skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This demo (starting at 13:06) shows how the SimAntics visual programming language works, and how objects publish advertisements for their available actions (which show up on the pie menus that the user can select, or which the characters can autonomously choose to perform).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs&t=13m6s

Advertisements appeal to characters based on their current motivations (feelings, hunger, etc), their distance from the object, their relationship with the object (so you prefer to sleep in your own bed), and SimAntics scoring functions that can perform arbitrary calculations.

Then it shows how all that works together in the "Food Chain", a complex Rube Goldberg device comprised of many different objects, that compels characters to perform the many sequential steps required to prepare and eat food (when then compels them to poop, which makes them need a shower, which makes them tired, and so on).

The main loop of the "autonomy" algorithm that decides what to do next (if you don't tell them what to do) searches for the top several advertisements with the highest score, and then chooses randomly between them. If they always chose the top scoring best thing to do, then their lives would be too mechanically optimized, lacking in whimsey and spontaneity, and anything the user told them to do would deviate from the optimal path, making their lives less efficient, more miserable.

So for better game play and happier users, we randomly dumbed them down a bit so they needed the user's guidance to have a better life (but we didn't make them so dumb that users couldn't fuck up their lives even more, either).

http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=SimAntics
Fake Entrepreneurship
Netflix at 10$ is severely underpriced relative to any competition. I've been curious just what their next move is.
Also a Stack Exchange! https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/
Exactly this. I was fortunate enough to stay in one place for K->12, but in the world I grew up in it was totally normal for young adults to move for college, then after college, then a few more times before settling down, then again for retirement. My parents did it, my grandparents did it (including as refugees when they were children), my aunts and uncles are all over.

Soon my parents will move for retirement, and my original "village" will hold nothing for me anymore. So it goes. I have a few friends from high school or college in basically every city, and we meet up when we happen to be in the same place. Family picks a place and all flies there for Christmas. It works out.
Facebook sneaks into China with a new app
> I find it hard to believe if you're a programmer

Some people work better with reference documentation, books and their brain than SO "answers".

Google for "complex programming questions" is laughable and honestly a bit insulting to the profession.
Funny, staying in the dead-end town you were born in with your grandparents' knitting circle supervising your dating life is an even greater dystopia to me.
> The services that they provide are so above and beyond anything from any other provider that to not use them puts you at a great disadvantage.

Five years ago I would have agreed but at this point most of the advantages offered by Google's services are non-essential conveniences. Google's competition has caught up faster than they have added new 'must have' features.
The ones you encounter in the U.S. are the cream of the crop. It gets very spotty when you look at western-based outsourcing shops like Accenture or Deloitte and then when you go to Persistent, Capgemini or Infosys it's a shitshow.

Fundamentally, the problem is that these firms are used for work that is not valued by either the customer or the implementor. The primary concern is cost. If you are a developer for a tech company working on core products, you drive revenue and are important. If a feature you implement is marginally better than the competition, your firm can win the market and, due to economies of scale, the revenue gain will be huge. Because revenue is sensitive to small differences in quality, you want the best possible developers that you can afford.

As a result, developers viewed as part of the firm's comparative advantage are paid well and treated well. But if you are a DBA working at walgreens, then you are not a part of the comparative advantage of the firm. If you are marginally better at your job, revenues will not go up. You are a cost that will be outsourced in a heartbeat if the firm could save a dollar. Or like doing landscaping at Google. Regardless of how awesome Google is, they are going to look at their landscaping expenditures purely as a cost. Revenues will not go up if you do a better job. Thus they don't care about getting the best possible landscaping, they want adequate landscaping, like water running out of a tap.

That's the type of work that is passed on to these outsourcers. It may be technical in nature, but there is little to no perceived marginal gain in the work being of a higher quality than the minimum amount necessary to be fit for use: maintenance of products that companies no longer want to invest in, but they have service contracts in place that require maintenance. The goal is to minimize cost while not breaching the contract. Or bespoke work in the B2B space where you don't get the type of economies of scale that result in a meaningful revenue bump when one particular piece of code exceeds expectations. In all these things, the driver is the cheapest talent such that the output is adequate.

That means that these jobs are not rewarding to the developers who do them, and so these firms have huge problems with turnover and keeping good developers motivated. Those developers who remain are the ones who don't mind working on code that no one cares about, being paid poorly to do it, and being treated as expendable. In other words, the least motivated, passionate developers are the ones who remain. It is no wonder that they will tend to be the least talented.
How much money has Google made from me?
Excluding things I know I pay for, such as storage and hardware, how much has Google made from me in the past 10 years? Across search, ad networks, GMail, Chrome, Android, etc.
Bonus question: Does Google know?
Those could just be video-scraping bots with a Firefox UA
> Wouldn't it cost more than $20 million just to get something into LEO with existing technology?

Don't underestimate the PR value. Space Ship One cost $25M to win the $10M X-Prize, but having a big prize can capture the imagination of the media and by extension the public.
You can, however, buy your own compressor.

They're not cheap, but they're also not all that expensive.
I just signed up for HBO Now. The streaming does not work as good as Netflix. Neither do the browse/search features. It would be nice to have a streaming platform that just worked, and was a marketplace for all the content providers. I couldn't even sign up for HBO now via webpage, I had to download their app, just to sign up. Terrible UI. Terrible platform, but its the only option to watch their content [legally].
Thank you for proving my point
Philly company digitizes 25,000 old records and they're free to download
Truly a big loss.
I didn't say otherwise. I like paying $10 for an Uber ride from someone scared I'll give them a bad rating, instead $15 from a surly, unaccountable cab driver. I'm just pointing out that if you think that's a problem, blame the people responsible for it.
Government work does not attract bright, creative people. It attracts people who want security, and this tends to result in bureaucracy, a lot of process and rules, and very little thinking or risk taking. Anything that doesn't fit "we've always done it this way" will be viewed with fear.
I think the title is a bit misleading. Nowhere on the linked page does it actually say "anonymous" other than that several people on 4chan's /g/ board who don't use names/tripcodes/whatever-the-term-is - "anons" - asked about it.

That being said, a full browser from scratch is a pretty cool idea. I don't think that it'll get to the point where I'd be fully able to replace my "normal" browser with it, but really cool nonetheless.
I recently had an existential crisis reading an Egan book where a brain modification allows people to control the collapse of quantum waveforms and therefore the protagonist can "smear" into infinite possibilities and then "collapse" to the one where the desired outcome occurs. Do we already exist across an infinite number of dimensions and we are just limited by our ability to comprehend a single possibility? it's a fun thought.
I ask for them occasionally when making a pre-seed investment and the entrepreneur isn't well known to me.
What does any of that have to do with the demonization of people who summarize empirical evidence about psychology and human behavior?
404 site not found.
To Da Moon (for the 5th time)
Out of curiosity, what are you doing with 6 TVs? Even when I lived with my parents we only had two.
You could say that you go down a tree of exploration on Wikipedia. https://xkcd.com/214/
GEF as well: https://github.com/hugsy/gef

Voltron adds awesome views, GEF adds a lot of handy functionality. I use both (often together)
The solution is, of course, for Netflix to open up to pricing differentiation. There is no reason for HBO Now to be offered outside of Netflix other than haggling over pricing.

What's wrong with Netflix rising above the rabble and focusing instead on providing excellent user experiences and rock-solid world-class reliability?

Just put in a checkbox somewhere that, when checked, added HBO for $X/month. Boom, it's opt-in and a-la-carte, the holy grail desired by cord-cutters everywhere.

At this point it's only Netflix's fault that the content owners are running away and it's within their capability to remedy the situation while keeping everybody happy. Let the children have their candy!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14960597
The obvious next step is to make an API that takes an input text and minimally modifies it to evade the filter, adversarial example style, and then package it as a chrome plugin, like grammarly.
Divorce and Occupation
The Daily by NYT is good daily listening before hitting bed, though Barbaro tries a little too hard developing his style.

Planet Money is well produced and entertaining.
What do you have to say to the other two responses that debunk your claim?
Big Beef would have been much better.

But, yeah, I'm over the Big $company monikers.
Thanks swatkat for a good gist. I found it odd that the nytimes mentioned a yoga study which I would guess was not among his super critical contributions and the purpose of which may have a fun study/angle to it like Alan Shepard playing golf on moon.
We could save a lot of money and time by replacing the Supreme Court and Congress with one person each. Do you think there might be any disadvantages?
Depends on what you deem suitable. If you're aiming to get people who have a strong desire for exploring and creating systems then you'd likely end up with more people with Aspergic traits, a majority of which are male.
What's wrong with eating fake meat if that's what you like?
It's really not that hard to remove the "mobile" part of the URL before submitting it.
Damn right
But why? The page looks good on desktop.
Neither me nor my girlfriend own a car or a house (and hopefully we never will). Why would either of those be an issue? Plenty of people date and live together in apartments.
Sounds on target. Anyone in the US can start a business based solely upon churning credit cards. For illustration purposes: Let's say you swipe at the start of the billing cycle, you now have about 60 days to repay. We will also assume that you have 10 acquaintances willing to swipe for you, each with a credit line of 80k, you suddenly got 800k credit to start. The more being spent, the higher the credit line offered by the banks. Add the incentive of credit card points/cash-back, and it's no wonder people are blinded by the risks of swiping. The end result? Small business owners will take heavy risks with an outsized amount of capital.
QNial7 – A new open-source release of NIAL
> Peter Thiel, one of the ideological leaders in the Valley, wrote in 2009 on a blog affiliated with the Cato Institute that “since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Thiel is definitely a business leader, but is he really an ideological leader? If I recall correctly he was decidedly in the minority when he came out for in support of Donald Trump.
I'll do some more research on this, since you took the time to post. My initial reaction after doing a bit of searching on the author is that he appears to have a financial interest in promoting soy-based foods.
The article said he felt indifferent about his previous and current careers.
I'm always willing to look at evidence. I'm a little concerned about the objectivity of the author of the papers linked to.
I stopped trusting Google after they removed Google reader, removed rss feeds from a lot of their services, removed blog search, removed discussion search, and then tried to shoehorn everyone into Google+.

These changes collectively did just as much(in fact, I think more) as twitter and facebook to silo-ize the web.
One of the indigenous boats of the region, the umiak, can be 30 feet long or so and can carry 20 people (or a fair amount of cargo).

They're easily big enough to cross the Bering Strait (in fact, before the Cold War, they did it routinely) and can be constructed completely from local materials (sea mammal hide covering, whale bones and driftwood for ribs -- modern umiaks often use metal fasteners, but traditional ones didn't).

Alaska Natives still prefer them for some tasks (e.g., whale hunting).
The worst part of the information age is arbitration by unreasonable and impenetrable algorithms rather than humans

The thing is, people only tend to notice it when it affects them personally (either they are the victim of the algorithm, or someone they know/like/support is). The world has long worked on irrational biases, which now are being used as the training data for decision-making systems which are subsequently declared to be "objective" because people believe an algorithm can't be biased. And increasingly, the mark of privilege is having access to a system -- applications, interviews, customer service, even courts -- which will use human judgment instead of an unreviewable algorithm.

For more on the topic I suggest the book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil.
look at the stories and when they're released... for example when travis was confronted in a hotel... there were like 4 people counting Travis.

so it was either one of them or someone they told that leaked... pretty simple regression analysis to eventually figure out that story after story with a certain group is getting out. then you have to figure out why and then it's... the present.
> i'm sure there are some people are responsible enough to never incur a finance charge from a credit card by always paying their monthly balance. I've never actually met one of those people. I used to say I was one of those people, but in reality if you had asked to look at my statement history I would have been embarrassed by how many times I ended up paying interest charges for things I probably shouldn't have purchased in the first place.

This is a really bizarre assertion: my bubble is such that I've literally never met someone (that I'm aware of, just as with your claim) who _doesn't_ pay their credit cards off in full each month. Hell, I don't think I've ever done anything but set auto-pay for my credit cards, and would turn it off on the rare occasion that I decided to use it as it was intended, as a liquidity buffer. (The difference between us being that I'm not narrow-minded enough to assume that this tells me something about credit cards in general as a product).

> Two years ago my wife and I cut up our credit cards, closed those accounts and never looked back. Initially that change hurt my brain and went against everything I thought I knew was normal. It was one one of the best financial decisions we ever made.

If you were having so much trouble, why not just use auto-pay from your bank account? I don't really understand this urge to universalize your inability to use credit responsibly to somehow claim that credit cards in general are a net negative. I don't mean "irresponsible" as an insult here: I don't keep desserts in the house because having to go out and get dessert when I want it is the most effective way for me to maintain my healthy diet in the face of my one dietary willpower weak spot (a wicked sweet tooth). But I don't justify my weakness by claiming that we'd be better of if dessert never existed[1].

[1] To be clear, I'm aware that the modern role sugar plays in most people's diet is unhealthy: I eat (non-fruit) sweets about once a week and I'm pretty happy with that level of consumption. To me, desserts are a delightful part of life, if you're adult enough to use them responsibly (excluding those unfortunate enough to have severely bad dietary habits from childhood: the deck is stacked against them physiologically).
Most of this short article is guilt-by-insinuation talking about things other people or companies did. And it seems like it's also missing a "nut graph" where it explains what Google is supposed to be doing wrong.

(Although, probably the professor who wrote the article didn't write the headline.)
Bitcoin Surpasses $4,000, Reaches Another Milestone
Interesting insights... thanks to you and parent. I have been thinking about this for a while. It feels very broken.
A good friend used to say "Everyone's life is just one or two degrees away from a Jerry Springer episode"

I think a lot of people watch that kind of "reality" TV just to make themselves feel better about how screwed up their own lives are.
Very interesting concept, nice presentation! It will be valuable when lots of experts start adding knowledge to it.
Ip options make it through the net/core just fine. It's generally edge networks where the ip option filtering occurs. This could be restored...so if someone wanted to suggest a backwards compatible extension to IPv4 that might be cool.
Add it to the list on Wikipedia!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers
This study might be a better source, but I am no expert in biology.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)3...

This has a laymen's explanation
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/10/16125654/st...

Still a bit confused.
Song Exploder, Coding Blocks, Strangers (really good series of long conversations with Trump voters began not so long ago, but haven't check in on it for a while), Judge John Hodgman, Front End Happy Hour, Bullseye, Jordan Jesse Go!, More Perfect, 99% Invisible, Hidden Brain, Oh No Ross and Carrie. In general lots of NPR stuff and the following networks: Maximum Fun, Earwolf, Radiotopia.
I am an expert in my field now. It is indisputable. It took me less than 10,000 hours because of the other work I did.

You are indeed missing the point.
It enables the coder to engage in some late binding without engaging in a lot of casts or more elaborate metaprogramming: the enum index used for assignment is itself an assignable value and therefore can be passed around and manipulated if the algorithm needs it. It's a very intentional tradeoff of structure and long-term clarity for a faster turnaround to make design changes.

I haven't even checked to see if the final program uses it. It's the kind of thing, though, that you might go in thinking, "maybe I will need that", and it doesn't add too much overhead to your prototype.
This is just speculative but the Bitcoin fork was probably the best thing to happen to the price of bitcoin.

http://amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/08/07/bitcoin-cash-bch-h...
It is arguable that my job was about equal in viability to either becoming a PGA pro or a pro golf instructor along the way.
Bitcoin surpasses 4,000 US$
Current lead dev here, Oh wow an HN thread. AMA
Plenty of these US persons aren't even migrants, just individuals that happened to be born to (a) US citizen(s).
Rush hour seems just as bad on public transit: incredibly crowded trains, have to wait several trains to cram onto one, trains are stop-and-go through the tunnels because they're running too close together, etc.

We need to actually reduce our transit needs (build taller buildings closer together) and spread out our commute times.
Just put it behind e.g. nginx
An easy answer would be that everything is more pronounced while tripping on LSD
so what do you do with the people?
Inquiring minds want to know: what list?
True. Many have never had any contact with the US or a US institution yet if the IRS ever learns of their existence they receive notice of overdue taxes.
I work remote for Silicon Valley type companies but live in a location very similar to the author's New England vacation home. I try to buy locally and often joke that I'm slowly siphoning money out of the tech bubble and re-purposing it here.

All joking aside many parts of this country are struggling and I think we need to come up with more local solutions.
Open source software should come with a support contract, and the government can easily change contractors, which is not the case with the proprietary software.
No, those are all policy choices we made.

Policy choices that

- encouraged capital mobility

- tax advantaged capital vs labor

- gave an ever larger share of the national income to the ultra rich

- to not enforce regulations against allowing unlimited supply of taxi cabs.

- to subsidize walmart to the tune of $6.2B in 2013 [1]

- to bail out banks and screw mortgage holders

- to allow banks to get so large they implicitly carry the backing of the US government and then turn around and go gambling, keeping all the profits and dumping the losses off onto you and me

- to allow Amazon not to charge tax and undercut local businesses for most of their history

- to subsidize amazon with the USPS [2]

I'm not saying any of these are necessarily right or wrong, but they weren't programmers. They were choices we as a society made via our representatives.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...

[2] http://fortune.com/2017/07/16/amazon-postal-service-subsidy/
Soy-based foods have essentially no impact on testosterone levels in men at the typical levels of consumption: https://examine.com/nutrition/is-soy-good-or-bad-for-me/

You'd have to basically almost be subsisting off of soy to start to see effects.
Title is definitely misleading. Nor do I think the project will stay under the netrunner name as there's a distro with the same name.

The goal now isn't a browser but a framework that is easily modified, well documented and can be embedded in other projects.

We realize how much work a real browser is but if you look at the source of WebKit, blink or servo, it's a huge mess. We're trying to be low dependency and multiple interface, perfect for scripting.

Our web page targets are simple just 4chan/g and stackoverflow. But we also have plans where this framework can also be used for document viewing and editing.

I'm thinking of the project as more of an electron replacement. But we'll see where the future takes us.

Tabbed browsing by the end of this month is on track.
It will be able to, we're planning a configureable key mappings.
This seems like a false dichotomy. There is nothing preventing a human staff from declining to provide an explanation, nor is there any reason a machine learning algorithm couldn't summarize its reasons.

The issue isn't AI vs human, it's transparent vs opaque.