skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure but a bad choice can be buying a new BMW while I put 25% of my savings away to retire and now I'm stuck paying for you to retire because you didn't save your money. What's the incentive? I'm a democratic socialist, and I support safety nets and wealth redistribution where it makes sense, but it's important to keep in mind that we need to make sure we are continually incentivizing good practices. If you make a bunch of money and save nothing, you should live in poverty in you're retirement. Sure you can be fed and clothed and have your healthcare taken care of, but aside from that? You made a poor choice in the face of very clear information telling you to save for retirement.

Frankly I think people need to be scared of what happens when they retire: they should be thinking "crap if I don't save money I'm going to live very poorly when I retire". Right now it's "the government will take care of me so let me go buy this unaffordable thing".

Even worse is that the government encourages this because without consumerism our economic charade falls flat. Keep buying poorly made, cheap goods from China and overpriced homes and cars with low interest rates!!
Interesting. What is driving this? Obviously the finger has been pointed towards medical companies bribing doctors to prescribe their meds, but that doesn't explain the use opioids in particular (other than if you are very cynical and believe that pharmaceutical companies want addicted customers - which might be partly true but hopefully not the whole truth).

The question becomes - what are doctors elsewhere doing?

- Prescribing physiotherapy for e.g back pains, rather than meds?

Or

- prescribing other kinds of pain medication?

Or something else?

There is also a question of how many of these people had non-prescription addictions and simply switched to prescription drugs because it's convenient and doctors can be persuaded to prescribe.

Here in Europe I know many people (most?) who have been prescribed pain medication at some point, but no one who has had potent opioids outside of hospital. Typical pain med prescriptions are for higher-than-usual doses of non prescription drugs like paracetamol/ibuprofen and only in rare cases weaker synthetic opioids like tramadol.

Hydrocodone and similar opioids are typically only used for terminal cancer patients and are banned from general prescription. Methadone is used for treatment of heroin addiction though.
I am not familiar with FiveThirtyEight but these graphs look quite nice.
Do any of those CGP Grey videos actually address one-person-one-vote? Looking at the titles of the videos they seem to be mostly critiques of how votes are grouped rather than how much voting power a single individual has. For example, criticising the electoral college system in the US has nothing to do with one-person-one-vote, it's a criticism of how the winner is decided.
TOML's array/table syntax is kind of confusing, especially when you're a few levels deep. Having meaningful whitespace in YAML makes it clearer.

It's also kind of messy when you have a lot of multiline strings.
Meanwhile, over here in the UK we're still in the "drugs are bad, mmmKay." dark ages.

I really hope a major political party runs with a cannabis decriminalisation policy at the next election.
I found it much easier to completely eliminate alcohol than to reduce my consumption. You no longer have to think about it, and you're no longer tempted by 'just one more drink' (which becomes even more tempting after a couple of drinks).
I agree, the query optimizer is a good example of AI, but it could be made much better, if it learned from real world experience.
Instead of relying on the first plan (created within very short time constraints), it should observe which queries are used most often and which ones take the longest, then during slack periods, it could tryout different plans and add missing indexes, to find faster plans. Also auto materialized views could be created by such an AI agent. Should also remove unused indexes. Of course there could be parameters, such as how much space to use for indexes or materialized views.
I was exaggerating, it's not that it's totally unsearchable, but it just doesn't have enough structure, so sometimes you get lucky, sometimes a search ends up being a 15 minute spelunking expedition.
This is fascinating, as I've done some work with weighted voting systems in the past.

If I understand correctly, some emergent effects would occur.

1. The poor would collectively have less voting power.

2. The poor would likely become less poor due to distribution of voting funds. This would be roughly proportional to the amount of voting power lost.

3. The middle class, assuming it still exists the way we know it, may or may not have increased collective voting power.

4. Upper-middle class will gain proportionally more collective voting power than what middle class gained, but they are fewer in population. The 1% will gain even more, but they are only 1% of the population. Each social class (aside from the poor) will have more representation, while the poor will receive money (and a tiny amount of representation).

5. More passionate voters will pay more, and polarizing or strongly motivating issues will create a less-predictable situation at the polls. This could be a very good thing or a very bad thing, I don't know. Perhaps this is where the magic happens.

6. Political groups will form voting coalitons to vote certain ways, and may be paid to do so, beyond the voting fees, unless legally prohibited. However, this may prove to be not the most viable use of resources.

I think that this could work in positive ways. However, I wouldn't bet on it, as there are as many things that could go wrong. When dealing with complex strategy or architecture choices with unknown consequences, it is a hard sell to willingly go with one that brings significant risk. However, one can argue, especially with the current political climate and lack of faith in the system, that not switching to this would be the bigger risk.

I'm interested in finding smaller scale applications of such a system, as a crude proof of concept.
Probably he meant that China went from being a top #1 economy in the world by a huge margin when the opioid epidemic began there, and it has just recently became #1 again, so far by a small margin. That sounds about right. They lost ca. 200 years.

Of course explaining that by opioids alone would be balancing between a huge oversimplification and a plain lie, but at least opioids have been the biggest single factor.
Seems relevant: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/09/global-banks-sabotag...
Wouldn't it also be a negative?

Basically, you cannot have radical societal or cultural changes because you have to get everyone on board ahead of time.

In a two party system and optional voting, you can have only a small fraction of the population who particularly want some changes actually get those changes. Also, this strategy can be used to destabilize a system away from local maximum (if we are searching for some better state).
The president seems fairly worried about it. (Or does he not count?)

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40891691
You don't really need to script to buy most things in Mexico. Or if you do the kind pharmacist with gladly write one for your ailments, only a small cash fee.
It's an excelent reason in my opinion.
Just because they fell in the rankings doesn't mean they actually lost anything.

E.g. Another way for a country to lose the #1 economy spot is for it to simply stay the same while other nations (e.g. Europe in this case) make huge advances.

Being fair, a few other things happened in there too. I don't think that during the communists' Cultural Revolution the country was primarily being held back by opiod abuse.
I'm fine with that as long as they're not used for indoctrination. I.e. Every single issue and previous decision by society needs to be "re-decided" by the children in the civics class, without influence by the teachers. If you're not doing that, you're reinforcing previous generations' biases in the form of indoctrination. It's a very precarious line to walk, and a very important one because you're dealing with innocent and impressionable minds.
I don't think its just drugs. Take a look at this months natgeo cover story http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/the-addic...

They are basically saying porn, social media, the news hype cycle are all tied to dopamine increase in your brain. Its the same mechanisms that drugs, alcohol,cigs can produce.
By the usual way, I was referring to large advertising campaigns that I'm sure yield more votes per dollar than a quadratic voting system.

One of the things you're missing is that people who can afford to buy that many votes for a single issue are very rare and could easily be out voted by a small organized group that buys multiple votes, but with a lower power multiple.

Assuming all votes cost $1, then 1,000 votes costs 1mil. That could easily be nullified by 100 voters buying 10 votes.

Consider also that the money would be rebated equally. So you might spend $100 and get back $250 and win the vote.
So the government knows what you voted? Great.
Well there it kinda made sense, as the apps were all web based.
Yes! And it's based on a misreading of the article.
Why email?
Priceless a time with family.. :)
https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/ if you're ignorant of this like me.
JavaScript: The Curious Case of null &gt;= 0
It only favors extremists and extremely rich over the normal democratic process. But since the US is already an oligarchy, it makes sense for them.

And it's of course a cheap take on the tragedy of the commons.
Decorating: Decorators for ASCII Animations on Python
China's Century of Humiliation started on the eve of the opium war. The current Chinese government has a goal to never let China ever experience anything like that ever again. I visited their museum of Chinese history in Xian, really eye opening about how this thought drives almost ALL of their foreign and domestic policy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

The Century of Humiliation started them on a road of weakness that took several revolutions to figure out how to stop. Only with Deng Xiaoping in the 80s did China begin to find its stride, and only now are they starting to finally become a world power that the world needs to reckon with instead of ignore. Whatever you think of politics and philosophies, China is now considered a world power in a way it never has been before.
It already it, in the form of ChromeOS. This just seem to bring more of it to other OSs.
>The reason that they do so is not entirely clear.

Not clear? It's almost too clear as to be tautological.

They do because they (a) think all members should have equal say, (b) most members in the group want X to be done.

Unless we're talking about submitting to force or listening to expertise, why would many people wanting to do something, let fewer people tell them what to do instead?

Heck, if it comes to fighting for what's to be done (the most effective but primitive form of getting a decision), the majority could beat up the minority and have its way anyway.
I don't know about that specific one but elections with complicated rules and multiple votes (where you can "kumulieren" and "panaschieren") are usually counted with the help of software where the election officers manually enter every ballot into the computer after inspecting it visually and have to trust that the displayed end result is correct (although there are some manual consistency checks).
The opium wars were from 1839 to 1860. If you check out this graph of Chinese percentage of global GDP since 1000AD, it started dropping from about 30% to <10% around the time of the wars and started recovering around 1970 but still isn't back to where they used to be. You could argue us brits owe them a few trillion in damages.

In the scheme of a 1000 years of history you could argue 1970 counts as only now perhaps.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/06/mis-ch...
Aside from the hours of operation which really has nothing to do with the LCBO (complain to your MLA), yes they do. They are well stocked, very clean, their employees are trained and treated maybe too well, they run tasting bars and even offer loyalty points.

As for the price, "wines and spirits sold in Canada is subject to the Excise Act, 2001,[36] which contributes greatly to the cost of beverage alcohol, although most liquor tax is provincial."
He says he wants to spend money on it, but judging by the types of people he's put into positions that have no qualifications to be there, it's hard to see his future intentions as anything more than funneling money to people connected to him.

The one thing that the US has consistently shown recently is for every state that has legalized or decriminalized/medicinal marijuana, opioid abuse and related deaths have plummeted, yet we have trump trying to crack down on this emerging trend.

So it's just more of say one thing but do another.
Curious to know how you are looking at an R2 value (correlation coefficient) of 0.53 to 0.63 in Figure 1a, and interpreting that as 'strong statistical correlation' -- that is pretty terrible actually (most highschool AP chemistry students can produce values of 0.8 - 0.9 for titration curves, for instance).
Wait, this argument makes no sense. It wasn't until 1950 that we had game theory to analyze voting systems directly, and it wasn't really until much later that people looked at more efficient systems. It's not hard to show that the 1-1 voting scheme is pretty useless in that its Nash equilibrium isn't guaranteed to be reflective of the population's general desires.

So, fine, while the current form of democracy may have somewhat worked until now, that definitely does not imply that we reached an optimal voting system. If we can make the world a little bit better, why not?

(This paper looks interesting, but, of course the devil is in the details of implementation; would I personally want this system? No idea.)
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9ak7y5/the-secret...
HSBC isn't a monolithic organization, it was fined and people did went to prison, probably not as many and should've went but still.
> "Assuming all votes cost $1, then 1,000 votes costs 1mil. That could easily be nullified by 100 voters buying 10 votes."

Do you not see the problem with that? With the situation you describe, it takes the coordination of 100 individuals to nullify the actions of 1 wealthy voter. Do you not see how much easier it is for the wealthy voter?
Hmm, but what if "a minority that cares passionately" are nazis or religious fanatics or some other extremist group? They fit the description pretty well, and just being a minority doesn't validate your ideas or views automatically. This system would, as a side-effect, effectively give more political leverage to all extremist groups out there, too.

In many European countries ethnical minorities are given a few guaranteed seats in the parliament to ensure that their voices are heard. The same could be done for a wider spectrum of minority groups that are of interest to society, selectively boosting their political influence, but still filtering out the crazy ones. Problem with this is that it's not as stable as giving everyone the same rights unconditionally, as it's much more prone to manipulations, like cutting deals with minority representatives who got elected without voting and making wide coalitions with them in order to take over the power, against the will of the majority.
Why? Rails powers many huge, important things.

Like GitHub.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. But still, the previous commentator's "Florida is just low-tax." does not hold at least percentage wise. However, when I searched the tax ration they say there is a 40% income tax in Switzerland. What is wrong here?
In a way it was. Majority of population were just off the drugs, and most kids who became 'red guards' - they were born in China's darkest days - had prenatal drug problem so they were kinda mentally impaired which caused most or all that shit.

If such a relatively innocent thing as inhaling lead vapours from suddenly omnipresent cars in 1960s and 1970s could cause a 1980s-1990s crime wave in the U.S., it is easy to see what putting whole nation on opioids could do with the next generation.
Flying Ninja Warrior Robot Transform
Flying Ninja Hero Robot Transform Battle is a highly addictive action based game, featuring flying ninja hero or futuristic robot which has to remove all mutant terrorist & autobots in highly intense robot war for the protection of grand city
The problem with talking about 'cores', is I still have to parse and handle the entire language if I want to claim to support YAML.

I've used JSON is some constrained places, I can't imagine writing my own YAML parser, or hacking an existing one into a constrained place (no memory allocation for example).
Yes if you want radical change it is a negative. Having said this radical change does not have a good history. I think that gradual change that has the support of the majority is the best way to achieve lasting change for the better.

A really good current example is same sex marriage. Australia is one of the last western countries to allow this (should be implemented before the end of the year), but it now has the support of 70% of the population. I would rather see change occur that lasts, than a small minority impose their will on the majority and having to deal with the resulting backlash.
I think the thing that annoys me about modern medical trends such as the enormous rise in obesity, Alzheimer's, autism and chronic pain and ensuing opiod abuse is the shoulder shrugging by the medical establishment as to the cause. Any meaningful change for the worse in medical statistics over time seems to be uninteresting to most of the medical community and is almost always ascribed to "better reporting" or moral failings of the patient.
Demand for sand is killing rivers in Africa
Everyone is different. I also prefer just stop, but not everyone has will power to do so.
Parts are and parts are definitely not (we are after all comparing continents here). I don't believe secularism is the only consideration at play. The question(s) I am noodling on (for myself and broadly) is: do these young men have a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives and if not, is that contributing in a meaningful way to their willingness to engage in degenerative behaviors / drug use?

If we entertain this hypothesis for a moment by assuming there is a causal relationship between lack of meaning / purpose and higher propensity to engage in degenerative behavior and severe drug use, it then begs the questions: what changed? Where did people derive meaning and purpose in society before? Where are they getting it now? Where are they likely to get it in the future?

Again, entertaining the hypothesis, it would follow that setting up more drug clinics is unlikely to solve the problem because people are unlikely to find meaning through the current format of drug rehabilitation. A better solution long term may be increased emphasis on psychological rehabilitation.

I don't have the answer to any of these questions and certainly wouldn't say religion is the only answer. There are alternative ways to accomplish this. For example: as a society we can try to reinstill a greater sense of dignity in labor and non-managerial service roles.
> This framing is insensitive to both call center workers

Capitalism is a ladder (To paraphrase a certain GoT character). No one has to be a call center worker till the end of their days, it's just stuff you do until you can find a better job (perhaps after attaining some extra training in your off-hours).
That's how I read it too. They failed to answer the first question:

>> Have humans already caused a detectable increase in Atlantic hurricane activity or global tropical cyclone activity?

>> It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations, or are not yet confidently modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate).

The answer is NO, they have not already caused a detectable increase in Atlantic hurricane activity or global tropical cyclone activity. That is not to say there is no effect or that it won't be detected in the future, but right now the text reads as NO, couched in a bunch of leave-the-door-open language.
Based on my conversation I got the impression (never confirmed) that he might have been more than one person.

I've always thought this as well. It really makes the most sense.
Is this a fair system? It looks to me like the very wealthy get there own way.

Let's say I'm a very wealthy person, and I have $4M to spend. It looks like I can buy 2000 votes. However, money is very fluid. So I decide I'm going to find 10,000 "budget-constrained" voters and give them each $400. I'll say, "Here's $100 for buying 10 votes, and keep the remaining $300 for yourself." Now I've just purchased 100,000 votes.

Ah! ZenoArrow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206589) beat me to it. Well done.
>Angular/Vue like templates - these are natural templates, you work only with HTML, [...] the good part is that with natural templates you see stuff in a perspective and in a more plain/readable structure

If you're using adjectives like "natural" without qualifying it with "in my opinion", it means you don't really understand the higher meta level discussion.

It is not objective fact that embedding a Turing Complete programming language inside of HTML via custom attributes such as Angular "ng-xxx" and Vue "v-xxx" is "natural". Many find it quite unnatural and unreadable![1].

If that's your personal preference, that's fine but be aware that many see HTML custom attributes to express a pseudo-language ("ng-for", "v-for", etc) is not really HTML. Yes, it's cosmetic HTML for appearances sake but not semantic HTML. The semantics is the pseudo-programming-language that's executed by Javascript. If you're unaware, the extending HTML with custom attributes for expressing code is an example of The Inner Platform Effect.[2] It doesn't matter whether you use new HTML custom tags[3] or custom attributes; that's just a difference in cosmetics.

[1] Examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10967000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10967789

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

[3] tag soup to express a pseudo-programming language in HTML: https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-development-as-tag-soup/
Hand-edited and human-readable? With significant whitespace and tab-space difference?
The Easy Way to Stop Drinking, by Allen Carr
Wait... Bournemouth and Dorset!?!?
The LCBO is a business, government run liquor stores and distribution is a policy.
LCBO is a well run organization, government run liquor stores is an absurd policy in my mind. Painting both with the same brush is disingenuous.
This seems like an interesting book but a few points are dangerous, especially if it is used for teaching.

1. Concurrent access to a variable out of a critical section is qualified as not being dangerous. This actually can't be decided without knowing about the memory model you are considering, and both in the general case and in practical implementations (C++) this is UB.

2. This sentence is maybe only trying to be funny, but discouraging formal proofs in 2016 can very well end up borderline criminal (depending on the application):
"The only alternative is to examine the code carefully and “prove” that it is correct. I put “prove” in quotation marks because I don’t mean, necessarily, that you have to write a formal proof (although there are zealots who encourage such lunacy)."

Especially if this is stated right after a rather simple algorithm.

I can absolutely not recommend a book about a critical topic, which contains that kind of defects.