skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The US has an economy larger than the next four largest military countries combined. An economy that is hyper dependent on the global economy functioning well and trade flowing unimpeded.

I happen to agree with slashing the US military, however your premise is incorrect. It's also worth noting that China aggressively lies about their military spending - under counting - and has been doing that for decades. The US is also now spending less than Russia per dollar of GDP.

Further, the $165 billion wouldn't accomplish anything in terms of infrastructure, or healthcare, or anything else. For example, take a look at the estimate that California Democrats recently ended up with for their single-payer system (it's so expensive to do in the US, it'd instantly bankrupt California; not even a small, somewhat well run state like Vermont can pull it off). You can't even fix California's infrastructure problems for $165 billion per year. Right now, with the US budget what it is, you'd need more like a $400 billion cut to the military to even scratch the surface (we have nukes, it'd realistically be feasible, but we'd have to dramatically disengage from dealing with Russia in Europe and China in Asia, requiring those regions to significantly lift their military spending).
If there is such a thing as an external reality, is there even such a thing as 'meaning' that arises from anything other than relationships to other things?
The only way to describe the human experience outside of the human experience is by describing all interactions and relations between the constituent parts.

That ignores the issue of how useful this description is. It is easy to conceive of an external mathematical reality that cannot be fully described from within. Even with a full description, there is no guarantee the description is at all useful. If you consider how stumped we are by the goldbach conjecture, and how simple that is, you realize there are plenty of mathematical structures that defy understanding.

And then there are the standard crises of maths. Incomputable problems, paradoxes in informal systems, controversial axioms in formal systems (axiom of choice), and that final bombshell of Godel's incompleteness theorem. All of these make math seem less rock-solid.
Heck, if the universe is maths, we can't prove the universe is consistent from within the universe.
US planning to create 'Space Corps' as sixth branch of armed forces
You can have pretty much the same mental condition when you are 70-80 years old as when you are 20-30. But to have that you need to keep using your brain and challenging it. Old people usually have much less opportunity to stay mentally active. And less motivation.

Statements above are based mostly on The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge[1] which I highly reccomend. Plus just listen to some old folks that you can tell are still quick - Warren Buffet 86, Chomsky 88, James Harris Simons 79 and so on.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Brain-That-Changes-Itself-Frontiers/d...
Removing "inactive" subs has proven to be a dud for me in many ways as well.

The first time I tried it silently and got a lot of people very annoyed they were removed. The second time I actively emailed people and they were similarly offended. I now don't bother (though if open rates were low, I'd probably just do it again).
That's not what I mean by more code, by taking advantage of dynamic typing you can write more generic code than is even possible with generics in a statically typed language; code that works for any type, whereas a static language either forbids you or forces you to write multiple versions of the function. You can't write a single Max function in C# that works for any type supporting >=, it simply can't be done. This is typical of static languages, they forbid perfectly good code because it "might" be used inappropriately or because the type system can't guarantee it won't.
Have you used it? Your experience doesn't match mine in using HSR in Europe, China and Japan.

The vehicle speed is lower but the total travel time (much less inconvenience) of rail vs air is much lower, except for transcontinental trips. And the rail stations are usually more conveniently located compared to airports.
How much more are you willing to pay, in time and money, for your convenience? (e.g. Waiting in traffic, Congestion pricing, and Elon Musk's Boring Company)
I'm not sure why you'd assume that, the NYPD certainly has a history of bravery but not one of technical competence.
I'm making the cases for it!

After all, it's the culmination of all medical research, whether intended or not. What happens when science "solves" aging and disease? What will we call the state where people just don't die unless killed?
Got busy, just got a chance to respond. I'm all about raising awareness and have experienced first hand the stigma of having a mental disorder like schizophrenia. It's not fun. The stigmatization or the condition. In fact, being schizophrenic is nothing short of extensional horror. Associating a metal disorder, like schizophrenia, with "psychics", I feel would only further stigmatize people with mental disorders and lessen the seriousness of the condition to the public. I would find it disheartening that someone would get the idea that talking to a psychic would somehow improve the condition of a person with a mental disorder. We need to raise awareness about these things but people need to be aware of the woeful lack the available treatment programs and the high cost of medication the prevents us from getting better, not that a "psychic" could somehow help in any way.
This is true in the US, but is the opposite in Europe and China. (I don't know about Japan, the other HSR powerhouse).
> You haven't learned the true power of a decent type system then.

Conversely you haven't learned the true power of dynamic types or like coding with handcuffs to keep you safe. What static types offer me is not as useful to me as what they forbid me from doing, so no it isn't an issue what what I don't know, but rather of what I do. And Haskell, no thanks, I'm not a masochist.

> and the Python's harder to maintain too!

That's an issue with Python, not with dynamic types. My Smalltalk code is a joy to maintain.
"...you like PostgreSQL enough to attend a conference". Future classic right there. (Not being sarcastic, I loved that joke)
It's a complex issue. I'm willing to help people who work hard on getting out of bad situations. I'm not willing to solve their problems mostly or completely on my own.

That necessarily implies some degree of American individualism in the person looking for help. Without that the helpee sooner or later will run out of luck (and/or "other people's money") no matter what you do.
Holy hell that is awful design.
Great article, this is the first one on aging I've read in a while that has it's head on straight and isn't trying to make weasel arguments that suggest aging cures are just around the corner. Happy to see a clear distinction between lifespan and longevity, so many people like to leverage confusion between those concepts to argue that medical advancements have improved longevity, like Ray Kurzweil does.

> People talk about healthcare, but in essence what we have right now is not healthcare. It’s sick care. Some people see their physician when they’re well, but most people don’t because there’s not much advice that they can give you other than not to smoke and to exercise and all that.

I feel like I identify with this; I want to have conversations with my doctor all the time about routine advice seeking kind of stuff, but I don't because there's nothing wrong, plus it costs a lot. I would love to have a health care plan where conversations during and about being well were expected and included, but I don't see it coming any time soon.
Plus: "Hey, Steve, buddy - I'll pay you the cost of losing if you sue us for infringement - we're one law-suit away from being invincible."
No, actually, because I am homeless and completely broke today and seriously considering going and playing in traffic for reasons I am blogging about. Which boils down to sexism is part of why I can't fucking get my finances straightened out.
It doesn't include TSA or boarding, but it does include landing/taxiing. Flight time = gate to gate.
Burning Man happens on federal land, so I think this is probably still a no go.
If I can only ever be sued for a pittance, why would I ever fear lawsuits?
That sounds more like a compliment. You're jumping through hoops.
I'm in the Netherlands, where I spend some extra money to get a 1st class ticket (because that has the room to work on a laptop), and I nearly always have a seat in that. I guess during rush hour about a fifth of the rest has to stand, true.

Even if you have to stand now and then, you can use an ereader.
3. Correlation between liberal politics and those who smoke. (see Richard Nixon)
If you are a human being you should be happy humanity is better rather than selfishly worrying about the 4% of the world whose lives improved less than the rest.

Have you seen the elephant graph? [0] The reason people are upset is not because they are selfish, it's because the people above them are. The wealthiest of the wealthy 0.1% have profited immensely, the lower half of the world's population has been lifted out of poverty, and this has all come at the expense of the American blue collar worker. Factories have closed, the opioid epidemic has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and everybody is calling these suffering people selfish and lazy. It's no wonder they want to give everyone the middle finger and vote for Trump.

[0] http://voxeu.org/article/greatest-reshuffle-individual-incom...
Trucks are closer to 40 tons, actually.

And many shippers will absolutely not use rail freight for a variety of reasons in the USA, including slow delivery time (can't ship produce and other perishables easily), lackluster quality of service from the rail lines (they want coal, oil, large commodity business, not smaller firms), higher chance of damage; as well as not meeting minimum qty/volume for it to be worth it.
> Thus a multifacetted image of mathematics as a coherent subject, all of whose many aspects are well connected, is important for a successful teaching of mathematics to students with diverse (possible) motivations.

Somewhat useless personal anecdote to follow on this quote that I also liked:

Prior to my PhD studies I had heard of math and experienced it largely as computation. Arithmetic, matrix multiplication, integration by parts etc etc. This is, to my mind, the most terribly boring part of mathematics.

It's not certain, but I suspect that providing at least a few alternate characterizations of mathematics to students stuck doing computations for years and years will almost certainly help some of them find their way to regions of the subject that they find interesting.
Lack of ethics education for computer programmers shocks expert
Like it or, this guy speaks the truth
California's beaches belong to the public
The problems affecting high-speed rail in the US are the same problems that prevent low-speed rail, streetcars, subways, and buses from being more common -- people don't see themselves using such things and so they don't want to pay for them.

In the Bay Area, the Caltrain commuter train runs from San Jose to San Francisco, through the downtown areas of most major cities in between. It is currently so popular that it is significantly over capacity every day. Yet it is still a constant political battle to get funding to improve the system, even though the Bay Area is one of the most educated and politically liberal parts of the country, where support for public transit is higher than many other places.

Sometimes I think we would have much more transit funding overall if we set aside part of the transit budget to send Americans to other countries on vacation, so they will return knowing how good public transit can actually be.
That's the first useful justification I have ever seen for NoSQL.

How in the world did I miss such an obvious thing?
Not really, you just get more space outside of the cities.

I have some friends that have moved to upstate New York from Brooklyn and rent is the same, just with a lot more space. However, you then have to add on $400/month for the commuter rail along with an extra hour per day of commuting, plus owning a car and needing to drive everywhere instead of walking. It actually ends up being more expensive, but the trade off is getting more space (if you care about that for some reason).
Business class seats are about as comfortable as European train seats, so I'm not sure what there is to learn from this.
> Actually, such behavior has gotten people killed in those contexts.

Nobody is going to die if you can't date someone.

Again, I advocate a conservative approach to getting a date with a coworker. One request, declined for any reason, should be treated as a firm no absent explicit signals to the contrary (request for a rain check, some other sort of proactive, explicitly date-seeking behavior from the other party). Your odds of getting into trouble under this rule are so vanishingly small as to be nonexistent. If you choose some less conservative rule, including, apparently, whatever rule you've been following up to this point, your risks are higher.

Of course, there's also the issue of not wanting to make your woman coworkers uncomfortable. I would hope that would be something of intrinsic value to you, and that on this basis alone you might change your behavior after seeing its impact in the past. The fact that you're still arguing about this makes me doubt that you do value their comfort the way that I think you should. But I don't know how to tell you that you should care about other people in a way that's going to stick. :(
Oh wow, I had no idea the number positions varied across the world! I just assumed everyone went from 0 to 9, because it makes logical sense. :-D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_dial

That article has a UK, a New Zealand, and a Swedish phone, and you're right, all different layouts.
> • Cloning. You basically get a new person that may be "as good" as the loved person/pet/celebrity you wanted to preserve.

I don't think this is an accurate description of cloning.
Notice that the countries with the largest welfare states in the world (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway) fare better by far in global indexes of happiness, human development, freedom, democracy, etc.
Happy user here. My GF came up to me and asked if I could somehow get country names for the ip addresses she had of her survey respondants. I Googled and found this neat little API. True, I could have downloaded the raw databases from elsewhere and worry about the SQL I need, whether the data is recent or ancient or even correct. I decided it was an overkill for my need, and just used this API in a throttled(1 req/s) mode and left it overnight. If I need this IP to Location need again, I'd happily pay for this API.
The original claim is circular.

Physics may be mathematical, but that doesn't mean you can start from the Big Bang and use mathematical physics to predict the contents of this particular thread on Hacker News.

So you immediately have the problem that mathematical physics cannot possibly be a complete description of the universe.

Of course you can argue that we simply don't know the math yet, and if we did we'd be able to start from the primordial singularity and predict the existence of Max Tegmark, Y Combinator, and me and you.

But that's a very strong claim, and I'm not aware of any evidence that comes close to supporting it.

Even if you make a much looser claim - that mathematical physics can predict classes of phenomena like Max Tegmark, etc - there's still no math around at the moment that even begins to pretend it can formally prove that assertion.

Worse - strong claims about mathematical provability immediately fall apart because of Godel. How can you have an abstract formal system running the universe if that system can't possibly be complete, provable, and formally consistent in its own terms?
Yeah they lied to go to war in Vietnam just like they lied to go to war in Iraq just like they lied to go to war in Libya just like they're lying now because they're so eager to go to war in Syria. Fortunately for the MIC we Americans are really stupid and easily distracted by shiny media bullshit.
Scheduling is also problematic, particularly when you have a lot of local restrictions from cities and market changes that require freight rail to increase or just plain harvest.
>edit: pro-mode paranoia for in-room consumption brings a smoke buddy, febreeze, and a generous tip for house keeping into play.

Or request ozone generators outside the room. This seems surprisingly common.
We have a serious problem with retrogradism in this country.

A large number of people are suffering from changes outside of their control, and they are disconnected from those at the forefront of social and technological progress. Many of these people have lost trust in the system, and even in progress itself (outside of progressions that are accessible and affordable such as games or phones). As a result, there is little enthusiasm for investing in major improvements to systems or building any major infrastructure enabling progress.

"High speed rail? What is in it for me? I work part time and can't afford these medications. I want the life I used to have back."

Perhaps a good place to start is understanding the experience of people who are voting for an imagined retrograde society. This can be difficult for those of us who have had the privilege of a better education, or better opportunities in the cities, or even all of our needs met as we build what we build. The privileged must try, and must succeed in understanding what is happening here. This is because the votes of those within what is essentially a ghetto lead to major consequences, including underfunding high speed rail. The result isn't just ridiculously under-qualified and intellectually isolated politicians that are easy to make fun of.

The underprivileged will keep voting in this way until their concerns are answered (or not).

We at the technological forefront know more about what needs to be done in terms of advancing progress, possibly even to the point of solving half of all social problems. However, we must also pay heed to the immediate, harsh reality of the people left behind. Our environment -- natural, political, or infrastructural -- depends on this.

If the ethical demand to listen and react appropriately to the suffering of others does not convince us to strongly act, watching the destructive results of their votes should.
> I want to have conversations with my doctor all the time about routine advice seeking kind of stuff, but I don't because there's nothing wrong, plus it costs a lot.

I assume you mean it costs a lot as a total package, including paying for health insurance.

For me, my individual visit to see my doctor costs me $20 per visit, which I do not consider to be expensive.
> One of the biggest flaws with cryptocurrency is that for all its mathematical and structural elegance, it rolls back almost all of the features that mitigate fraudulent human behaviors.

Those aren't flaws; those are features.

Bitcoin was meant to serve a very small number of people attempting to evade the laws surrounding currency exchange.

The fact that it could be propagated as a pyramid scheme (mining gets vastly more expensive the later you "buy in") was marketing genius.
Most JS server-side rendering never approaches anywhere near string concatenation performance, and I've tried. Whatever abstraction you use has to resemble string concatenation without doing much else, and it's really, really hard to not do much else. That's why embedded JS templates (EJS) is so fast, it just concatenates strings with some logic built-in to the template.
'Why Trains Suck in America' :
https://youtu.be/mbEfzuCLoAQ
An old saying with a deep truth: A mathematician is a person who will assume anything except responsibility.
If you read Reid's posting, once he gets out of the intro he suggests gender-neutral rules. And the intro is about the actual recent news. And the title appears to be a reference to a famous speech on human rights from 1995.
Why LLVM?

Aaron's Co-dfns[1] is an APL compiler that compiles to C++ and there's some advantage to doing this.

[1]: https://github.com/arcfide/Co-dfns
A train means being trapped. USA light rail has been run so poorly that no one thinks they can depend over the long term on rail. The trust in rail as a solution has been so greatly eroded, that people will always want to have a car as a backup. And since they own a car anyways (under this scenario) ...
"We're living in an age of incompetence."

I'm not American, but I doubt it very much. It seems to me, from the outside, so take it with a grain of salt, that the crippled infrastructure thing is politically motivated and working as planned.
Gettext() sucks
fish shell does it with manpages https://fishshell.com/docs/current/commands.html#fish_update...
To do math, or write, or write a computer program, you have to come to terms that expressions (or computations in a in formal logical system) are intrinsically meaningless—the result or machine will blindly follow its internally meaningless rules and come to some internally meaningless conclusion.

It may be that some folks pre-accept following rules wherever they might lead, and other folks refuse to deal with the 'meaninglessness'.

One way of dealing with it is to learn to apply external meaning/motivators to these models/programs, but I think this is a separate skill, possibly much harder and not taught as such.
High quality cryptocurrency have strong fundamentals.

Those that have interesting methods of creating demand tend to do well. Those that simply combine existing features and don't provide compelling use cases have difficulty sustaining desirable long-term market conditions.

A combination of small, medium, and large market caps may help provide a properly balanced risk and reward.
I get the feeling driver-less cars are going to be a thing given all the money. I do wish we could have some standards for "annotating" the roads with useful beacons to help things along, but the money is probably going to talk. If driver-less cars appear, I do expect roads to flow a bit better just because of proper grouping and better coordinated exit / entrances.

Yes, the Hyperloop is pretty iffy, but at least it won't conflict with freight rail.
I'm not sure why people are proud to do things without spending money on marketing.

What if spending money on marketing had made you grow twice larger? Twice faster?

When people say "I didn't spend money on marketing", the only translation is "I knowingly overlooked massive growth opportunities."
Yes but what's your revenue? Please consider going transparent (i.e. http://www.transparentstartups.com/) and making an interview with one of my fav websites indiehackers.com
Maybe I am biased because I am not in SV and my company funds itself, but you don't have a right to anyone's money / funding. That is an extremely entitled sentiment.

People aren't starting a fund to fund women entrepreneurs because it is simply a less effective way to make money than funding whoever you feel will be the most profitable regardless of gender or any other such consideration. When I decide what to do with my money, I do whatever I think will be the most profitable, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is not my responsibility to pay to fix the bad things other people do. And you probably do the same with your money.

Edit: I don't want people to misunderstand me, I do believe you have a right to other people's money in the sense that I agree with the government taxing us and helping those in need (like healthcare and education for everyone, etc). But I don't believe you have a right to someone throwing a ton of money at your startup. It just sounds ridiculously entitled.