skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The population of China dropped drastically in only 50 years of Mongol rule, down to 50% by some accounts.

The population of Europe also dropped by about 50% in roughly the same time frame, with cities hit particularly hard. The Mongol conquest coincided with the start of the Black Death, and their trade networks allowed it to spread.

As for the rest of your post, empire building is by nature evil. The Mongols were just better at building than most other empires. They were fairly inclusive and accepting for an empire, the various splinter kingdoms largely took on the culture and religion of the area they controlled.This was roughly the time of the Crusades, and the thought of them with Mongol military tactics is a terrifying.
Maybe having one's future life at stake plays a role in one's effectiveness in practicing?
I agree it's not optimal but it beats dealing with spam form submissions or creating a form that prevents spam submissions in the first place. I know there are solutions out there, but it hasn't been a priority for me.
Fun with Toshi: Building a Simple Ethereum Faucet
In Lansing the community is building out a network of bike trails but its patchy.

Detroit has gotten very aggressive creating dedicated lanes taken off not so busy roads and using old railroad right of ways. You can go almost anywhere in the downtown area by bike. There are even rentals available.

http://detroitgreenways.org/bike-map-and-parking/

Some of the trails that slice through industrial areas even feature artwork like the famed DeQuindre cut

https://www.traillink.com/trail/dequindre-cut-greenway/
You have bigger fish to fry if growth goes negative. If you think that's going to be the case soon in your country, maybe retirement homes would be a wiser investment.
> but that might only be because the bots can react to certain events thousands of times faster

AI bots such as this one are usually limited to emit actions every N frames, so they can't possibly react faster even if they can solve the perception problem. There is nothing interesting for AI advancement in competing for the best reflex speed - it's all about strategy.
> It's much harder than you'd think, and the most common way of balancing things is to simply make them more "samey".

which is the wrong way to balance a competitive game
Why I don’t use a Parser Generator (2012)
Action Video Games May Affect the Brain Differently
Your looking at the blizzard school of balance.

Think going to a theme park. It's very pretty and attractive but underneath it all, the experience is always on rails without any deviation.

That's one way to deal with complexity. I hate those games, because the moment you become human, and try to do something intuitive but undefined and unwanted by the programmers, you get penalized.

Dota doesnt do that, although the recent patch feels like a shadow of such design: but nothing like league or blizzard
Open Access Can't Wait. Pass FASTR Now
It straight up doesn't make financial sense unless there are massive subsidies. I live in the Desert Southwest where we have 300+ days of sunshine a year. The Industrial Commision has been "compelled" to lower the rates of energy going back into the system. That is, we pay 08-14 cents a kWh with some BS pricing schedules that need a Gantt expert to decode... WHILE we get paid somewhere between 2-5 cents a kWh.

Solar doesn't make sense for me in other ways too... when I average my electricity usage over the year, it is around $98 per month for a family of 4, 2300 sqft home, in Arizona. If I go with solar city my bill would be $120 and I would be in a lease for 20 years. Nah...

Forget about buying the equipment myself as well due to the reasons above. The time that would be required to recoup the "investment" just isn't worth the hassle.
link: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/08/01/google-a...
> Not upgrading your browser leaves you insecure, and within a year or two websites will start breaking on you. In little things of design, mostly, but steadily more and more.

This blackmailing is the worst, and what I hate about modern software.
> Also, the article seems to think missing out some weak-ass graph and a link to wikipedia as irrefutable proof that this guy knows what he's talking about and everyone is out to misconstrue his words. Nope.

You do realise that this is what people making the opposite arguments do, right?

> I'll tell you some bias he makes no mention of. The bias of having Disney princess for girls before they're born. Of being bought pink and told they're pretty not clever. Then getting dolls as presents instead of practical problem solving toys. The shoes and clothes bought that aren't practical for climbing trees or exploring. Then watching every Hollywood film about men while pathetic women characters look savvy and get "rescued" like the fairytales they were told when they were little.

What about times before TV existed? what about countries where computers and games weren't marketed?

> After all this, even if the adverts of scantily clad girls in both boys and girls magazines haven't dissuaded them a career in science. Perhaps they study and perhaps they do so well as to get a job at google. Where they will be surrounded by a good many male asshole engineers (it's likely because I'm a male software guy and have seen no shortage). They persist anyway.

Most software engineers where nerds and there was a huge societal pressure against nerds, that didn't stop nerdy boys from doing what the want to do.

> Then some male privileged white lad

If it's a poor black women from the ghetto making the same argument, does it make the argument better?

> Wants to talk bias in an open way? Nope

If you dare say that: it's not only women that have issues in life or that we don't live in a patriarchy, people label you as fascist, sexist, racist etc. Want to talk about double standards in an open way? Nope.

> He's missed the point. He wants to talk about the very few who've travelled that unlikely journey made all they way to Google despite the obvious barriers that were in place before they were born.

Are you implying that only women have barriers?
This is a long standing pattern. Whenever a thread about a social justice topic gets too far away from the orthodoxy, it gets flagged and hidden. In some cases I've seen a thread without any noticable flags and with a high score nevertheless drop hundreds of places so it sits between week old content. The official response to the LambdaConf controversy was the most glaring example.

At this point the HN moderators are either incompetently letting the system get gamed for obvious political purposes by one particular camp, or they are quietly looking the other way when it goes down. Either way, it's a pretty open secret by now.
I don't agree with your implication that semantics aren't important in this argument.

What you refer to simply as discrimination is probably better characterised as discrimination by "morally acceptable" traits while your interlocutor would characterise it as discrimination by "morally irrelevant" traits. This, I think, is the heart of the debate. It's clear that discrimination is occurring. The real question of debate is whether or not it's acceptable.

It's politically untenable to admit that and so we do actually have to discuss semantics. After all, can you imagine having to say "I'm being sexist but it's okay, he's male." or being called a misogynist and saying one is proud of that fact?
California Court of Appeal Overturns Dangerous Right of Publicity Ruling
It's not impossible, it's called inverse reinforcement learning, where they learn a value function from an external demonstration. Then they use this value function for teaching the bot an action policy. Intuitively, the idea is to learn first what are a good state and a bad state, based on external demonstrations, then use that to teach the bot how to act.

This kind of learning is similar to GANs, where the discriminator learns from real data and the generator learns from the discriminator.
One thing that I've noticed about ethical or socially responsible investment firms is that they have a very specific list of ethical concerns that they offer to help investors use to make investment decisions (maybe the most commonly-expressed ones, maybe ones that are most similar to the founders' concerns, and maybe the ones that are easiest to measure). But of course there are lots of things that people feel passionate about, and some of them are more obscure and not the subject of major current divestment campaigns, and some of them are opposite of each other!

For example, some people find it very important not to invest in nuclear energy (often because of the risks of radioactive waste, among others), while other people find it very important to invest in nuclear energy (often because of the lack of greenhouse gas emissions) -- especially given the alternative of, say, hydroelectric power. Some people find it very important to divest from Israel, and other people find it very important to invest in Israel. Some people want to invest in developing countries, and other people want to promote employment in their home country. People might strongly disagree about which of {porn, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana} they don't want to invest in.

So, this hiring-oriented service has a similar set of challenges -- although it's easy to argue in both cases that the default is having would-be investors or employees be totally in the dark about every dimension, so it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

To give a "niche" example, two of my own traditional concerns are animal rights and free software, both of which could be relevant to investment and employment but both of which can be seen as obscure or marginal concerns in particular settings. But it's easy for me to notice that "promotes software freedom" isn't on the values list here, even though it's perhaps pretty relevant to technology jobs (maybe too few prospective employees or too few prospective employers have mentioned it?).

I was actually talking to someone a few years ago about the question of whether one could make a hyper-specific ethical investing firm that really gave people lots of fine-grained choices, and not just, say "environmental-friendly" (according to one single organization's criteria) or "good labor conditions" (again according to one single organization's criteria) or "not invested in vices" (is there a pattern here?). It might be courting far greater controversy to do that for employment and workplace culture, but it's easy to see that there are lots more details and more attitudes than are yet represented here. And also there's the straightforward question of who has assessed these things and whether different current and prospective employees employees would all agree.

Anyway, I don't mean to be super-negative here. It's a very interesting attempt at a very thorny, complex problem.
Most likely going for another Tesla playbook where wealthy customers (what's $25k on a $3MM+ house?) buy in and subsidize future development.
It looks like the creators of that site have never read this:

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

If they had, they'd know that trying to validate names is a losing proposition, and they should trust their users to get their own names right.
I say don't just move it out of Github - move the list to a blockchain. It's the obvious solution.
Agreed. It shows a far more optimistic view of how far one can get in 1 hour at 4pm in Atlanta, however my wife would consistently spend nearly 2 hours in traffic to travel 21.4 miles. Without traffic that is normally a 30 minute drive.
Normal roof mounted solar doesn't pay for itself unless you plan on staying in the same home for a longggg time.
The Camry alone sells 400,000 a year in the US, where the market for new cars was 17.55 million units last year.

If Tesla can pump out 500K globally, that's respectable, but hardly a death knell to the 80 million unit industry.

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-auto-sales-20...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/200002/international-car...
Care to elaborate where in the world artists don't have access to performance rights societies or copyright collectives?

See:

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

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

https://www.ascap.com/help/international/affiliated-foreign-...

Its up to the artist to register with a PRO or to affiliate with a publisher that will do so for them. ASCAP despite the A in the name will collect performance rights worldwide and anyone that meets the basic requirements is welcome to join regardless of what country you live in. See:

http://blog.songtrust.com/uncategorized/ask-songtrust-publis...
How to create backlinks for a new website
Creating more currency is not necessary, all that’s needed — if a single currency unit becomes too valuable because it becomes too scarce — is to increase divisibility.
She's so inspiring! I wonder if actually programming regularly kept her sharp mentally.
What OS do you use?
I didn't say that semantics were unimportant overall, I'm implying that its erroneous to assert that there's discrimination at play against men in this context because to imply so, supports the stale argument that policies favoring equal gender representation discriminate against men.
Doesn't seem to be phasing internet financiers: they're all in on this issue on Reddit.

Shorts take note: Tesla has access to dumb capital that you haven't necessarily factored into your models.
Great find! Some of her Word and Excel games in english: http://marchan.my.coocan.jp/pc_playroom/index.htm
What can we do about Facebook?
Sounds like fun, I took the time to apply on https://mhacks.org.

The mhacks.org site could use some work though:

- no password reset

- you lose your profile after saving it and re-navigating
In retrospect, a lot of Fahrenheit 451 seems like "cranky old man" territory, although Bradbury was only 33 when it was published. I recall a lengthy passage where Clarisse talks about how highways have destroyed respect for nature because it's impossible to see flowers at freeway speeds. Literally impossible, this wasn't just a metaphor--she also mentions how freeway advertisements have to be extremely long because ordinary billboards would just be a blur, which implies that Bradbury had never actually ridden on a freeway before despising them.
I mean... the sentiment is fantastic, and we need more hardware like this. Desperately. But...these just aren't really usable for its target audience. The biggest sticking point is the screen resolution. Come on, it's 2017, and 1280x800 just isn't enough.

The other sticking point is the processor. It's unfortunately necessary to use an ancient one to avoid Intel ME. This comes with a massive performance bottleneck and increased power consumption.

To build a properly useful free laptop requires a non-x86 processor, as it stands.

The P8400 is 9 years old. We cannot rely on decade-old technology for our computing.

On a side note, did anyone ever buy the KDE Slimbook?
That is not a problem because there will be competitors without this requirement. The problem is laws that are not well balanced and are biased towards interests of one party.
Ask HN: Docs for Devs?
This is a question for those of you with startups or working as freelancers: what do you do for docs (a.k.a. every developer's nightmare)? I know that I groaned whenever docs came due, but I also know that I judge the products I use by how useful their docs are.

Do you DIY your docs and just ship it? Do you outsource somehow? If not, would you spring for a service where you could purchase docs credits (say, for a fixed fee, you could get two full tutorials written)? Is learning to improve your docs skills on your radar?
Gaming skill is often divided into mechanical skill and decision making. 1v1 like this is dominated heavily by mechanical skill (frame-perfect last hits/denies, the absurd creep block, etc). Generally, it's the sort of thing you can "download skill" in (cheat at) because computers are very good at it.

Decision making is how quake pros can beat aimbotters, and starts to become very important in 5v5 DotA, particularly at a higher level. You'd see it in terms of drafting, ganks, map vision/control, map positioning, sneaking rosh, and other unexpected meta strats. Considering the real-time computation requirements, this is almost certainly a much harder problem.

So while it's entirely possible bot-team would win just through insane mechanics snowballing the game (ganking 0ms reaction times would be fun), or through good-enough decision making + insane mechanics, they could also be outplayed.
Yeah, just re-watched the clip, I think you're right. My mistake (the word "coached" confused me).
The magic here doesn't come solely from deep learning, but also from having access to massive simulation. Simulation can make an almost average human-level deep neural net become better than the best human. It happened for Go as well, where AlphaGo learned by self playing millions of games.

I think there is a deep link between simulation and AGI. An AGI would need to be able to imagine how people and objects would act and react in any situation, which is the same as the ability to simulate the world, or to imagine. We might be able to create small simulations like Dota2, but the real world will be much harder.
Watch the trends, not the current year.
But nothing prevents Admiral from notifying Github about a DMCA violation informally and Github removing the code.
I make sure that nobody knows who I am, or where I live in meatspace.
I loved Berlin... Over a decade ago, when room rent was 200€ a month in a massive apartment in Prenzlauerberg. Sounds like wages are stagnating, cos I was on 2.5k net starting as a junior and when I quit a few months later they offered to bump it asking if the competition had offered more. Wouldn't live there now long term. Probably still a great place for a year.
Value is not the criteria for currency - otherwise Magic cards and Beanie Babies would count.

Currencies must be widely accepted in exchange for goods or services. Crypto is promising, but it's not there yet.
Hn removes the reply for an increasing amount of time per level, I think.

But it's not "screw you" it's "I don't want to waste the bandwidth I pay for and am metered on with things I don't want to download and could potentially harm my computer". Viewing those ads costs me money as well, money which isn't going to the person serving the ads, not to mention the risk of malware.
They're coming soon.
I understand and sympathise with your friend's experience but:

> Some people defend the current contraceptive status-quo by reasoning "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."

Yes. This is how modern medicine works. Nearly every medication will cause an adverse reaction to a small number of people and there's really not much we can do about it. They produce a net good though so we use them.

Also, I'm certainly not a doctor but doesn't Nexplanon release the same hormones in "the pill", used by millions of women around the world?

I think the real problem is in this part:

> Her doctor didn't appreciate the significance of the main negative symptom she complained about (bleeding continuously for months), and injected her twice more anyways.

The problem here isn't hormonal birth control, it's an incompetent doctor.

> Except to the people who have them. Here's a report from a random redditor

She also seems to be a victim of an incompetent doctor.
I am sorry, I don't understand your point. You're using the word "self-discriminate" as it would be a thing - even though my whole point was that it isn't a thing.

I mean high school jocks (men) also "self-discriminate" against using computers. I don't see where I am one-sided. Everybody makes some choices, sometimes they are misinformed, and sometimes they change the choice later, and sometimes they regret.

Also you shouldn't forget that many men (lot more than women) tend to risk and make some really bad choices in their youth (like driving motorcycles, participating in crime..).

> Instead people insist on focusing on "hacker culture", "having coded since you were young" and "being the right kind of computer geek" long after finishing high school.

I don't think they are, particularly. I think if you feel that way, you just need to go out more. In any field, many people who are really good at it started at the early age.

Although you could perhaps claim that this feeling of wrong choices in youth affects women more, because they tend to self-doubt more. But, it's a feeling, it won't return you the time. Society can try to make people avoid bad choices, but only so much.
I've had a similar thing likely happen from about $100 of things off aliexpress. Air china handed off to the USPS and it showed up as delivered without me ever having signed for it. I argued with aliexpress, and they just saw air china had it marked as delivered and just closed the claim against me. If they can do this locally, they likely can pull this off from outside the US as well.
but NPR and PBS are not the same thing.
The inherent challenge, as I see it, is that if you manage to produce e.g. an electric car that’s not quite as good as a Tesla, you still have a car that can transport people from A to B. And if you have trouble selling your cars, you just lower the price until all your cars are sold.

With mining chips, if you have a chip that’s just half as efficient as the best one, your customers have zero incentive to buy your product, as efficiency is all that matters. An inferior car can still transport people, even though it’s not the best car, but a mining chip whose electricity cost is $5,000 to mine a Bitcoin that costs $3,500 is worse than useless (you might as well throw it out).

That’s quite a difference.

I’m not saying this makes your venture impossible, just that it’s an important aspect to consider.
That's no different than public feedback, though. It's not a problem specific to gossip.
You have it backwards. Being able to do it freely means that I have the right.
'Dear Mr. Google Manifesto': Epic Response from Chemical Engr, Corp VP, Mom of 5
No, but I'll might write it up at some point.

So much to do, so little time ;)
I don't have a link at hand, but there is a company offering a metal-roof-based solar roof product at about half Tesla's price. My limited understanding is that it looks like a metal roof -- said roofs having been growing in popularity.

I guess I should add that, as best I recall, they have not yet actually launched consumer sales, although I believe they did/do have a working product.

(Good, and properly installed) Metal roofs (non-solar) are... I seem to recall from 5 or 6 years ago, about twice the price of an asphalt shingle roof. But, good quality and properly installed, they can last 50 years. If this Tesla substitute were to have a similar lifespan and electrical output comparable to Tesla's or at least enough for self-sufficiency, I could see paying for it.

Perhaps a principal problem/consideration being how far technology will advance during that time and will it be desperately obsolete long before then. The other being, will the company be around to provide needed support for anything like that timeframe?
I've gotten counterfeit body wash (Shiseido Super Mild) and counterfeit microSD cards off Amazon, and, ironically, the only things I buy off amazon.com now are books.

Everything else I'd rather buy from the manufacturer (and pay the full shipping cost and not Amazon Prime) or a reputable distributor (digi-key/mouser for electronics, CS Hyde for films/tapes, etc).

Counterfeit items -- and the co-mingling of items "fulfilled by Amazon" -- ruined the whole experience for me.
Is Windscribe VPN Good to Use?