skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I could argue that Mr. Lynn is crying "sour grapes" over this, but he also came very close to a point Bryan Lunduke made recently about Google[1]. Google has the power to stop people using their products from making a living, and a collapse or compromise of Google's infrastructure would cause untold economic harm to the nation and world. If Google as an "information provider" fails (search, email, telecommunications, DNS services, cloud services, etc.) a lot of other businesses stop or collapse.

A healthy economy is a lot like a healthy ecosystem: some parts are weaker, some will fail when stressed, but allowing the system to react naturally to inputs will likely result in a better outcome. But when you encourage a monoculture, single stresses can result in a complete collapse[2]. We're experimenting with establishing monocultures in our economies with potentially even more impact than those of the 19th and 20th centuries (like Standard Oil) that inspired the anti-monopoly regulation and legislation: if Samsung were to shut down tomorrow, what would be the impact on the Korean, regional and world economies?

An all-powerful Google that can't accept criticism or action to "trim it back" to preserve the overall economy represents a danger and Mr. Lynn was right to point this out.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwzJlvx4ndk
[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/04/the-w...
This was my reaction - It is my understanding that "think tanks" are essentially a nice name for lobbying organizations. A google funded lobbyist being fired for criticizing the company he is paid to lobby for doesn't seem out of the ordinary. Not that i think it's good, but it sounds like a perfectly normal event given the current state of western politics.

Or am i mistaken and think tanks are usually politically neutral pure-research organizations?
He criticized a "corporation" one that gets criticized on HN somewhat often.

As for At-Will states, you can't fire someone for any reason, because there are employment protection laws. And, as anyone who has worked in positions of authority can attest, even if you have to fire someone, you build up enough evidence so that when you are sued, you can back up your claims.
The telecom industry lobbies state governments hard to limit government operated internet, especially public fiber.
>I pretty much only use them when they offer free food - combined with my insane amount of delivery credit, and I pretty much just pay to tip the driver.

This is basically every order on Postmates at this point. No one is actually paying their insane delivery fees. I worked as a driver for a few weeks in Berkeley and it was like clockwork. Postmates sends out a free credit promo, get a bunch of ultra cheap short orders, and make like $6 to deliver someone an Iced Tea. There's no possible way the economics can work out for this.
The whole think tank industry is like this. This is one of the main reasons why things like single payer don't have the intellectual backing of rigorous white papers and advocacy -- there isn't a whole lot of money to be made for corporations lowering the cost of healtcare.
Exit strategies aren't just for startups.
The article quotes an economist that says there is no substantial benefit to the state from deals like these:

> “There is virtually no association between economic development incentives and any measure of economic performance,” urban economist Richard Florida concluded in 2012. A study of his found “no statistically significant association between economic development incentives per capita and average wages or incomes; none between incentives and college grads or knowledge workers; and none between incentives and the state unemployment rate.”

And look, maybe this economist is wrong. But I'm not sure why the knee-jerk reaction is that a datacenter is so good that who cares if a deal like this is made. Shouldn't the people who make this deal have to prove why it is necessarily?

And if datacenters are so good for our society, why should Apple get the tax break and not everybody else? I'm quite sure there are other datacenters in Iowa provided the exact same benefits of this Datacenter while still paying the legal tax rate. I could also argue that this form of unfairness is itself a cost Iowa is paying when they make a deal like this.
Just as long as it's not big tobacco or big oil paying for research, right?
It's not even about them being unable to resist. Schmidt is on record saying that he feels that their success is a function of/reward for doing what's morally correct and that the company should use its power to push their morality/ideology (and that the market will reward them if they're right or won't if they aren't).

Thinking about this keeps me up at night.
I should definitely make a macro at this point:

Callback paradigm has not been used in node development for 3-4 years at this point.

return someHttpCall()
.then(response => someOtherHttpCall(response))
// Do 2 async operations in Parallel:
.then(response => Promise.join(
someCacheThing(response),
someDBThing(response)
))
.spread((cacheResponse, dbResponse) => sendBackToClient());

This isn't callback hell. Without creating or managing threads, I have established serial as well as an example of branched concurrent logic that is entirely nonblocking. Every promise is handled as a try catch, so error handling can be done at the end of the chain with a single `.catch`.

Clustered express application puts the performance well within what you would expect from Go/Phoenix, all of which are operating at an order of magnitude above Python/Ruby.
"Don't be evil" is still in the Google code of conduct.

Legal as Google's demand was it seems to qualify as evil or at least unethical.
And if the worst damage comes from positions like lineman and linebackers repeatedly hitting their heads on every down during the course of normal play, how do any of those changes fix that problem?
> We continue to iterate on LogDevice with the ultimate goal of contributing it to the open source community later in 2017.

Frankly, if it's the same license as React (BSD + PATENTS), I'm not interested.

Edit: Here come the facebook fanboys with the downvotes.
And what about other people that give to non-profits? Should they also be made to continue giving even if they no longer agree with what the non-profit is doing?
If "progressive" WA adopted "conservative" ID's tax regime, resulting in roughly ~$2.5b/yr extra revenue, WA would have much better infrastructure.

Local businesses like Boeing have been begging Olympia to invest, better maintain infrastructure (for as long as I remember). But those efforts are always rebuffed by the anti-tax jihadists.

Per Logic of Collective Action, the reason tax regimes should be normalized (local, state, national, international) is to minimize cheating (defecting).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
How to evaluate a space rocket launcher startup
I used to do double/triple monitors but it's easy to slip into the habit of swiveling the neck instead of the whole body, and over time, that could lead to injury. At least it did for me. Neck pain stopped a while after I went single-monitor. Well, it's still there, but definitely got loads better.

Personally, I work with netflix/youtube on for background noise so I can't attest to the attention stuff, but if you're feeling a little neck/shoulder pain, try single-monitor and see if it helps.
How so? Why would it benefit Google to fund outcomes that harm Google. How can a harm be a benefit?
jrowley's comment is a good start. In addition one could also suggest digital design for asics, but then I guess the thing is you have to either be at a university or work with tools from vendors like Cadence or Synopsys. But there is a free software called alliance which is supposed to work with ubuntu (I have never used it yet though... here it is https://soc-extras.lip6.fr/en/alliance-abstract-en/).

Maybe with the power of the internet we can create a guide :-)
Samsung secures self-driving car testing permit for California roads
This is highly dependent on the kind of work you do as a developer. A lot of times I'm just using one monitor and switch between windows and that's fine. Edit some text, run a build script, run some tests, commit to git. But when doing some serious debugging, e.g. remote debugging a kernel mode driver on a virtual machine, using two displays is almost mandatory.
Yes, petty in the same way that uou are pretty when yoi fired the painter you hired to paint your house when he starts to replace your roof.
I and the entire Open Markets team were let go because it’s not in Google’s interest to finance criticism of its business model. It’s as simple as that.

Right. Where's the scandal here? If you don't want someone or some company to have monetary power over you, then don't take money from them. I understand that it's not so simple, but at the end of the day this can't be surprising.

To wit...his prefacing comment says a lot:

No think tank wants to appear beholden to the demands of its corporate donors.

Operative word being - appear. In fact they all are beholden, of course, you just want to make sure not to appear to be.
The Perseids peak at around 60/hour, but I guess it's a lot less a couple weeks before.
I'd imagine that funding and investments are a way to pressure research to favor your stance as a company. While think tanks can operate under their own rules, as an investor you'd probably not want to spend more money if the result isn't helping you in some way.

Phrased a different way I think technically it's not a requirement to follow your investors' goals, but it's pretty much a necessity so your hands are tied.
Barry Lynn <=> Sergey Brin?!!
The tiles are copyright by Penrose. No one can use them.
How's it a market failure (markets not working properly) when bad regulation/ regulator regime is to blame. One should properly term it as 'Government Failure', don't you think so?
There is often a great deal of copy elision when passing things by value when the compiler can prove it the copying itself won't cause side effects.
NASA Supercomputing Strategy Takes the Road Less Traveled
> In fact the disease most discussed and studied has been Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy or CTE. The position most likely (nearly 50%) to be affected are the linemen[1], not the guys leveling or receiving the bone crushing hits, but the guys doing the hum drum blocking on every play.

This actually means there might be hope. The game could be modified to reduce the impact on the linemen. Reduce the distance the defense has to back off from the line of scrimmage, maybe even right down to zero or even a straight-up scrum. No lead-up to that first hit, they start out in contact. No lunge forward to close the gap between offence and defense.

Same gameplay happens - two lines of men trying to break through/protect the QB, but without that initial impact because they're already in a wrestling position.
The key factor in that report though is that it concludes that "Concussion rates highest for kids in rugby, hockey and football".

I'd guess its likely that American football as played in the NFL is a very different game to the one played by kids, and there might be virtually no correlation of actual risks.

Rugby is also very different between kids and professionals of course - my 5 yr old plays ripper rugby which involves no contact tackling but instead ripping a velcro tag off the opposing player. Great fun to watch!
> there isn't a whole lot of money to be made for corporations lowering the cost of healtcare.

I don't know if that's true. There are a lot of companies that would save money if healthcare was cheaper -- pretty much every company in America is a health-care consumer. It's just that benefits are diffuse and the downsides of lower-cost health care are concentrated.
Handling 1M Requests per Minute with Go
burn them down, burn it all down, dance in the flames, death to all of us rather than the continuance of corporate reign
Whether or not it's surprising is immaterial to whether or not it's good.
Like Smallshire mentions in the talk I think the way forward is gradual typing, like you have in e.g. TypeScript. Best of both worlds.
>What's the point of this convoluted system? It allows voters to split their vote between parties. They can vote for a local candidate from one party and cast their second vote for a different party.

That's not really the point of the second vote. If we would only have the first vote we might have 599 representatives that only were able to get 20% of the votes in their district (the remaining 80% being spread across other candidates with a vote share of <20%). With the second vote we ensure that at least half of the seats are distributed proportionally across the parties and smaller parties have a chance to get into the Bundestag.
> Otherwise, I always thought the concussion aspect was much less worst in the NHL than NFL, but maybe im wrong about that...

Maybe, but what we're discovering is that concussions aren't the only problem: you can get CTE even from the repeated sub-concussive hits that linemen get constantly. By focusing on concussions the NFL is dodging the issue.
I wouldn't take the statements about credibility at their face value. AFAIK it didn't seem like RBI's credibility got affected. Also, as other poster cited, most of those seem to be the opposition and they are just "concerns" rather than "facts".

With respect to poor losing jobs, that seems like a play around statistics more so than actual facts. 1.5 million out of 406.5 million lost jobs, which equals to 0.36%. Employment usually goes in cycles so we don't know how this relates to the previous year. Given that April is the end of financial year, could it be the case that people usually get fired during that time? I don't know.

I have no meat in this game. I would consider myself as an observer interested in knowing how it worked out. This whole debate is very polarised and it is hard to separate fact from fiction. I would take everything with a grain of salt. As an Indian growing up in the hopes of seeing a developed country, I was hopeful that this could actually be the catalyst that roots out corruption. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. Well, we keep dreaming on...
The scandal is that most of the policy research in the US is funded by supposedly-neutral think tanks which are funded this way— which means new laws will usually be designed to serve the big interests that fund think tanks.
The free speech amendment stops congress from passing a law that abridges freedom of speech. A non-disparagement clause in a private contract doesn't violate the constitution.
Anyone can voice a criticism. And ask others to assist.

Ask. Not compel. You no longer have freedom of speech if you are forced to promote ideas you don't believe in.
DoorDash actually pays a set hourly wage, trains their employees, and focuses on customer service. What a mind blowing concept.
Well, unless you're talking about a homomorphism with an inverse the term seems pretty good for me: the same (iso) shape (morphos) between server-side and client-side.
Football's core problem is still denial that this is an issue. Until that happens, real, concrete steps won't be taken to address it. Here are a few suggestions:

1) No tackle football before a certain age (to be determined by scientists based on brain development and how damaging a concussion would be). You can learn a ton about football, running routes, learning plays, getting in shape, etc. without hitting people.

2) Ban hitting. Everything should be a wrap around tackle. No more players running full speed and launching themselves into other players. Look at how few players actually try to tackle people.

3). Put padding on the outside of helmets and maybe shoulder pads. Current helmets are not doing nearly a good enough job of slowing down energy. They are designed to protect against fractures, but future football equipment should be designed to slow down impacts.

4) Make neutral zone a few yards long. Much of the worst blows happen to linemen who fire off into each other, particularly on running plays. While big hits get the most notice, it is actually those who are suffering routine head blows that are at the most risk.

5) Ban the quarterback sneak and any other similar play where linemen dive into each other in short yardage situations.

6) Ban players for unsafe hits. 15-yard penalties are not nearly enough for something that could cause someone to die very young.

7) Ban players for PEDs. Steroids and HGH permanently alter your physiology. PEDs are making players unnaturally big, strong and fast. Suspensions are not enough, because even if a player stops doing them, he may have made himself unnaturally big, strong and fast.

8) Allow defensive backs to hand check and other ways of playing defense that don't revolve around big hits. The passing game has exploded in the NFL, partly because it's so hard to defend against receivers. Receivers get more separation these days. Allowing hand checking closes separation and would limit the amount of passing.
Yeah I was thinking of that too, but didn't remember what it was called, so didn't say it. Very cool. Esp when developing static website (Hugo) it feels magical to see you changes appear instantly on the 2nd screen :)
It doesn't matter if the attacker steals the database of hashes because the database of registered users is also stored there in plaintext. The attacker/insiders would need to start logging the contact intersection requests, including the authenticated user making them, in order to see a social graph and how that changes over time. Cracking the hashes is only necessary to unmask the phone numbers.

Standard OTT messaging architecture guarantees the service will see message envelopes anyway, so it's not worth the trade off of deploying PIR schemes of the differential or computational variety. Look for stuff by Ian Goldberg. Percy++ is a practical example you can run yourself.

For OTT contact sync the reasonable thing to do is just send the phone numbers. Blinding them by truncated hash is a nice gesture. What's not cool is sending all the other fields of the address book along with it.

We know and can easily verify that Signal is being good. But what can we do about less trustworthy services? The phone would need to apply permissions. Like, allow/deny filters of which fields of contacts or contact categories each app may have access to. An address book firewall, essentially. Considering how important messaging apps are in our lives and the amount of time we spend with them I think such granularity is warranted.
he worked for a nonprofit to which Google donated

Ipso facto, he worked for Schmidt/Google.
I could not agree more, but Google has no incentive to make it better. Why would they waste the time when you have practically no choice but to use what is provided?
Except Lynn wasn't a Google employee, so the at-will employment analysis doesn't apply.
The problem of defencemen getting plastered was not just the trapezoid. A lot of it had to do with the way icing worked. It used to be the d-man had to "touch" the puck for it to be icing, this always resulted in d-men and forwards going nearly full speed after the puck to either get the icing call or to beat it out.

The NHL has done away with this and has "no touch icing" where the d-man only has to skate to the hash marks (middle of the circles), that's removed a considerable amount of the high-speed collisions
Sooo... if anyone at google wants to make the 'I feel lucky' link for 'streisand effect' go to this article, that would be a great easter egg.. just saying..
The low-fat myth is still going strong, especially when it comes to consumer products.

My wife has a very hard time fining yogurt with normal fat content. We've settled on a product made with whole milk by Stonyfield that is available in most grocery stores in Colorado.
Lots of LSD
And anyway, fighting is not where the injuries happen. Ugly tackles to the head are the bad thing.
Good point.

I guess it is a fair assumption that the neural network is trained using a corpus of logos that already look "well made" to the human eye.

It is possible there may not have been any/many samples that would be considered bad.

It would be interesting to see how this neural net evaluates a bad logo, using a tool such as LIME.
Any legitimate reason maybe...

There's an Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode that covers this question, if you've seen it maybe you will remember the big "H" on the box is for "Hornets" so we all know it's a box full of hornets...

I mean, you could try mailing someone a box of hornets with a big "H" on it and tell them it's a present and the H stands for "Happy Housewarming," but you were talking about legitimate reasons to mail bees, right?
I've been looking at getting into MTG, is it not possible to just buy a deck, and be done with it? If I do that, will I just get crushed on a regular basis?
Agreed - I enjoy Magic, but it's expensive to even become competitive at the local level.

Living card games (FFG makes several) can still have expansions packs, but everyone has access to the same card pool and all the cards are equally available (no randomization).

Android:Netrunner is a great example (though the original Netrunner from the 90's is like Magic), but they also make a Game of Thrones game, Call of Cthulu, and Star Wars living card games :) You could buy a complete set of cards for any of these games for less than a top-tier Magic deck :)
Using JMAT to Analyze Memory in JRuby
Think tanks are rarely neutral; they're generally organized around a set of ideological principles. New America isn't really a pro-Google lobbying organization, except in the sense that by shackling themselves financially to Google, they've rendered themselves incapable of criticizing Google even when Google contravenes their principles.

As a lobbying strategy it would be a little like Google trying to take financial control over Cato or Heritage, not to get those think tanks to spew pro-Google stuff, but to ensure that the primary conservative and libertarian voices in Washington were unable to criticize Google.

(Cato's relationship with the Koch brothers gets similar criticism).

It's definitely fraught! But New America isn't a victim here.
There's the con. There is no independence from funding sources unless you have so many that you can ignore losing one. Now if one were to turn that critical lens to the rest of the advertising funded media...
Even if they are politically neutral why would the think tank expect to be funded by the target of their criticism? If they are truly neutral why would they not seek out diverse funding sources?
Regarding concentration of corporate power and economics, Nick Hanauer was on the 1A yesterday [1] and had relevant commentary. He also brought up problems with inequality a few years ago [2] and last month [3].

[1] http://the1a.org/shows/2017-08-30/zillionaire-to-other-zilli...

[2] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfork...

[3] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/18/to-my-fell...
That comparison doesn't make any sense.

Eric Schmidt didn't hire Barry Lynn. New America did.

Perhaps a better analogy: The same way I would be petty, if I fired a painter I hired, because he showed up with wearing a Colin Kaepnernick Jersey and my neighbor the police officer, who lets me borrow his lawnmower, was furious.
Skimming over the comments, it seems many people defines "free speech" as if they lived in utopia
I find it implausible. Ice hockey players are not the kind of dude who get scared by a bit of pain after being hit. If they would, they would not played hockey (which hurts even outside fights and gets you injuries often).
Also let's take into account that players only get these salaries for a few years, on average. NFL average career lengths are brutally short: 3.3 years according to the NFL Players' Association.
It was a pun on the clap system and "Gone With the Wind".
It's going to be a long list if we discuss all the things Google does as 'good' or 'bad'.