skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked the first half of the article, especially the analysis of aggregators' profiteering on the backs of creators.

But it has a few serious problems.

- If economists are to be believed, the cost/value of a good tends towards its marginal cost, without regard for sunken capital costs. This is the trend that seems hard for musicians to fight. Movies are slightly less affected because the cost of transferring multiple GBs (and then getting them piped into the screen of your choosing) is further from zero (esp. if you take time into account), but that will tend downward with time.

- He laments the loss of magazine or other expert reviewers who can guide purchasers. Crowdsourced reviews on Amazon or Steam for games are amazing and only augment, not replace, expert reviews. The number of websites with expert reviewers seems to outnumber (and out-expert) the available reviewers of old. Amazon is currently losing the battle against spam reviews, imo, but I'm holding out hope that the situation will improve (and there are browser plugins to help).

He also begins the article talking about the open, sharing nature of academics but then strays quite far into advocating that society should not promote the free sharing of ideas and discoveries. Because he fears that if the ideas can be freely shared then the big players will be the only ones to profit while the creators get no reward. That's likely true, but his medicine (ramping up all copyright violations to full criminal status) seems worse than the disease.

Interesting ideas and I learned a lot from the piece, but so many of his solutions boil down to applying pre-digital mechanisms to digital media or just trying to unwind the clock and effects of the digital age. And a depressing hopelessness that I don't share.

Finally, he gives zero credit to the value that his villains (Google, Apple, Amazon, et al) have contributed to society. Maybe the price we've paid for those benefits in giving up privacy have been too high, that is maybe we are getting the raw end of the deal, but you can't discount to zero what we've gotten in return. As for me, I think we've gotten a pretty good deal.
> Religion, politics, JavaScript

Why are you repeating yourself? ;)
Paris agreement is non-binding.

Who cares? What matters is if it's working or not. Of course it's hard to untangle if it's due to accords, scientific/engineering breakthroughs, government investment, etc. but India and China are far ahead of their Paris targets: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15052017/china-india-pari...

China has no obligation for 20 years.

This statement is wrong in multiple ways. As you noted above, Paris is non-binding, so there are no "obligations" beyond developing a plan and reporting on progress. Next, China's goals begin in 2030, which is 13 years away, not 20. Finally, according to the link above, China is on pace to meet its goals almost a decade (!) in advance, i.e. early in the 2020s. So even a charitable interpretation of your statement looks to be wrong by about 4x.

It's not ratified by Congress.

This is as far as I can tell, just a negative thrown in that has nothing to do with the thesis. Is agreeing to the accords bad for the U.S. (cost billions!) or does it not matter, because it's not ratified. Which is it?

Nothing from agreeing to this was going to affect your descendants other than draining American coffers of billions.

So basically every other country is willing to drain their coffers. Why is that?
>Why would you suggest we prevent using all appropriate options at our disposal?

He already answered that: because not all options are appropriate.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Shimmering Visions
>"I'm baffled by some of the comments here... Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on? You can still sign into random sites that require it that way, arrange meetups, etc but without 'scrolling your life away'"

Some of the smartest people in the world work hard to make the site more addictive. You could just as easily say, "Is it so difficult for you to just have a needle and heroin on your desk and shoot up?"

It might be easy for you or me to have it there within reach, but for those who have already had their mental pathways significantly affected by the daily or more frequent hits of dopamine, it's not easy at all.
>This isn't even counting the part where no new nuclear reactor could possibly be as unsafe as Chernobyl or Fukushima

That's what they say after every accident too. "This time, with the new designs, it's different".
Are there any companies that sell something like privacy as a service? It seems sorely needed that someone work on this
The point of this link is the courses, I think.

> A number of years ago I became aware of the large number of physics enthusiasts out there who have no venue to learn modern physics and cosmology. Fat advanced textbooks are not suitable to people who have no teacher to ask questions of, and the popular literature does not go deeply enough to satisfy these curious people. So I started a series of courses on modern physics at Stanford University where I am a professor of physics. The courses are specifically aimed at people who know, or once knew, a bit of algebra and calculus, but are more or less beginners.

http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses
Yeah, yawn, I've been reading this every month for the past 18 months. Tell me where and when I can buy something.
This is really a wonderful book. Nystrom's writing is clear and entertaining. I look forward to every new chapter.
There are a lot of anti-Trump folks who, too, keep their heads down because they don't want the drama. Or are you suggesting that pro-Trump people are some kind of a silent majority?
Roughly, "capital" is the class of people who make most of their money by investing money they already had, and "labor" is people who feed themselves by selling their time working to others. I'm guessing you knew that but want to challenge the categorization?
This is over 15 years old. Title should probably reflect that. There are several early versions of the paper: here is probably the definitive one, published in 2002.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A101329850711...
He didn't acquire a single bargaining chip. If anything, he handed Europe, China, India bargaining chips.

Trump is in for a rough time next time he tries to negotiate anything internationally, now when he has shown that he backs out of what many regard as a very important international agreement just 2 years after it was reached.

And on yet another issue, Trump shows the world that America is no longer taking the lead. Positioning yourself with Syria and Nicaragua is not taking the lead. He has put America last.

And I doubt it will be without repercussions from other nations. In the coming weeks we will see how there will be calls in Europe for blocking America in all kind of other international cooperation, including trade deals.
single digit number

At least it's likely a high single digit.
It amazes me that you can write something like this on the same day that Pres. Trump announced his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. The man is imperiling the very future of civilization.
> Even Yahoo, for whom mismanagement is usually effortless, had to work hard to keep Delicious down.

Man, I love Maciej's way with words.
Very well put. To make your point in another way: an additional pressure on traditional content creators is having to compete with those who can create content but have no plans to generate rents from it. Traditionally that crowd had no ability to distribute their creation to the masses and it was thus not a viable alternative to the major publishers and distributors.

The democratizing of content creation is a huge and a new competitive force in the market.
Yes. Not only that, it gets good tax and capital flow treatment in China, because it's considered "exporting".

The big Bitcoin question for the last several years has been "what will the PBOC do"? So far, they've discouraged the use of Bitcoin for transactions within China, and stopped some speculative practices at Bitcoin exchanges, but haven't really cracked down.[1] Back in February, the PBOC announced a "study period" while they decided what to do.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-10/china-bit...
>Nothing an X-Prize contest or two can't help address if things get truly desperate.

Yeah, because technology advances magically if you will it enough...
128 Tasks to create a website
Electricity in Vietnam is expensive. I doubt it would be practical to mine Bitcoin here.
The USA creates far too much pollution, no doubt about it. If China and India only stop emissions increases when they reach per capita parity with the USA then we're all in a lot of trouble.
In the last 20 years or so, I have come across a couple of ideas that are not politically palatable.

The first was a universal transaction tax. Every transaction that passes through the banking system has an associated transaction tax rated at 1 cent per 100 dollars collected by the banks, remitted directly to the government and taken out of the transaction. All monies transferred out of a country would have the originating country collect and retain the tax.

The interesting aspect of this is that all funds that end up in the banking system, irrespective of legality of source would participate in the transaction tax. And based on the figures of over 20 years ago of only 1 in every 1000 dollars passing through the banking system was from legal enterprises, that's a lot of additional taxed wealth.

The other aspect of that discussion was that all other taxes, government charges (duties etc) would be dispensed with. It was unpalatable because it treated all as equal and various interest groups don't like that.

The second one was charging a flat tax (income) on every entity with the only allowable deduction being salaries and wages. This is based on gross income not net income. One aspect would be to force companies to run much more efficiently than they would otherwise do so. Again treating every entity equally would not be politically palatable.

Of course, there will those who would still try to game the system, them you cannot get rid of.
It does. If half the miners went offline right after an adjustment half as much bitcoin would be mined everyday and the next adjustment would be a month away instead of 2 weeks. The number of available transactions for the month would drop by half as well.
Funny you mentioned reddit, reddit started off as social bookmarking, it's much like Delicious or https://pinboard.in/popular but with comments.
The Chinese government holds $3.5 trillion in U.S. treasuries. The profit from "short-selling bitcoin" wouldn't even qualify as a rounding error to them.
I always thought it looked like a butt, from the point of view of a person getting oral from the owner of said butt.
Illinois is being sucked into a 'negative credit spiral,' warns S&P
Part of the problem is unbalanced incentives between tax inspectors and crooked accountants.

If an accountant​ helps a billionaire dodge taxes he can earn millions of dollars in fees. If a tax inspector exposes the scam he might get a salary bonus worth a few thousand dollars.

I would like to see tax inspectors get paid by commission. If the tax inspector exposes a scam and the government collects $50 million, the inspector gets $2 million. (And to avoid overzealous inspectors, if a tax audit finds no impropriety the inspector forfeits $20,000)
The dev tools are built into Firefox by default. So what do you base your claim on?
A - counterpoint: Great products can succeed without ads. The customers find YOU. Crap needs to be advertised.

B - yup, and bye

C - yup

"Content" of any type is just not worth much anymore. It's plentiful and cheap. What's worth something is eyeballs.

As the price of content, of all sorts, approaches zero, the work is taken over by amateurs. Old timers have seen an amateur web and are absolutely not afraid of its coming back.
Furthermore, he produced videos instructing the viewer on how he avoided paying income tax [1], then sold those videos. For income. That he didn't report.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL-F4-RDNz4
I had to laugh at your second point; "monstrosity", that was really creative.

Actually, it does not use too much memory, given what it is, a JS application, that runs virtually within something else, there are no two ways about it. JS was the language of choice simply because of the easiness of getting the product out there. If I was to write this in plain C++, even Go or Rust, memory usage would be less, but that's not in my near future plans.

As for the server; I wanted fully to use websockets and I wanted to keep it simple. IRC would mean another layer which I is not part of my scope here.
The recent update from Krebs gives some interesting details into how the attack took place, something we don't get to hear very often:

“Our review has shown that a threat actor obtained access to a set of AWS keys and used them to access the AWS API from an intermediate host with another, smaller service provider in the US. Evidence shows the attack started on May 31, 2017 around 2 am PST. Through the AWS API, the actor created several instances in our infrastructure to do reconnaissance. OneLogin staff was alerted of unusual database activity around 9 am PST and within minutes shut down the affected instance as well as the AWS keys that were used to create it.”

Credit where credit is due, that's a pretty quick response time for data breaches, which are normally quoted as being discovered in an average of 30 or so days.

However the fact people's information can be decrypted from this breach is awful. Sounds a lot like the private key to decrypt this information was stored alongside the data in the database... whoops! That's like storing the clear text password. Let's hope the decrypted information contains strongly hashed passwords, but I'm not holding my breath.
My general sequence for an overseas trip is to use a slew of tools:

1. Choose the dates based on compatibility with my work schedule or particular events I want to visit (e.g. festivals)

2. Use Google Flights and matrix.itasoftware.com to get a idea of prices

3. i. Use a shared Google Sheet to list out options and my schedule (e.g. plotting out a row for each day of the trip, to allocate out days to each destination)

3. ii. Check Google / Wikipedia / TripAdvisor to see the top attractions - add these to the Sheet for reference while I'm on the trip, and also use this to make sure I've allocated the right amount of time to each place.

4. Use booking.com or Expedia to find the best deals for accommodation (usually I use hotels)

5. Book directly on the airline's website, since that often has the best price.
Woman's preferred sexual strategy is monogamy.

Men's preferred sexual strategy is polygyny.

I almost shed a tear for her.

The subject of the article, Michael, sounds like a solid player. He would show up 5 minutes late to each date, while she was early by 5 minutes. She's been gamed hard.

I have 5 women on the go at the same time now. Ages 23-34 (I'm 34) and half of them know I will never be monogamous and the other half have not asked yet.

This allows a man with high SMV to get the best, most attractive and fertile woman to have children with.

Monogamy monopolises a mans resources and is to be avoided as long as possible.

Most men are incel and have no matches. Cry me a river
It amazes me that you can follow up his post with an example of the very sort of hyperventilating moral panic that he's talking about.
Most Republicans support this. Republicans control all branches of Fed, most states, munis, etc. The president's decision is likely in the majority.

This is the problem, not the president himself.
I'm trying to understand Google's new rules... From what I can tell they have published the set of prohibited practices here:

https://www.betterads.org/standards/

It weird language... they say things like "Included ad experiences tested: Auto-playing in-line video with sound" and "The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”) video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself."

I think that means pre-roll is OK if it fits into the content, but auto-playing inline video with sound is not.

It would be nice if they could just say explicitly what the rules are. Instead I guess you are supposed to use the Ad Experience Report tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ad-experience-deskto...
These are graduate level textbooks. There is little point in attempting them without a solid undergraduate background in physics, which is necessary both to understand and to appreciate Landau's presentation.
> I'm not convinced there's any language that can be considered "completely object-oriented";

Maybe Smalltalk?

> I might just have a more liberal than average interpretation of what OO means, though.

I think the problem is that there's no clear definition of OO, and at some point the term becomes meaningless.
My Garmin sports watch syncs via Bluetooth and uploads to their website in the background. What more do they need beyond this for your application? Is there a particular limitation that it can't update Apple Health in the same background operation?
Europe is sufficiently integrated to consider it as a bloc with regards to this issue. Europe's population is twice that of the USA and half that of China/India. If Europe's emissions increased to the same per capita level as the USA that would obviously be a bad thing.
China is shutting down miners, Yet the price is still going through the roof.
Ask HN: Make Alpha-P a new symbol for together-for-the-Paris-agreement?
I want to have a symbol for the support for the Paris agreement. I think HN would be a good place for the movement to begin. Can you help me with design and how we can use it?
> Hopefully when they come out with special anniversary editions in the future, they'll redo all of that with the latest technology.

I'm sure the four sequels being made will look great.
The story is doubly sad because a) the family often couldn't prevent their children's death, and b) the companies don't want to admit how bad Japanese productivity is and keep resisting the changes.
Agreed, I know the feeling well. It's a crazy mess of a system where people with very straightforward sources of income and deductions end up unsure every year whether they've done their tax returns right. This is why other countries just fill them out for you.
Is that reasoning a way of solving the problem of doing good for the sake of evil perhaps?

Edit: This and my previous posts are very toxic towards Google. I shall try to be more positive. Maybe they really are doing good for the world. I mean, how will we have selfdriving googlecars if we don't have ads?
This is for an earlier version, the basic implementation/renderer has not changed.

https://asciinema.org/a/4ff69bzz484gopw5hno3ietmm

I have not thought of decomposing the actions so they generally available in the CLI, but it sounds like a good idea, I will look into that. Thank you for the pointer.
What if it is asked in an interview? "This guy don't even know bubble sort", let's not waste more time on him.
Well, in total honesty, the very fact of using PyPy is already a performance optimization over the regular CPython interpreter.

(Although, this comparison is very interesting, it shows that not always PyPy will overperform regular CPython; it depends on what you are trying to do and if the system has just bootstrapped (after all, PyPy is a JIT compiler)):

https://lincolnloop.com/blog/speed-comparison-cpython-pypy-p...

All in all, i'm happy that there are alternatives to speed Python up, but i'm kind of a bit worried that the bottleneck on performance might be the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), the big white-elephant-in-the-room that is never talked about often enough when discussing Python. Mind you, Python is one of my favorite languages and i've used it a lot, so no hate here.

There are projects for overcoming the GIL, for example PyPy with Software Transactional Memory, but they're still work in progress:

http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/stm.html
Well done. Love the mission.. is there a floating VIP code / Easter Egg :)
I don't think it is this much of a zero-sum game. You have framed this in an odd correlation != Way; e.g.

As pollution increases so does quality of life.

Uh, what if we plow 100B into battery production and photovoltaic cell system integration? We could build the 5-6 gigafactories to recycle and manufacture batteries...That use solar free energy...To reduce pollution...And cost...To increase quality of life...To cheap to meter
Obligatory posting of the best piece of writing discussing Japanese workplace culture anywhere on the internet.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/
You must have a really good internet connection. I pay close to $200 USD/mo for a wireless, 10Mbps max connection, and that's literally the best I can get unless I were to personally invest in running a fiber-optic line to my house.
> Will anyone remember all the crying wolf on the next go-around?

Yes - a large part of the reason Trump won is that people who haven't drunk the kool-aid are sick of being told that they're deplorables who are imperiling the future of civilisation (see elsewhere on-thread).

With all the hysteria, name-calling etc. from the Democrats, I'm not sure that this lesson has been learned yet.

ESR wrote about this in depth here:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7268

"While these words point at some real problems, they are also a trap. They lead you to organize your political pitch around virtue-signaling, exclusion and demonization. That, in turn, can be successful (though repulsive) politics when it’s used against a minority to mobilize a majority or plurality. But you’re in the opposite situation now. You were trapped by your own privilege theory. You demonized a plurality of American voters, and in return they gave you Trump."
Did a wormhole temporarily merge HN with yahoo answers?
Multithreading in Python is all uphill. In Python, any thread can store into anything at any time. By name, even, using "setattr". There's no thread-local data. This implies excessive locking activity. That's why this guy is working so hard to do things that ought to be simple.

A few restrictions on the language would make it easier, but when this is suggested, Guido has a cow.
Intervention from China will stabilize Bitcoin.
really nice concept. Even though I'm already a fulltime employee. I'd love to contribute if possible.
How a Wireless Sensor System in the Busiest City Intersections Can Save Lives
> Consider how annoyed people have been at the Apple dongle situation.

Do you mean the USB-C with the gazillion required adapters or new cables?

It's relevant you bring up Apple, because if you have a MacBook and an iPhone, and pair it via Bluetooth, the a tethering option shows up in your WiFi menu that you can easily select, same as any other WiFi network.

The advantage of it being an easy, yet manual process is that you can't accidentally use it and blow through your data. I do wish they would go the extra step and build "limit what you do because you're on a metered connection" support into macOS.