skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article argues how many people’s lives are now depending on and living in these virtual online platforms such that we are forming a society there.

It doesn’t rule the world in the same sense as a government on earth. But every move FB and Google make can impact millions’ lives. They don’t invade your home and arrest you, but they can shut down your account. Google can disable your entire Google Account and then you lose years worth of data (this happened recently a few months ago).

Instead of marching on the street to protest, users are now sharing stories and their opinions through hashtags and sharing posts with their friends. They own your data now. They own your lives. They learn enough about you they can lure you into buying products. Instead of shaming another human being with a physical sign like Da Zi Bao (Big-character poster in the 50’s in China), we can gang up on an individual in the comment section. Keyboard warrior, huh? Their powerful algorithms can regulate and determine what we get to see and when we get to see. So many people are “being educated” on the Internet; there are the good stuff like Cousera and edX, and there are fake news outlets). We are grooming a whole new society in the cloud. Instead of taxing your money on a regular basis, they tax your time and then gets revenue back every time you are online and whenever you shop. Instead of sightseeing a new building, people are excited about new features rolling out.

How are the above not evidence of forming a new kind of civilization? Every organization is itself a “government”. Someone at the top is making decisions for you.
Whenever I've been to baltimore, it took around 10 minutes just walking this distance, adding in waiting at road crossings: https://i.imgur.com/Vxnt9cq.png
This seems impossible as long as people love money it will be a powerful tool that can exert influence over politicians one way or another.
> Every argument is subject to intense scrutiny.

The reason we have a "left" and "right" in politics is it is impossible to prove one true and the other false. No matter how intense the scrutiny or clever the arguments.
The Black-Scholes algorithm in effect.
yeah, SDL rekindled my passion with this kind of
stuff, man. It is so easy to set up and deference a simple software-only framebuffer and after you whet your appetite, setting up a hardware accelerated one is also dead simple in SDL2.
I was wondering whether one could bring several asteroids in a regular orbit near Earth and Mars with minimal need for correction. Perhaps there exist orbits which might take significantly longer than a more direct trajectory (e.g. several years), but ultimately it might pay off in terms of reducing radiation exposure.
If you frame tax law and its enforcement as violence and taxation is theft anyway, how do we finance a society then? How about YOU start answering the question?
Same place other creditors/companies/banks/businesses sell their debt to - collections agencies.
Refusing to pay taxes is stealing?! I am afraid you have this backwards: taxes are simple robbery.
You can also re-discover the dates by doing your own historical research, if you want to. And of course, historians don't really spend much time literally learning lists of dates. More realistically, there are lots of causal and logical connections between historical events that enable a historian who knows the details of a particular period to infer certain facts that they've forgotten from facts they remember.
Let me be extremely critical here: there is moral judgement in the quote while it argues against that. That taxes would be enforced exactions, in lieu of laws, goes counter to the common moniker to follow the spirit of the law.
To follow the law by the letter might be a bare necessity eventually, that can't support the moral argument.
The essence of the quote is a warning of false analogy that's pretty much in line with a liberal capitalism, and also from analogy in law in general.
But it's not inline with a liberal rule reading, especially as unforseen cases were meant to be covered in hindsight.

Tax law is terribly verbose to not miss a cases, which is a good thing for the intention of giving everyone a fair warning so to speak, and it is frequently changed to cover it's bases.

If the comment really amounts to an attack on case law, I fully agree. And it's an understandable thought insofar he's in the position to have to sift through it the most, or at least a lot, I guess.

edit: only if the frequency of changes is not enough or not exact, for whichever reason, that might introduce impedance mismatch here and there.
In that case I have A Modest Proposal.

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
I can advise managing multiple projects because I haven't figured that out myself, but I have a small tip: You can probably quite easily squeeze in an hour or more of audiobook listening a day. I know I manage, and I have ten minute bike commute. But I also wash dishes, clean up the house and do lots of small chores. It has reached a point where I reach for my headphones even if I'm just going around the corner for milk.

And when I say audiobook, that includes MOOCs and other recorded lectures, you can access a wealth of free, university level material online if you want to move past popular science audiobooks or Teaching Company lessons (not that they aren't great).
I was under the impression that Milner was above board BECAUSE he had ties to American companies. Crazy.
Example: If the british monarch exploits her very poorest subjects by promoting ill-adviced (vacuum cleaner) loans, that is a 'secret' that has been uncovered. And in a normal political environment the queen should step down or at least donate most of the involved trusts money to the people hurt by it.
Not a bad point to make, but the debate is what ought the rules be? And how are we to judge what we think the rules should be if we don't even know what the consequences of the current rules are? From that point of view, the leakers are benevolent rascals.

Wrt the lawyer-privilege example, we have a good idea of what would happen if attorneys couldn't speak in confidence to their clients: everyone would be worse off when seeing a lawyer.

I can't see that being the case with these stashed money leaks. If everyone could see who was putting money offshore, would everyone be worse off? Hard to make that case.
Facebook is doing a lot of ML work on automated tracing from aerial imagery, which has great potential for mapping terra incognita in OSM. There are several bumps to be ironed out with the community but they're engaging well.

Bing has given OSM tracing rights over its aerial imagery for several years now - it's hard to overestimate how significant that is.

Apple (as you'd expect) has been much more private about its OSM work, but it has numerous people working on it and has been surfacing OSM data in Apple Maps in several parts of the world.
Is there even just a singular focus? Normally, both of a persons eyes are facing a singular direction which makes a large area of shared vision between the eyes (which allows a focus point anywhere in that field of vision). But with eyes which are pointed in a different direction this seems less likely. Does anyone have more info?
> Because I looked at the DE course he taught (18.03) and I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education. I'm sure many other HN readers have too. I wonder if there is some test you can take to see if you are just as good as an MIT graduate?

My experience at an okay school was that all upper level classes were graded and taught to scale with the student's intelligence. I and many other students passed through the curve. Many of us would not have passed comparable (by name and subject matter) courses at the top schools with a different curve and more in depth material.
Well, is this really wrong? If I get work done on my house as a young person, I pay as much as 10x what the same workman would charge my grandmother in law. The workman knows he/she can get away with charging a young person who doesn't have to live off social insurance more. The workman would never get the job from a retired in Prague if they charged what they charge yong people. However, if they charged everyone the reduced rate, then they would never cover the cost of tools and training.
The confusion is that the article refers to two different courses:

"18.30, differential equation, the largest mathematics course at MIT, with more than 300 students" [ths might be the course that is now 18.03]

"18.313, a course I teach in advanced probability theory"
He also says he's doing $200k/month in one spot, then $8M/year in another. Smells funny.
Yep! The only way I'm able to afford this house is because I'm selling the house I bought 5 years ago for 50% more than I paid for it. So many of my friends and colleagues, even in the tech industry, the 20% down payment they're saving for is going up faster than they're able to save for it. I don't think this is sustainable for much longer.
Progress is not in the absence of taxes. Progress is in a fair and efficient use of the taxes money.
Rights only exist in the context of a system that enforces or supports them.
A central repository doesn't automatically give you versioning, and URLs as package IDs doesn't take it away. These are orthogonal issues. It just happens that Go has chosen an approach for now that results in a lot of pain.
I'll get back to you on that question once you've found a way for people to "protect their assets" that doesn't also rely on force or implied threat of force...
See https://arslan.io for his bag reviews.
I don't consider it uncivil for someone else to say "fuck [my project]" after having trouble with it. I would consider it uncivil to write me messages saying "fuck you, you are an asshole for writing [my project]".

Maybe that's just me.
What does being hackers have to do with it? Every tech company and startup is already relying on the threat of violence to get what they want. They all use IP law which is enforced by the government and that enforcement leads back to violence.
Does anyone remember websites?
Progress is reducing the use of violence & aggression to achieve political ends.
Don’t do that. We know exactly what capitalism is and what communism is. Some of us lived under both.

And the fact that communism is the favorite system of dictatorship is no coincidence: communism itself is an autocracy.
What percent of their income do you think a grad student on a $20K stipend should owe in taxes?
Internet? Everybody with 2 or more computers tried to connect them together.

Those computers developed from the code-breaking machinery in WW2 you mean?
You don't even need a complete asteroid. You only need a few hundred or maybe a few thousand tons of shielding material. You could get that from any nearby (relatively speaking) asteroid-like body with a reasonable delta-v and a surface covered by loose regolith.

Mars's moon Deimos might be the best candidate -- delta-v between Deimos and Earth-Moon L4/L5 is about 3800m/s [1], and there's no need to move the bulk of your shielding lower into the gravity well on either end.

In this scenario, you'd want to use something like an Aldrin Cycler [2] to provide radiation shielded transport between Earth and Mars. This isn't exactly the same thing as hitching a ride on an asteroid, but it's the same basic principle.

You'd definitely need nuclear electric or maybe solar electric propulsion to make such a scheme work, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v#Delta-vs_around_the_So...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler
Given Milner's background, I would think this is has been an "open secret" in Silicon Valley investment circles. Is that the case?
> we kinda need people at the top to make the whole thing work ... Let's not forget the rich spend a lot of money in their own country too, which is an essential part of a thriving economy.

I don't agree:

1. Capitalism inevitably results in some people being wealthier than others. But it doesn't need to be these people. Cutting taxes for the wealthy entrenches the current wealthy people, as if they have some claim to the position. What about tax policies that promote social mobility of others to become wealthy and fill that role? Let's cut taxes for the up-and-comers.

2. If the distribution of money were flat, there would be just as much money in the world. We don't need uber-wealthy.

3. Inequality is at record levels; the economy ran fine (or better) before, when there was less inequality.

4. The same idea fueled Reagan's 'trickle-down' economics, the idea that if the government cut taxes for the wealthy then the benefits would 'trickle down' to everyone else. Ignoring the implicit idea that the non-wealthy were like serfs waiting for their feudal lords to lift them up, rather than capable economic agents themselves; and ignoring the incredibly self-serving nature of the idea; it didn't work at all (see #4). The surprising result is that cutting taxes for the wealthy benefits ... wait for it ... the wealthy.

5. Since Reagan's tax cuts, the wealthy have grown far more wealthier while the other classes' incomes have been flat - that's over decades. (The exception is the last year or maybe two of the Obama administration.) During the prior era, when taxes were much higher, middle class Americans experienced probably their most rapid period of economic growth in history.
I recently bought something from eBay (didn't search on amazon for some odd reason), and I received it from Amazon. Turns out the seller has an Amazon prime account, and all he does is provide the ebay-buyer's address on checkout.

He netted $2 on a $12 product, and I found it amusing.
Sure, and a historian who knows a particular period should be able to explain what evidence is available that event X happened on date Y.
>> It should have been replaced with the F20 probe, which had already been built and was being kept in storage by the US Air Force. However it had to be destroyed, on the orders of the US Congress, on the grounds that its storage was too costly.

They destroyed the replacement.
According to you, violence is created when the government forces people to pay taxes (or to do anything else).

The reality is that violence existed way before any government or society. For millions of years, it was, and very often still is, the normal way of dealing with conflict for human beings.

Human society emerged as an attempt to contain this violence and avoid human suffering. In other words, without governments or any social structure, we would return to what we call the "law of the jungle", and that's not desirable at all.

We absolutely need a set of common rules that everyone follow, otherwise human society would collapse, that's a fact. However, those laws are by definition limiting individual power (taxation, etc) and therefore very often resisted by those individuals. That's why there is, as far as we know, no other way than violence, or threat of violence, to enforce those rules.

In other words, taxation is not theft, it's a key component of a desperate attempt to control human violence and limit human suffering (including yours).
pg's comments there are interesting.
Rather than repeat what's already been said many times before, I'll just refer you here:

https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/is-taxation-theft
Quick, investigate pg for Russia collusion LOL.

But seriously, let's put these reactions in perspective. Supposs the same was revealed the other way, about a US company having ties to the US government investing in Russian technology. We wouldn't bat an eye. This hysteria about Russian collusion makes us waste our energy and attention which is necessary to pay attention to the real issues (which I list below.)

I am not surprised that a Russian billionaire has ties to Putin, or invested in US companies. His company has since sold his stake and moved on, and nothing scary happened.

Compared to what the USA does on a regular basis, Russia is a pretty good actor when it comes to external dealings.

What's much more worrying is internal Russia policies. I personally know some people who started VKontakte (the Russian facebooj). They all sold their stake or were later pressured to do so by the Russian government after refusing to cooperate with the equivalent of the FBI's NSL + gag orders. and of course the Mail.ru conglomerate wanted to take it over. Not easy to maitain a business in Russia.

(Note: the US has just as much spying and NSL+gag orders but far, far greater freedom of speech and property protections so we don't feel it as much.)

But outside? Look US firms regularly make investments in companies around the world. The actual influence comes not from investment but from things like:

The CIA approaching VK founder and developers hoping to install backdoors in Telegram

Microsoft Windows new versions phoning home or cooperating with the CIA. There is a reason many nations including Russia have built and are now promoting ther own operating systems instead of Windows.

It's just so sloppy to talk about "ties" to something. The hysteria cheapens the impact ahen something real happens. Like backdoors and hacking.
The inability for countries to peacefully reorganise themselves with clear democratic mandates, both enabling the rights of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority, is a major problem, and one that could well define the 21st century.
You're posting on a website of a venture capital group.
0.1.0 definitely not feature full, but Pyro seems promising.

PyMC3 is fine, but it uses Theano on the backend. Theano will stop being actively maintained in 1 year, and no future features in the mean time. That was announced about a month ago, it seems like a good opportunity to get out something that filled a niche: Probablistic Programming language in python backed by PyTorch. They are taking cues from edward and webppl, which from a casual glance seem to be the best libraries for python and javascript respectively
http://edwardlib.org/
http://webppl.org/

But Edward is backed by TensorFlow

That announcement by Theano’s main developer Pascal Lamblin and Yoshua Bengio:
https://syncedreview.com/2017/09/29/rip-theano/
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/theano-users/7Poq8BZ...

"Dear users and developers,

After almost ten years of development, we have the regret to announce
that we will put an end to our Theano development after the 1.0 release,
which is due in the next few weeks. We will continue minimal maintenance
to keep it working for one year, but we will stop actively implementing
new features. Theano will continue to be available afterwards, as per
our engagement towards open source software, but MILA does not commit to
spend time on maintenance or support after that time frame. "

https://www.wired.com/2016/12/uber-buys-mysterious-startup-m...

Uber acquired Geometric Intelligence and renamed it Uber AI. From this article:

"But it hasn't published research or offered a product. What is has done is assemble a team of fifteen researchers who can be very useful to Uber, including Stanford professor Noah Goodman, who specializes in cognitive science and a field called probabilistic programming, and University of Wyoming's Jeff Clune, an expert in deep neural networks who has also explored robots that can "heal" themselves."
The same can be said to NAVSTAR GPS. The only system which is not primarly built for military uses is Galileo.

Yes, that's what I am saying. Don't rely on one system. Using more also increases accuracy.
I don't think they're completely orthogonal; I think it's much easier to enforce versioning with a central repository than URLs as package IDs. It's not a coincidence that the most common centralized package managers (e.g. Ruby, Python, NodeJS, Rust, Linux distro package managers, and brew) all enforce versioning and things like Go and Vim packaging don't.
Are there any downloadable documents one could sift through? I'm interested in finding which individuals and politicians in my home country are implicated; this coming a at a time where our sitting president is guilty of fraud, racketeering, corruption, tax evasion (hasn't submitted a tax return since 1995).

Civil society and citizens are working behind the scenes to put pressure on the remaining good people in the system. This information could help. Thanks.
GOPATH isn't a real problem; it's just a search directory like PATH or PYTHONPATH or CLASSPATH or NODEPATH, and it has a default value that makes it painless. Vendoring can be truly painful, but `dep` aims to fix that. Imports are not git URLs or indeed any kind of URLs; they're just directory paths into your GOPATH which the `go get` program can use if the directory path resembles the URL of a git (or hg/bzr/svn) repo. Don't think of `go get` as a package manager; think of it as a convenience utility to play around with a package before locking down the version via vendoring. Go's package management has a lot to improve on, but many of the common complaints are misinformed.

> I'm happy that there seems to be some movement. But now we have godep, govendor, glide, dep. and every project uses one or the other. Are they all compatible? Or is it a minefield?

They're not all compatible, but it's not really a problem because (last I checked) the prevailing philosophy was "libraries should not vendor--only binaries" which is to say "libraries shouldn't specify versions for their dependencies; the downstream binary projects should figure out what versions of each library should be used to build the binary". This means dependency tool compatibility isn't a problem because the dependency tooling punts on the dependency-resolution problem altogether, which seems like an even bigger problem.

Remember that this is only painful if you're trying for deterministic builds, and in the absolute worst case, you forego Go's build tooling and use something like Nix. This is absolutely not a reason to change language.
> to social unrest / revolutions that causes problems for rich people as well.

Some problems for sure, but it's probably manageable. Poverty is not and should never be an excuse for crime. Rich people can build as many prisons as necessary.
> Compared to what the USA does on a regular basis, Russia is a pretty good actor when it comes to external dealings

It has been a while since the United States forcibly annexed another country's territory [1].

In any case, this argument is irrelevant. Irrespective of whether Russia is a "good actor" or not, they are a geopolitical competitor who surreptitiously exercised control over, or at least non-public purview into, sensitive American companies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_territorial_acqu...
Interesting idea. You have resources talking about this in more detail?
You may not like the guy, for the same political reasons as many people, but shouldn't he be allowed to buy and sell property just like everybody else?

The only issue I find distasteful is how the oligarchs got their money. I wouldn't want to personally make them richer, but isn't it of a nature where you can't point fingers if other people do so? Who am I to stop some startup from taking investment from them?
The communists figured this out long ago. You do realize you have to abandon the idea of markets, money, and capitalism if you want to pursue this further.
What does being hackers have to do with it?

Seriously? It's mind-boggling to me that somebody would ask that with a straight face, ya know? I mean, the essence of what it means to be a hacker is to examine things, break them apart, understand how they work, and improve them. And as a general rule, most hackers have traditionally preferred to use their minds to achieve various ends, rather than relying on violence.

Put those two things together and it's pretty easy to see why one would think that hackers would be motivated to find ways to improve our systems to governance such that they aren't rooted in the use of violence.
Tangential: interesting how, through using a weird vertical scale, the image you linked to weakens its own point. I suppose if the Y axis was consistent, it wouldn't look as if tax law expansion slowed down significantly in recent times.