly superior (at least to XML, maybe JSON) due to its size and quick line-by-line parsing. The downside is lots of quirky and broken formats, there's no real standardisation in e-commerce.
> There's nothing worse than whipping out your smartphone during a meeting

Yes, there is something worse. Pulling me into an agendaless meeting that has
nothing to do with my job, just because the organizer thinks my presence may
potentially be useful at some hypothetical point.

> When you take out your phone it shows a:

> Lack of respect. You consider the information on your phone to be more
important than the conversation at hand, [...]

On par with arranging an unnecessary meeting. First show me respect by not
polluting my day with useless crap that prevents me from doing useful work,
then you may start expecting respect in return.

> Lack of listening. You aren’t practicing activelistening, so no one around
you feels heard.

Of course I'm not listening. If the meeting doesn't concern me, I won't have
anything to say nor will it have any information important to me. My attention
is a scarce resource. If you want it, provide me something valuable in
exchange.
collectivists unite
It's not just you. All the images have absolute pixel positioning, making them overlap the text if you change font size or similar.
Wonder how this compares to ActorDB http://www.actordb.com/
Thai line breaking: how to break Thai text effectively
Yes, I use that a lot. Mmenosyne is also good.
Something amazing occurred to me when I got my Pebble. It grabs notifications from my phone and displays them, but it goes a step farther: it lets you choose in the app which notifications are actually important.

I never sat down and thought about this properly. I had it set up to buzz when my friends chatted in all my IM platforms, but that quickly got old and I didn't want to become numb to the sensation; the watch is surprisingly good at getting my attention. So I turned it off. I allow through text messages which my friends only use to contact me for important matters, and I've silenced almost everything else.

It's amazing how freeing this is. Even for text messages, a simple glance at my wrist is enough; if I don't have my phone out already, I won't get it out unless it's for something important. I walk around the city with my head held high, surveying my surroundings, and noticing things I've never seen before in the neighborhood where I live. My friends know. They can wait, and when I do get around to replying, we pick up right where we left off, no worse for wear.
That's cheap! Melbourne is planning the Metro rail project - a 9km tunnel under the CDB with 5 new stations. Current cost is approx $9-11bn AUD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Metro_Rail_Project
any valid contract can only be signed by willing parties. if one party doesn't like the conditions, they don't have to enter into it.