skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IRBs for psychology really do seem needlessly bureaucratic. This is a case where a controlled experiment is not allowed, but the corresponding natural experiment would be (They would likely have gotten quick approval to investigate long-term outcomes of patients who had charted bipolar on this test). This is not the only time that I've heard of professional psychologists not being allowed to do something considered mundane and ethical as a course of their job if it were part of an experiment.

Yes I am aware of trauma caused to people in not just Nazi experiments but in many post-war studies (many of which were of dubious value). It seems like at some point we should decide one of the following:

A) Psychology has the potential to significantly alleviate suffering, so it's worth a risk of small harms in order to collect good data.

B) Psychology doesn't have the potential to significantly alleviate suffering, so we shouldn't do any of these studies.
Futures and Monoids
The part about Article 9 is pretty much irrelevant for antitrust considerations, because that's not criminal law.
Yes and hihats. But how am I to tell now that I have high frequency tinnitus?? Blasted drummers.
While Google is definitely nice and useful, I think that they, just like any company, are trying to "improve" their bottom line. And they seem to be doing just fine without also trying to do shady stuff: https://www.forbes.com/pictures/mlf45kijd/google/#10b28b8029...
It’s the same reason downsampling 4K to 1080p looks better than shooting in 1080p.
Why the real difference for Insurance will be the UX
Yes, life would be pretty miserable without clean running water and sewerage.
Are you more or less forced to buy a Toyota simply because all your friends drive a Toyota? Is the majority of roads exclusive to Toyotas? If you question a business decision of Toyota, or a design of their car, can you then sell said car and purchase one from another brand with minimal impact on your daily life (Other than the fact that you have to sell and buy a car)?

Clearly it's not just about revenue numbers here.
One reason might be performance on low powered devices.
I think the type of music you are listening to assists with being able to differentiate. To me (much rock, blues, guitar music) 128kbps MP3 sounds like somebody chewed it first. Cymbals and bizarre snares that sound like the snare is now made of paper indicate the low bitrate.

But 256+ and I certainly cannot tell the difference reliably.
You could probably buy a house on that salary at a reasonable commute distance to Perth CBD.
He bases his metrical geometry on “quadrance” (squared distance) and “spread” (squared sine) rather than distance and angle measure.
How long ago did you contact them? The recent activity on the repo issues seems to indicate a change of heart on their part.
Decoding electric skateboard Firmware
It makes sense to treat ∞ ≡ 1:0 as a “number” in the context of projective geometry, the Riemann sphere, etc.

The quarrel Wildberger has is not with the proportion 1:0, but with the concept of a limit.
That is an image of two painters in protective clothing painting a Streetview car at the CeBit as an art project a few years ago (2010?). What do you want to tell me with that?

Also, what is wrong with a company which improves lives to also improve it's bottom line? I prefer that to an openly hostile company who destroys life that improves it's bottom line.
I don't understand the synergies of AWS within Amazon. Amazon.com is probably one of the biggest clients, but probably not even the biggest. If they were to split up AWS from Amazon, the entities could be worth more than combined. AWS would lose restrictions of companies that don't like Amazon while Amazon.com could still access the systems.
I'm not sure how it's not even more "silly" then. Investing in additional infrastructure, equipment, and effort, when all you need to do is turn down the compressor ratio in the mix... Sounds silly to me.
And perhaps too loud for humans?

I only say this because most people are happy listening to music on CDs but when in the presence of a live band (eg an orchestra) it is suddenly obvious how incredibly loud it is. My brother is a drummer and I find it incredibly loud; I am a bass player and I don't play loud although he sometimes complains that there's "too much bass". Perhaps we just go deaf in our relative audio spectrum.
As a Pratchett fan I welcome his wish as it means his legacy is left as he had intended it to be written.
It's interesting the parallels I see between this and right to die.

He didn't want to destroy his work whilst he could still work. But if he waits too long and misses the opportunity to take action whilst in good health he may lose control over it. Without the other limiting factors - this feels like a very easy call. I'm thrilled that he trusted people to see his wishes through - and as importantly that they've shown themselves to be deserving of said trust
Crowdsourced Gaming of Google Translate Dubs Kim Jong Un “Mr. Squidward”
>If the car is somewhere it can't receive the update then its not going to work after the due date until it returns to an area with cell coverage.

The car can't move till it moves? I spy a catch-22...
A brief guide to UX niches and specialities
How to Copy Any DVD to Your Laptop
Peeking into data would be risky and could be detected. But evaluating server logs is possible without affecting the user. If you know what servers target.com uses and evaluate their load, you can probably learn a lot about their business.
If Terry had expected us to ignore his wishes, how would we have acted differently in life? Would he have destroyed them himself just in case? Would he have done that before completing The Shepherd's Crown, or even an earlier book?

I honestly don't know, but it's worth asking the question. That's how we can expect the next Terry Pratchett to act, if we ignore this Terry Pratchett's wishes.

(I should note that even if the answer is that he would have shrugged and let us release his unfinished works, I still think we should obey his wishes. Terry belongs to Terry, no one else has a right to him.)
I saw a TV programme a year or two ago which was discussing the increase in hurricanes etc in the Gulf of Mexico area.

They were saying that the storms aren't increasing due to global warming but are actually regressing back to their natural levels. The previous decades of pollution had been suppressing the storms and by cleaning the air the storm ferocity is heading back to normal.

I can't see the article at the moment but I think it was Cloud Lab on the BBC, they floated around on an airship.
> If Google eats all those sites and services up, what stops them from doing all sorts of nasty stuff once they're in the dominant position later on?

And if I had wings, I could save me the airline fares. There is zero indication of Google actually being a Bondesque supervillain organization out to destroy the world.

> How are the little guys supposed to compete with premium-space on Google's search pages? Nothing on this planet is a stronger marketing engine than that.

Back in 1997, I used Altavista for search, sometimes Metacrawler, very rarely Yahoo. I got a hint from a friend about this new thing called Google - back then, they were the underdog. They surprised me with their vastly better search results. I never looked back to the "stronger marketing engines" that was Yahoo. Or Metacrawler. Or Altavista.

In truth, marketing engines mean shit if your product is bad. Google today is the company that gives people what they want, at a reasonable quality. If you are a little guy, you can compete if you are better than Google.
The code that does anything in mine is just

$('*').filter(function() {
var pos = $(this).css('position');
return ( pos === 'fixed' || pos === 'sticky')
} ).toggleClass("_zapfix");

where _zapfix is a class where things are hidden and $ is jquery.
Defensive would fall under strategic.
ZFS autotunes memory allocation based on how much ram you have, if you have 128GB ram free, ZFS will use that. In fact all operating systems eat GB's of free RAM just like ZFS.

Software raid has a larger write penalty, that is why you see slower write performance versus using hardware raid. As I said earlier, writing directly to memory helps. Recommended read: http://rickardnobel.se/raid-5-write-penalty/
Bullshit.

If my mechanic wants to publish a paper on wear-and-tear on 4 cylinder engines using just the information he gleaned from doing work on cars that I (and others) paid him for, he has caused zero damage to me versus just doing the work on my car.

The same applies here. Patients come in for treatment, and they provide exactly the same questions as if they weren't doing research.
Putting aside his dying wishes, why would it matter if there's a "highest bidder" at play? All commercial literature involves highest bidders and people make money who've never read a word of it, and what do we readers care as long as we get to enjoy the work itself?
“Nearly 4000 papers written using the 635 GB of Cassini data by researchers”
Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
Looks like the author fixed the C translation following your comments:

y = rndval & 0x000FF; /* Y = low 8 bits */
x = (rndval & 0x1FF00) >> 8; /* X = High 9 bits */

However, given that the assembly is verbatim from id-software's git, I guess those extra instructions are part of history now.
Lest you suffer the posthumous indignity of the world discovering the designs are coded in C# ;-)
Would it perhaps be because the bluetooth speakers typically cannot reproduce bass below a certain range and so play the harmonics of the bass note or use the resonance of the item they are placed on to "produce" the bass note? In truth you are not hearing the bass note - you are hearing the harmonics and your brain is making up the missing low note.
Show HN: This month's most popular Golang projects
That does it. I'm not sharing my Hodge Conjecture solution, either!
Never reading a Guardian story again, crypto-communists - no other word for them, pretty much every day some kind of idiotic leftist agenda is being pushed.
IncludeOS on Solo5 and ukvm
This development is probably unrelated to AirBnB. People go to big supermarkets or shop online instead of going to specialised merchants (e.g. fishmongers). Small stores have been dying since a decade in most European and North American cities.
Fill out this 40 page form requesting for an exemption to the no-pen rule. In 3-5 years we will deny the request due to increased risks of patients choking on the more flexible pens.
For cases like this there should be Long Bearded Commissioner who decides to split the country in half - one side would get the papers and the other would pretend they were destroyed. Each citizen should be given a choice in which reality to live in.
The world could be a lot more fine though - we as a global society are largely still with in the age of superstition.

Would have been great to possibly break out of that before our lifetimes, and I'd guess writing could have played a big part in that.
Sure these super/hypermarkets are a thing for long time now.

I know them since I can think.

What has changed in the consumer market is delivery.

I mean I can buy a huge amount of stuff from all over the world via Amazon and get many thinks delivered at the next day for just 60€ a year prime costs. This is as insane as the hypermarkets were back in the 70s I think.

And it gets better every year.

With self driving trucks we will get even more stuff around the world for less money.

I think this is especially interesting, because it not only gives us much nice things, but also it makes the world smaller. We start to identify more with people around the world, because we can reach them more easily.
I'm really annoyed that Pope John Paul's II wishes were not respected by his life long friend and right hand - Cardinal Dziwisz - Pope asked him to burn all his notes after his death, which the cardinal promised, and then released all the notes in a book after pope's death. I can "sort of" get his reasoning - that these notes were extremely valuable to the church and people in general - but a personal wish, especially such as this, should be respected in my opinion.
Ethereum DApp development
The problem with specialized committees that review and approve something is that they have absolutely no incentive to allow the new thing to go forward and every incentive to drag it into the ground with requests for more and more changes and precautions.

Well, except when they are paid per review in which case they just rubber-stamp everything.
Please, no more referendums.
It's hard for you to believe because you've been influenced by SJWs. There is no good about this, at all. So what, you try and teach a bunch of inner city kids that don't want to be there how to program. By the time they even finish the class they have already been arrested by their probation officers for violating probation. The program is useless. Yeah, maybe one or two students will be successful in the class -- but that doesn't make the program worth it. I have news for you, those students would have found such a path another way.
Tax-Free Studentship Ph.D. At University of Sussex International 2017
We need to stop posting links to the Guardian.
> It's pretty obvious that the EU is only doing this because Google is a US company.

It's pretty obvious that Americans are complaining because Google is a US company and they want it to succeed even at the cost of unethical or illegal behaviour as determined by foreign jurisdictions, and that they deem their own laws to be exceptional and superior to those of all other nations.

See? I can make totally unsubstantiated claims too.

The point being all your comment does is serve to distract from the actual issues in question by turning the issue into a tribal us-versus-them conflict. It's tedious and unproductive.

I'd wager if the US's own regulatory agencies were doing their jobs then each of the 'big four/five' tech companies would have faced penalties in the past on various issues.

They haven't because of that thing you mentioned, protectionism.
https://github.com/trapd00r/vidir looks like a fork of moreutils' vidir.
Apart from it being a great video, I'm sad to say that I'm surprised my phone isn't burning my fingers after watching all the way through it. It's like these people know something about multimedia on the internet.
100% this. At Upwork the ratings are clearly setup to make you select people. You see people with top ratings but when you go through the individual they are much worse. Something is going on with their aggregation. I find freelancer is the best platform for getting decent people but still have issues.

I wonder if there is a model for something like freelancer where they set up offices around popular freelance cities, and people have to work in the office with a quality control manager for X years (3?) before they can work wherever, assuming they don't get weeded out.
I find that most writing is really NOT meant to be "heard" in reality

As a counter-example, Flaubert used to scream his texts in his "gueuloir" as a way to perfect them.

wrong written sentences do not resist this test; they oppress the chest, hinder the heartbeat and thus are apart from real life conditions.
There's a vi mode plugin [1] for it which helps me get by.

[1] https://github.com/lambdalisue/jupyter-vim-binding
True but the topic is about nationalisation so I still felt my point was relevant even if it was tangential to the GPs tangent
The Unique and Efficient Four-Flipper Locomotion of Plesiosaurs
I have! I really have! My friend spends all his money on audio. I sadly just don't understand. You are correct. I was going to say that he pays infinite money for what to me is a 10% increase in enjoyment, but perhaps for you and him, your brain is better with sound, and you guys might get a 1000% improvement for your dollar.

Although in any case, nothing justifies the pricetag dished out to audio enthusiasts.
Dell's XPS 13 gets the very latest Intel quad-core CPUs
Under some interpretations of physics there is a finite number of objects in the universe, hence a largest possible cardinality of things that is finite. Even sets like the number of possible states of the Universe appear to me to be finite, though so large as to be intractable to my imagination.

A conceptual circle and a real circle differ markedly because of the lumpiness of matter, quantisation, uncertainty. Every real circle is an approximation (yay Plato!).

Pi doesn't appear to me to be real, as in writ in matter/energy -- it's a ratio of measurements of an imaginary article, circles don't exist in our experiential 4-space.

Irrational numbers like root-of-2 just fall out of basic maths though, there's not going to be a real line with that measure just as there's no line with a predefined unit measure (ie unless you define that line at that point in time as your unit, but a real line isn't even straight).

I'd be really interested in refutation of this -- it's one of those positions I've held since Uni, at least, but never explored as I've never seen it challenged/supported nor named.
That's one way to clear your internet history after you die.
...in cities, towns and villages (any dense area). But in sparsely populated areas with dispersed housing, this is not such a big deal.
If one considers the big three to have become a problem then there is a simple solution. One should just stop using them.
Why bring politics into it? The users made them what they are, the users can undo it.
No, because that's a paradoxical requirement. I can't care for things which I never knew (could have) existed, and interfering with reality so that they would exist would require me to care enough for them to exist so as to interfere in the first place.

Every action we make chooses one from (infinite) branches of reality. Favoring one over the other is meaningless. The result of things existing will always be other things not existing. The atoms that I'm using to exist could have been used to compose other entities instead. You're assuming a sort of situation where everything that could exist would exist. A Borgesian library where not only every possible work of Kafka is written, but in every possible variation. The act of writing by itself destroys every alternative work. Are we certain that the Kafka we have is the best Kafka we could have?

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

One morning, when Georg Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a disgusting bug.

One day, when Georg Valta woke from troubled dreams, he found himself awake in his bed transformed into a horrible vermin.

In the morning, when Georg Sanka woke from dreadful dreams, he found himself awake in bed in the body of a nightmarish vermin.

...
> What's the cost/benefit of them doing that to Target? On the upside they could see what's selling well, what margins they have, etc. What's the net value of that information to their retail unit? I'd say it's probably very small.

It doesn't have to be a careful CEO decision. It could just be a curious engineer and someone in strategy who appreciates the data. That's probably how it started at VW, not with the board deciding that this is a wise strategy.
Not every potential user of roamer is a Python package developer.
I think we should move back to the model we had at the beginning of the internet era:

1. Universities and government agencies create the protocols and the software.

2. Companies create just the hardware.

3. Infrastructure is run and maintained by the government with the help of companies.
Yes, strange indeed, I expected Terry to only roll with the latest in tech.
>Also, what is wrong with a company which improves lives to also improve it's bottom line?

Nothing as long as it obeys the laws of the countries in which it operates.
You know who I trust less than Google, Facebook and Amazon? The U.S. government.

Also "nationalize". The author seems blissfully unaware of the existence of other countries where said services operator (about 200 of them!).
Modern DACs and ADCs (sigma-delta) get around this entirely by oversampling/upsampling then low pass filtering in the digital domain with a minimal if any analog LPF. This avoids all the issues you describe and with noise shaping the added noise is inaudible (unless you want to claim you can hear -100dBFS which would be pretty amazing)

>So they are mentioning alternative (b). The problem is that oversampling does not solve all problems. Oversampling implies that the filtering is done on the digital domain and there are several choices of filtering you could use, for example FIR (Finite Impulse Response), IIR (infinite impulse response), etc.
And each one of these choices have side effects...

Citation needed here, oversampling solves virtually all the problems + with modern DSP the FIR filters can be made extremely good. the induced noise of modern adc/dac's is seriously tiny, and swamped by the recording noise of your audio.
Why doesn’t someone build a competing search engine for Europe? Serious question. Seems like the EU prefers to tax and harm the incumbent but do little in the way of improving tax policy that would encourage US style venture investment and the resulting innovation. It’s very difficult for investors in Europe to make any money — in a place like France, capital gains are punitively taxed and apparently there isn’t a French Google competitor. Go figure.
With the higher 24 bit resolution, would it not be possible for someone to "decompress" the dynamic range with less distortion than 16 bit?
> Do we really need to send plain versions or it's just a second system syndrome of doing everything "right"?

It depends on your costs / target ratio. You will have a percent of users that absolutely need to get text emails. If delivering text e-mails to them gets you more money than you spend sending the two versions, send them. Otherwise, just send the HTML ones.

Same for browser support. If, for example, you spend more supporting IE than you gain from only-IE users, just don't support IE.
Hey, I work in insurance too - as a non-life actuary for the last almost 8-9 years. Your description is not at all how insurance works, and insurance is not a form of betting or gambling but really distinctly different. What it's really about is just risk pooling; my share of the risk pool is smaller than if I would keep the risk to myself.

Insurance companies don't mind insuring risks that they know will happen at some point, e.g. most property policies will have some claims, and life term contracts (as have been stated below) of course will have a claim at some point (unless the policy is lapsed). However, they have an idea of how often and how costly these claims will be, and through risk pooling diversification, this is lower (per policy) than the cost to the individual. Thus there is an incentive to buy the policy, and an incentive to sell it - as the difference can be made as profit to the insurer.

In addition there's a timing element to insurance: insurers take in premiums "now" for claims that will be paid out "later", so they can invest the money in the meantime. Large insurance companies may have $200bn investment portfolios.

EDIT: So the point is that flood insurance can of course be sold by private companies, however they know the risk is too high and won't offer competitive premiums. If we only had private flood insurance in the US, in the long term this would lead to people having to move to places with cheaper flood insurance. In this way it actively promotes people moving away from risky places (which I think is a good thing) - but it makes it difficult for people in the short term.
Sadly that's true, but the blame for this single point of failure falls entirely on those people. In this day and age it's inexcusable not to have multiple ways to contact people you care about.