skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if the water evaporates and eventually rains back down? We should all drink rainwater or pure grain alcohol, just to be extra safe.
> I have yet to find a "web app" that I delight in using, though I love many web sites and native apps.

I wonder how much of that is an intrinsic problem with web apps conceptually, or a result of the various limitations and design fuck-ups of the browser vendors.
That's a pretty subtle case but I don't think it's relevant to the issue of human evolution for at least two reasons:

(1) humans have universal intelligence which gives us the ability to adapt to any environment,
(2) human evolution is now swamped by the evolution of memes, not genes. We now decide what to do (including whether to speciate or not)

A more realistic analogy from the animal kingdom would be something like the case of farmed salmon which within a very few generations are less healthy than wild salmon. Also the famous 'mouse utopia' experiment. Both situations where the environment has been artificially manipulated by (human) ideas, just as our present environment is. Mutational loading is one explanation for the results.

So have you considered the issue of mutational load: what's the greatest load we can sustain and what's its present level? Is it responsible, for example, for the declining birth rates in the West or is the explanation for that purely sociological?

I would like to know the answers. However I presume that we'll start by using CRISPR or similar tech to eliminate known genetic diseases like Huntington's and Tay-Sachs. From that precedent should follow the identification and elimination of new and more silent genetic abnormalities. Which is reassuring.
> If you ask someone “Which do you think is safer: artificial vanilla or vanilla extract?” they’ll often prefer the “natural” one.

This feels like an accidental trick question :-)

For me personally, I know I'll prefer vanilla extract (or rather, actual vanilla shoots) simply because it tastes much better -- precisely because of the impurities.
I know it isn't what you asked at all, but since the question is meant to uncover emotions: I'm having a hard time taking my emotional preference for natural vanilla aroma out of my reply.

It would be better to use an example where people don't have a strong preference for one of the choices for unrelated reasons. Unfortunately I can't think of an example right now.
I would finish that tutorial. RoR shows you what a cohesive approach can do to a framework and it'll get you used to good design patterns that can serve you elsewhere.

I would then move on to learn about elixir and Phoenix if I were in your position. Phoenix is similar enough to the good parts of rails but all the really nice stuff is way better than rails. ActionCable in rails is a joke compared to what elixir can deliver.
So the root of the incompatibility is essentially that even though both the GPL and Oracle open source licenses offer similar protections, they both are not allowed to be combined with other licenses.

Obviously you'd hope that if Oracle licensed it under a permissive license, the whole point of doing so was to enable third party usage and thus they won't be taking legal action against this kind of minor and technical infringement (if it actually is). However counting on Oracle the company to act in good faith might not be smart.
Maybe the audience is already grown? I mean it's being used by presidents and heads of states and is a major communication tool for businesses and governments. Maybe it's just not hip anymore.
People are trying to resolve this problem in a similar way the bitcoin itself functions: https://github.com/bitsquare/bitsquare
Hiring in the Age of Dispersed Technology Spending
That is due to coliform contamination, though. Those countries have feces in their water supply directly and in huge amounts.
question is did they use emacs or vim?
Samsung Closes in on Apple as World’s Most Profitable Tech Company
Hogan's Heroes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan%27s_Heroes

It'd fit well - they kept trying to escape, and it'd have been easy enough to have a plot where they talk the camp commander into giving them a "fake" receipt in return for a favour, only for them to actually escape (and of course get caught again).
>It's like Reddit for mature adults.

The immaturity has simply been replaced with smugness and elitism.
How to host lightweight apps for free
I've seen most of these arguments for and against gene editing before, but the fact of the matter is that it will come down to the economic competitiveness of nations, as always.

What concerns me in the long term is that gene editing will cause human genomes to converge to a single gold standard with proven mental and physical benefits, thereby reducing our species' genetic diversity and leaving us more vulnerable to a mass extinction event. A "zero day exploit" that everyone missed in the popular new cancer-fighting edit.
Foxconn announced plans to build a factory in Wisconsin
Twitter needs to:

1. Charge businesses that tweet $20/month. ok, so you are a small business and can't afford it? nobody will miss you and you will contribute less noise to Twitter anyway.

2. limit the number of links you can tweet a day based on your overall popularity. you can still post an unlimited number of replies and tweets with no links.

3. show less tweets from unverified accounts that never reply or interact with other users. in other words, throttle those bots and broadcasters.

I believe the noise problem is a huge issue in twitter. it gradully causes people to pay less attention to their feed and as a result less attention to ads.

i would even go as far as banning apps like Buffer and social schedulers from Twitter. They are a net negative for users (note: I said users not marketers)
Isn't Medium struggling in its own ways, cutting costs & laying people off? If it was a Twitter product, I imagine the stockholders would want it shut down, seeing it as a distraction to the main Twitter product.
This fails in countries that are simply too flat (the Netherlands).
3D NAND hits four bits per cell
Q1 and Q2 MAU are the same: 328 million worldwide.
Only in the US -2 million MAU less than in the first quarter.
Not tragic, in my opinion.
This is a great post about why you should target iOS and macOS features specifically. But it misses the point,

> we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen.

Yes, that's what (you and) Apple want. But what developers really want is a simple cross platform framework to target all OSes and the widest user base possible with the least effort.

These applications can then enable custom features on macOS where they get a better experience if they have a need for that.

Remember OpenStep? Yellowbox? We want those tools; right now the web is an ok standin, and until there is something better, developers will keep demanding these features. It's about targeting the widest user base possible, not about making a single platform the most successful.
Do you really think the profile is different now?

Do you really think people won't lie to get an advantage

Naivete is strong it seems
Wait, has encryption hit open-source ZFS at all? Can I use it on FreeBSD?
Sure, but what I am saying here is that if you don't speak a European language any Romance language, even Esperanto, is hard.

It's easy to not appreciate this, but in a way the hardest thing about learning a language is mastering the vocabulary. Think about your native language. When was he last time you encountered a grammatical structure you were unfamiliar with? Now when was the last time you encountered a word you were unfamiliar with?

If you're studying two related languages, like Spanish and English, you get a huge boost from the fact that the more difficult words are actually more likely to be the same. You don't have to study very hard to understand what "planeta" or "geografía" or "farmacia" mean. On the other hand, if you're studying Japanese, you have to memorize words like "wakusei," "chiri", and "yakkyoku" which have no resemblance whatever to the English words. And it just goes on and on and you are never really done encountering all the words you will ever encounter. Compared to this slog, mastering a grammar and the number of irregularities typical of a natural language is a minor annoyance.
As one of the earlier male in vitro embryos successfully carried to term in the US, I'll claim a unique perspective on the scientific creation of life.

As a living, thinking human, I am grateful for everything that was done so that I may live.

If the fertility lab had mixed chemicals differently, or deleted a propensity towards colon cancer, or changed my hair color, there's no way in hell I would have mourned my "unborn" mirror self. I would have been just as grateful to be walking and talking and living!

The slippery slope isn't on the action, it's on the intent behind the action. Designing blond babies isn't evil. Designing babies susceptible to drug addiction is.

So can we please stop with the deification of the default and get on with progress?
Anyone still actually having a good time on this service?

Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers.

I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" checkbox in settings and an algorithm to filter it all out. I'd rather get my news and politics from elsewhere.

Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation and have to dig to figure out what people are upset or gloating over today. Filtered words was a good first step but a lot of politics talk doesn't actually mention the words exactly.

Edit - Mass replying to the careful follow question:
I already choose who to follow carefully (Current count is 1000) and unfollow if it's really tiresome. No one I follow is a pure internet personality or journo, they're all people who actually do things outside of comment online.

To me it's a case of I want to read my followers at their best (Posting interesting and creative work), but can't handle them at their worst (Political hot takes).
Level Up as an Analyst by Asking the Right Questions
My point is that complexity is a necessary building block. It's not the cart before the horse exactly because I am talking about emerging complexity i.e. increasing complexity in a very specific context namely human brains and computer AI.

No one is claiming arbitrary complex systems in arbitrary environments are bound to anything. I am talking about something very specific namely how our brain came to be and how computers seem to be getting closer and closer to our brains. Just like how evolution in itself is not just arbitrary randomness.

Unless you are claiming that extremely simple systems can create the kind of consciousness we are talking about here I have a hard time understanding what you are disagreeing with in what I am saying.
End users are also concerned with not being frustrated at every corner with arcane and weird UI choices or a user experience that plainly mirrors the implementation choices underneath. Worrying about whether features have been moved around the UI usually comes after they've already used a program for a while. There's lots of open-source software that, for non-technical end users, doesn't get to that point because they've ditched it already.
I'd also add SQL to your language list, and often SASS, gulp/grunt configuration, JSON, ASP.NET, and so on.

And come on, JS is a C-style language. If you know one you know them all.

It's also not a difficult jump to OOP languages; especially now that Java 8 supported lambdas and C# supports async/await. It's hard to learn concepts, not syntax.
Some rumors that the admin of the servers was not arrested, but took the site down, to reconsider security and relocate servers, before starting up again.

That's why BTC-e does not show a giant FBI logo with a notice.
I've never, ever allowed a website to send me push notifications. I honestly didn't even know it was a "thing" until I started getting requests. Also, location-sharing requests are baffling to me on my desktop for anything other than something like a weather site (I still disallow- I have my favorites set).
As the article later states, they gradually increased the price by $100 over the span of a few months to the intended $999 retail price. Pre-order discount, I guess, to secure money to fund the development - people would've been less likely to shell out if they started off at $999.
Like I said before, not everything that is illegal is wrong. In Germany, homeschooling is illegal. In Russia, telling teenagers that some people are gay and that's OK is illegal. The US law is a hodgepodge of contradicting legal statements which are different in different states, and many things can be counted as legal or illegal based on your wealth, political connections, race, or just luck.

Law is not a bright shiny source of truth from outer heaven, it is a sketchy framework of hacks and patches written in haste to aid people in resolving their conflicts.
My Macs have an uptime in months. Sometimes I have to restart a process, but needing to restart the machine is exceedingly rare outside of the normal security update related reboots.

Over the years I have given quite a few presentations to customers and at public talks. None of my machines ever let me down.
> Subsequently I expect to see Monero delisted from any exchange that follows KYC after some pressure from law enforcement.

This won't happen. KYC will still remain, but privacy is an important feature that many legitimate businesses want in crypto for completely legal and good reasons. Many of the businesses in the EEA are interested in Ethereum gaining privacy features, and Ethereum plans to add zkSNARKS. At that point it's not just Monereo, ZCash, etc that the exchanges would have to ban but Ethereum as well. It'll be a losing battle for law enforcement.
I would say the biggest issue with declining birth rates are social and psychological in nature and NOT physiological. People simply work too much, for just one example.
The fuck-ups aren't just on the browser vendor site.

The entire front-end ecosystem is currently worse than enterprise Java at its peak and the quality issues stem from all sides.
God, instant search was such a pain. So much in fact that instead of typing anything into Google when it was on, I used to type it out in Notepad or another editor and paste that into the box instead. Just found it incredibly distracting otherwise.

Nice to know they've gotten rid of it.
Inside Facebook's AI workshop
Hi! I have a side project and would love to get some marketing ideas / support.

Please get in touch vic@smalldata.tech

Cheers!
Medium will get acquired by twitter in next few years.
>If we had orders of magnitues more of genius level intellects pushing the boundaries of technology and science, humanity would be better for it. I just don't see where this would be harmful if it works as intended.

Because science and technology alone cannot save us from destroying ourselves. Einstein, MLK, Carl Sagan and many others warned of how our scientific progress has been outpacing our human social progress.

Case and point - our scientific progress has led us to create tools of global genocide. Technology has always been a double edged sword.
It is one of the reasons, according to past contributors, why the project participation stagnates. Old devs have their flags and config all set up, and don't want to change to a new source control system just to get new kids on the block. A good example of how bds operating systems are being developed for the developers themselves, not for public use.
I use it professionally in the U.K. education sector and don’t see any U.S. commentary at all. Chose who and what you follow.
I use it because it's a lot less trouble than what I did before. Separate md, lvm and filesystem means 3 different sets of commands; now I don't worry about partitions, mount points or anything like that, I just run one big zfs and throw all my disks in there. It stores all my data, and there's a single command interface which I only use for replacing disks (with zero data loss).
This is the real shit right here. There's going to be gene-ism against older generations with inferior genetics, talk of "cutting them off" of government health programs because their fragile bodies are too expensive to maintain...
I clicked on three pictures. Two are dead links.
Hey, when are you starting to put CRISIL rating for the schemes?
Downvoting doesn't make it false.
You are right, of course. But I'm cynical. The banks themselves were too big to fail. But their executives and directors were/are not "too big to jail", yet most of them walk free today.

Amazon is increasingly woven into the fabric of our economy. How long before it truly is too "big" (read: has installed enough shills in government) to fail, or too big to punish? They would be following in the great traditions laid by oil companies, auto makers, telcos, and of course banks.

Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14865112
The best web app I use daily is Slack (wrapped in its native app "shell" on macOS). But it still feels pretty poor.

On iPad it's worse. On iPhone strangely, it's not too bad.
This shows why I have come to use Amazon less and less over the years...no it's not the "piracy" bullshit. It's that Amazon is buying up goods at full retail and then marking them up and counting on my ignorance and impulse to turn a profit.

In short, Amazon shopping has become adversarial. Its website is premised on dark patterns. That's why its search sucks and prices and terms change on the fly. Look how noisy Amazon's web page is, how long the delays are, and how far down the page important discriminating information...like the product description...is buried. In particular, Prime is designed to confuse the value proposition. It mixes in differential pricing, video on demand, and shipping. A person can't look at it and determine how Amazon makes money off of Prime. Having had Prime, the obvious way it profits is algorithmically. It just shows me more products that are cheaper elsewhere.
Can you explain this? If someone has a bundle of cash from illegally selling drugs, then they give it to their store front to "launder" as retail income, aren't they now paying tax they wouldn't otherwise pay?
Data breaches, loss of privacy are common, everywhere. The novel aspect here is this news wasn't buried.

Yes, please be outraged.

But please also realize its the norm. We (society) do not have the laws, rules, procedures, or technology to prevent or mitigate it.

Edit: Just quickly read up on this incident. They did try to bury it. But I read one account that stated one the Pirate Bay guys daylighted the breach. Delicious irony. So this scandal is now at stage 4: Assign the blame. Next is stage 5: Rinse, lather, repeat.
Laid off SoundCloud employees are being offered $10,000 to join WeTransfer
> This means that they will judge the risks/harm to the benefits and make a judgement, and receive informed consent.

We should remember that it's not just the individual whose genome is edited that may be harmed, but all of their descendants.

> And can’t you just sequence or test one of the cells from the morula stage?

This isn't sufficient. It has been observed (in mice) that editing the germline by directly editing the embryo will result in chimerism in the fetus. This happens because the editing is not 100% efficient in one cell division. So while some cells have the desired modification, others do not, while others still have completely different off-target edits. The resulting fetus may have the right edits in most cells, but the wrong ones in some particular tissue. It could be perfectly healthy except that it carries some alleles that are lethal when they occur in the liver, heart, or brain. It is impossible to avoid this by sequencing a single cell from the blastocyst, and probably it can't be avoided by sequencing any small number of cells.

> There’s no reason that if the technology exists, is safe, and is regulated that it should be only used for people with a huge number of genetic defects.

This technique does not appear to be safe, and it is not easy to control. If it were, I'd think it would be pretty cool. But, I don't see how we could do one-step editing with many edits unless the efficiency of the editing process is ~100%. And, given that the technique involves cutting the genome and hoping that the repair systems of the cell correct the cuts to templates that we've provided, it is very unlikely that it ever will be, because much of the editing process is outside of our control.

I look forward to another editing technique that is more precise. Or, to growing humans from cell culture. Both of these methods would provide the precision and safety that is required.
The "multiply by 2pi" version of this problem is the one where you have to lift the rope by a cat's height all around the entire earth. So if you have an army of southern-hemisphere cats and they need to get to the northern hemisphere, but you have cunningly put a rope around the equator because you don't want dogs to invade, how much extra rope do you need to lift it to just let in the cats but not the dogs?

(I'm assuming all cats are shorter than all dogs.)
One of the BIGGEST drawbacks using a Chromebook with 11.6 inch screen that nobody here talks about yet, is the grainy and crappy 1366 x 768 screen resolution! I've been a long time Macs guy anything inferior than RetinaDisplay will considerably straining my eyes before I am used to it. Dell XPS 13 included.
This is a very very curious incident. Advice from SAPO was not taken. And almost literally everything has been exposed because someone in the transport authority wanted to proceed? Incredible. Kompromat was it?
No, but its still is an investment with an expected positive return. Otherwise nobody would have any and would tend to sell it at 0.

Land also has the chicken-egg problem capital doesn't have. The first one that built a house didn't consume his capital, the first one that got the property rights didn't consume capital whatsoever.

I am closer to your position than to the other commenter in this thread, just wanted to distinguish that land can capital do have some differences worth thinking about.
Yeah, but probably not on a developers laptop. Even my mac does an occasional BSOD (aka kernel panic).

That said, multiple times a week is very silly. Once a month would probably top out my personal tolerance for similar bugs.
Yeah, Medium's having trouble finding a good business model itself:

https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be

It's got the same general issues as Twitter has. No clear business model, a more limited audience than the creators of the service want it to have and a severe with too much noise and hostility (especially when you go away from recommended articles to random ones).
Someone needs to make an ICO for WoW gold.
> It's coming.

I take it you plan to short the stock, to take advantage of what you know that the market doesn't?
You're an outlier. On HN we all are I guess. Most people don't or can't really distinguish between ads and real content and of course the quality of those ads is increasing - with all the information available to Facebook and other companies ads start to become actually relevant. Unless it's one for the product you just bought an Amazon and now see everywhere.