skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the worst news I've read. IMDB boards are where I always go to learn about a movie/tv show, there is decades worth of interesting threads and contributions from people who'd never use a 'social network', even with their stupid policy of deleting threads.

Its an insult the way they're going about this. Pretending that the majority of their users would prefer to use the cancer that is FB/Twitter, which even if you wanted to, is in no way even close to being a substitute to having a board for every single movie/tv/actor/cast ever.

The cost to run these boards is less than a rounding error to Amazon, they waste more money on their many projects that never go anywhere.

The real reason is that the people who actually use the boards are dedicated, you can't sell these people's profiles and 'monetize' them, you can't exploit them, and you can't sell them other junk.

I don't even care about moderation - any big forum will have trolls, let people self moderate.
Are you serious? An autonomous robot that can walk alone in the streets and carry a lot of stuff inside?
I just learned that one of the speakers at that woman's march (which was more of a pro choice march) once kidnapped and tortured a gay man to death, stating "he was a faggot anyway" afterwards.

How do you feel about that?
I find it hard to accept the "you must be 7ft tall to play basketball" story about why people become good at something.

My own view is more something like what bodybuilders say. Some people find it harder to grow than others, but everyone can do it. And people who put effort into it will definitely be separable from people who don't, regardless of endowment.

Now as for who gets to be written into history books, there's a fair bit of randomness about that. A hard working person can well find that the only phd advisor who will take them wants them to work on some dead end. Or you may work on something hot, but other people will know it's hot, too, and they may well beat you to publication. Doesn't make you any dumber, but your name will not be enshrined in that theorem.

There's also a necessary confluence of factors that depends very much on your parents, specifically whether they figure out how to manage your development. Look at the current first-in-most-people's-minds genius, Terence Tao. Not only did his parents figure out that he was good at math, they somehow got him the right guidance. I'm guessing very few parents, even quite well educated ones, would know what to do if a guy like that turned up in their house. There's also the sheer randomness of whether you'll end up doing things that encourage the kid. Most parents, myself included, have very little idea of how to get a kid to do what's good for them. You laugh, unless you are a parent.
not every great basketball player is 7' tall

In fact look at any list of the greatest basketball players of all time. Very few of them are 7' tall. Now look at a list of pro basketball players over 7', most of them are middle of the road journeyman players most people haven't heard of.
It's about packing in more workers per square foot of space.
I know that a lot of people don't frequent the boards so they might not see value in them, but I have a few experiences over the years that endeared this community to me. One was right after watching the second movie in the Matrix trilogy: the cliffhanger left so many open questions that the conversations around it were immensely interesting. I think actually that a few of the theories then (Zion in a zion and others) ended up being way more interesting than what actually happened in the third movie. In fact I think the Watchowskis were reading and following these theories themselves too or maybe I'm not remembering that correctly (it's been a while).

Another interesting one was right after watching Primer. A movie like that is meant to be talked about. I remember reading these boards and watching the movie again because there were so many interesting theories about what happened.

These are only two instances but over the years there were so many others where I'd watch a movie and then go to read about theories about the plot. The movie has to have a plot worth discussing for this to have value though, so in as non-condescending way as possible I wonder if perhaps people don't value that type of movie any more at all. Or maybe the number of boards where nothing interesting is being said dwarfs the ones that do. I don't know is, but I do feel like this is a huge loss because there are so many theories that will be lost forever.
Position:Designer OR Back-End Engineers | Alar Software | Chicago, IL | Full-time, ONSITE | Salary range: $80,000.00 - $160,000.00 + options based on experience

Please email resumes to hiring@alar.net

We’re aiming to aggregate logistics data to enable customers to operate more efficiently and connect them with other logistics companies. We believe we’re on to something big, but to get there we’re working through end-to-end complex problems in a complex and old-fashioned domain. We’re taking an unconventional approach (event sourcing with a twist and a touch of farmville) and dealing with big data to boot.

DESIGNER POSITION

Logistics software is notorious for overloading users with information, which requires a masters in spaghetti science to understand. Complexity in enterprise software is unavoidable, but we believe the end user shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to manage it. This may seem simple, but logistics is filled with antiquated processes and users.

BACK-END POSITION

This isn’t a run of the mill MVC app and requires solving performance and scalability problems in distributed systems using combined data from many sources.

Back-end stack: GCP, Kafka, Scala, Kubernetes, Jenkins, NGINX, Docker with a bit of postgres, some simple mongo for non-critical functions.
Nobody has proof, and it's probably unknowable. It could be that we're a discrete system embedded in a continuous system. Or it could be we're in a seemingly continuous system which is actually embedded in a high precision discrete system.

That being said, nature has given us very strong hints at discretization. For example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length. Because of uncertainty principle, we can't measure distances less than that. In a similar way, time also appears to be discretized, along with energy and mass.
Sounds a lot like the robot from Starship Technologies;

https://www.starship.xyz
That is due to maturity / age, and at one point Java was the new kid on the block.
Bonus points for the How It's Made-esque robo-industrial synthpop soundtrack. Reminds me of Mr. Wizard.
> It lacks any kind of purity

Example of lack of purity?
Nitpick - Harry Potter is set in the 90s, pre smartphone.

As for story suggestions - well, I don't read a lot of fantasy, but the "fanfiction" Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (by LessWrong's Eliezer Yudkowsky) is a deeply amusing take on what havoc might have been wreaked in the Harry Potter universe by someone who, finding themselves in it, applies the scientific method. (If that's not enough to pique your interest, at one point in the story Harry explores the possibility of using a time-turner to deterministically solve NP-hard problems through the forced creation of stable time loops.)

Another good story is Sam Hughes' "Ra", where magic is literally a field of scientific research and engineering. It scratches the same itch as Methods of Rationality (scientific deconstruction of magic), but in a universe built for that purpose. It's awesome.

[1] http://www.hpmor.com/
[2] https://qntm.org/ra
How lazy are you?
Thhis is already possible, but it's a fairly expensive and delicate procedure, so doctors only do it when you have a severely debilitating condition of the lens, e.g., cataracts.

Still, old folks who undergo lens-replacement cataract surgery often end up with fantastically restored vision -- beyond even what the lack of cataracts would give them.
America first, Switzerland second [video]
>>> It seems to be in-line with most of the federal code which is designed to give federal prosecutors outsized leverage in plea negotiations

That's what I thought. It's only that I find it - in general terms - terribly unfair and abusive.
Wow, that's basically a 5-year loan. I'm surprised that Canadian home buyers accept such risk. I wonder why the mortgage market in Australia and UK is so different to Canada.
Please please get a repost filter.
Use a language that has generics.

Snarky, but its such a tiresome argument. If you need something Go does not supply, use a language that fits your needs. There are a lot of programmers happy in Go, and thus happy without generics.

There are programmers who are happy using generics, thus write in Rust, Java, etc.

There is no language to bind them all.
> "aren't well targeted ads better"

When you're the advertiser, sure. When you're the target, not so much. Do you really want billboards speaking to you as you walk down the street? Making suggestions based on your recent purchase history or activities and personal associations?

Just because advertising technology can achieve greater powers of reaching people, doesn't mean we need or want advertising woven into the fabric of our existence more than it already is. You can opt in to that if you want, I'm staying well clear.
This is a bit banal. Nobody can predict second and third order effects reliably because they don't know how to weight one predicted effect vs another to know how they'll intersect and interact.

Extrapolation for any one technology usually works well for a short distance into the future (a decade or so), but the chances of a technology being blindsided by something else entirely rapidly rise over time.
>> A significant hunk of a Cortex-M die is the ARM licensing fee.

Can you give a few numbers/guesetimates for common mcu's ?
You just listed the elements, that's the easy case. You can pick one of the listed ones, like Teal.
To add to that, the escalating hashrate war within Bitcoin between Unlimited and Core is popcorn worthy.

And within the wider space of blockchains, improving access to strong anonymization techniques appears to be moving forward quickly: https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/01/19/update-integrating-zcas...
It seems far more reasonable to me that increasing the true positive rate (bad grains rejected) will also increase the false positive rate (good grains rejected), so it's not the value of the bad grains included (which is almost certainly very small) but instead the value of the good grains which would accidentally be destroyed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tainnade/comments/5s9xlc/how_to_wat...
I have used an argument like this and the answer I got(which left me dumbfounded) was like "Everyone believes in some sort of divine power or entity or whatever and the other religions just got their wrong."

They're basically saying that sheer quantity of believers in anything proves that their God exists!
What would be better in this case? Should anyone be able to show up to an airport, pay for a ticket and board a flight anonymously?

I'm a pretty staunch libertarian and even I can see the benefit here. Until we reach the border-less, one-world utopia that so many people seem to be gunning for, it's valuable to know who is coming/going from your country.
I want a city or neighborhood hooked up to a pneumatic tube system, like they have in bank drive-throughs, and I want at least one node of the pneumatic router network to be in an Amazon warehouse, and at least one other to be at a decent cheeseburger shop.

Make sure it's wired for fiber internet and I will buy a condo in that development.

Imagine ordering something up to the size and weight of a 3.5" HDD (or bacon double cheeseburger) and having it magically appear in your kitchen five minutes later.

If these things became prevalent, packaging could standardize on the capsule cylinder size, like shipping containers. Units containing e.g. 500mL of milk or 5-7 eggs would be perfect.
I'm a complete outsider, but I've always been curious why people didn't build on OpenSPARC. Is it patent-encumbered, etc? Or, is there some technical reason that makes that architecture less worthwhile than a new one?
Even if that's the case, I'd prefer it over an open office; I'd have headphones on either way, but a cubicle ensures less visual distractions. Plus surely it dampens the sound people make, so it doesn't carry as far?
that already exists, it's the machine at the optometrist with the picture in it, usually of a farm or road for some reason. I imagine that technology is too bulky and too expensive as is to put in reasonable glasses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorefractor
Hehe, I have to underline this aspect as npm killed half an hour of my work yesterday, when I redownload some package in a sibling directory (for diff purposes).

Never had this experience with go. The comparison is a little emotional for me, but when I realized npm just killed my code, I was emotional...

Nevertheless, Javascript/Ecmascript is the result of years of development in a living environment (the web) while go was designed from scratch, by some of the most capable programming language designers on this planet, to enhance their previous work. Who wonders about the result?
I had an eye test recently (in the UK, if it's relevant), and they had a device which seemed to do that. You sit down, look into the device and see a blurry image, which sort of "snaps" into focus as it works out the shape of your eyes.

That device was a fairly big thing linked to a desktop, though - no idea if it could be miniaturised or not. In addition, they followed it up with more "traditional" tests, which in my case disagreed with the results from that device. So maybe it's not quite there yet?
Agreed. I used to moderate the largest English Starcraft forum. We had a pretty low tolerance for poor behavior, and people would cause shitstorms on other forums about our allegedly heavy handed moderation style.

I'm no longer active on staff duties but the site is going strong so I'm guessing we did something right.
> I think "deterministic" is not really right here, since you can only convert monotonic times in the past, not the future, and only after you have been given the (completely arbitrary) leap second data. If you call that "deterministic", then what isn't?

You're right that the "deterministic" formula doesn't extend all the way into the future. If you believe Wikipedia [1], then leap seconds are added at two points in the year, and we've always had about six months' warning, so there's a window of about six to twelve months ahead where all the leap seconds are known. I don't think it's useful to get into what "deterministic" means, but you're quite right that you can't reliably convert monotonic times to human times, or vice versa, beyond that window. I'm not sure how much that matters.

> Did you read the proposal?

You're not supposed to ask that! But yes, i did.

> Because the Go folks are essentially trying to present a single, unified API for both, whereas lots of comments here on HN are suggesting the separate-API approach instead.

No, they are presenting a single type which conceals both kinds of time. This will lead to surprising behaviour if you ever rely on both kinds. For example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13574235

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Insertion_of_leap_...
Yeah exactly, thanks for pointing this out. I'm specifically focused on LLCs because they are single-man operated side projects with passive income. I maintain each one only a couple of days per month, at this point.

That being said, Clerky is an excellent choice for those looking to form a C Corp in Delaware and focus on their startup full-time.
New Pokémon “Arbitrary Code Execution” Simulates Different Games Within Itself
Thank you! I have this same problem and was never able to articulate why before, but it is for the same reason; I am a musician, and I can rarely let listening be a 'background' task.
Doesn't sound like suffering to me
I also hate any command that has more than, lets say 3 spaces, for its complexity, but hopefully this conversion stuff is more or less just a one time job so: who cares ;-)
I don't want to touch a keyboard that someone has painted with ketchup and knows what else.
Eh, you made it fancy to have to wear the same equipment as if you were on a factory assembly line or using a jack-hammer. Nobody thought of that for office work before.

And those who still object to wearing those are considered as retarded by the headphone crew: just look at any Reddit thread about this matter, and you'll see hundreds of guys who think that it is the normal situation and will thrash anyone dares say otherwise. And they truly believe that's cool and they're cool... Perhaps battery cattle think they're cool too, dunno.
"San Francisco doesn't allow new construction." as the other poster said, so you're going to buy up the $1m stock of houses.

I also think this "competition" is artificial as a lot of people are signing 30 year mortgages but I highly doubt their salaries will continue growing or even staying at the level they're at now.

Most folks aren't spending within their means.
You don't believe in ADSL?
Ask HN: Which are the most innovative webs for news?
The watering down of the word "troll" made me suspicious, but what I've found is that in the last 15 years it seems like we've regressed in our collective ability to reason about online conversation.

It used to be the case that "flame" was a word people knew, and that flamewars were treated as flamewars. Team "not getting involved" would peel off from the conversation and warn people with positions at stake not to get involved - there was no productive disagreement to be had in a flamewar. The people who couldn't stay away _knew_ they were in a flamewar. Everyone else knew to just let it run it's course. Nobody's opinion who mattered would be dumb enough to be swayed, so we just ignored the flamewar until it burned out.

Unrelated: In same time period, a lot of websites have popped up with content and editorial direction that profit off of the fact people get trapped in perpetual flamewars; maintaining/replenishing their audience by pouring fuel onto the fire. I'm sure this is a coincidence.
How is it possible then to know your balance? Do you have to go through all the blocks just to find those transactions that involve the public key of your wallet? This sounds extremely impractical, because the majority of the transactions would not involve yourself.

I assume then that there's a way to "query" the blockchain? How does Electrum do it?
Except by "exporting" those units to foreigners you're not allowing communities to build and that's why you're seeing a huge divide in Toronto between folks.

When I lived there, I felt there was a lot of hidden hatred that won't be painfully obvious to outsiders until something goes really wrong with the economy/foreign policy.
I wonder if the current revolution in AI will accidentally kill online message boards.

Here's the line of reasoning. Some of these steps are probably already occurring.

- It will be easy write a bot that understands what's being said.

- A bot can follow many threads at once, multiplying the reading workload for humans.

- A bot can pull large amounts of information together into a cogent argument, or at least one that cannot be dismissed by a human without a fair few minutes of reading. For instance, if I want to troll people by coming with reasons why women should not be allowed to vote, my bot could spin a yarn about how Switzerland is an advanced industrial country that only in 1991 allowed its remaining women to vote. I could pull data about women being left-leaning, more emotional, and so on. And the data needn't actually be true, I can quote sources with wrong numbers, create new sources, and so on. You, the interested debater, would have to follow this pile of crap and debunk each item, eating up your whole evening.

- In order to defeat such a bot, someone will invent a fact-checking bot (Like a GAN, it could decide whether you were botting your argumentation). Sounds good, but wait. A fact-checking bot would have to present its side of the story. And how would it do that? Just like a human, here's your points, here's why they're wrong, here's the actual facts, and so on.

- So now every message board is bots talking to bots.

- Humans will have to fall back to heuristics, like "read the first line and decide if there's a point". But of course a bot can figure out what the weaknesses in your heuristics are.

- People will get sick of writing on boards, because well, they're not for people.
Isn't it just a fad? How usable and readable is the brutalist design? Or what are you trying to maximise other than being different?
Call me cynical but all I can picture is one passionate longtime PM on IMDB losing a protracted political battle inside Amazon. If you're out there, thanks for fighting to keep it alive all this time.
I was thinking of Diplomacy/Machiavelli too. Machiavelli nearly ruined some Christmasses, but I still want to get it out and play it again...
Wheaton College (Massachusetts) promises full scholarship to student refugees
I'd love a factual and accurate report of that history and those trade-offs, even a book-length one on paper. Do you know of one? I'm not trying to do a dissertation on the subject, and it's not my day job, so weaving my own unreliable history out of Google searches and cranky blog posts is not ideal.
Isn't a part of a person's endowment their ability to work hard and put in effort where it's required, when it's required? The 7ft tall thing is an example of an easy to see factor, which some people have, and some don't. In reality, as you say, there are unlimited factors going into a person's greatness (or lack-of).

By the way, there was a study where, given the same weight lifting program, a couple people gained tons of muscle, most gained some, some gained none, and a few even lost muscle. Not everyone can gain appreciable muscle, and not everyone can get good at math (although most can, and the average person underestimates their ability to do so).
Rust, too, had an optional GC (where the choice is per-data, not global) for a long time and still intended to be a systems language (And was pretty successful at being systemsy IMO). I think there was a time when &-pointers didn't exist and all sharing was done through the GC too. At one point there was a realization that the new borrowing system could be used to write GC-less programs pretty easily, and that was a turning point after which the GC started being phased out in community usage and eventually removed from the language.
> There is no objective mathematical reality, because it cannot include a statements about its own consistency

Godel's first theorem says no formal system with recursively enumerable axioms and which is powerful enough to express elementary arithmetic can be both consistent and complete. Most people adopt the response – alas, that means no formal systems we can devise can ever be complete (except for systems too weak to express arithmetic, which are not very useful). But, paraconsistency and dialetheism give us another response: yes, we can have complete formal systems with recursively enumerable axioms and which are powerful enough to express elementary arithmetic. Okay, they'll be inconsistent, but inconsistency is not as bad as you thought it was. We can contain the inconsistency to some small area in which it isn't going to bother you, you'll scarcely notice that it is there. We can hide the contradictions in the closet and go on our merry way not thinking about their existence except on rare occasions.

If mathematics is inconsistent, does that make mathematics objectively unreal? Only if we insist objective reality must be consistent. If objective reality contains dialetheias, then inconsistent mathematics can be objectively real.
You should get Patrick (patio11) to weigh in. I think he's doing work in this very space, for Stripe.