skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It is a similar concept to export of physical goods into a country/trade block. Either comply with the local regulations on quality or your goods will not be allowed."

That analogy is what I take issue with. It's clear that Facebook, selling ads to European buyers, is doing business there. But is every random web site with a few European users? Does putting up a web site suddenly mean you're doing business in every country in the world, subject to the jurisdiction of all of them simultaneously?

"The US State Department does not really get to have a stated position other than diplomatic."

Diplomacy is what it does, and its diplomatic position on trade issues is relevant.
Probably. I’m more complaining about ambition though. Blue Origin isn’t trying to change the game fundamentally in he way SpaceX is. Regardless o whether they are hitting deliverables, the deliverables aren’t interesting.
7 Reasons Why Most Product Launches Fail and What to Do About It
it can sync with a directory, you can autocommit from there
I personally believe in Amazon, but their metrics are indeed obscene. I don't own any stock, and won't buy any until it pulls back at least 10%, and even then I'd be analyzing why it fell the 10%.

The fact is it is rarely too late to invest in a company if you do it prudently. The difference is Amazon being your portfolio - and being part of your portfolio.

Given its obscene metrics you shouldn't allocate a large percentage of your wealth in it. A good proxy would be index funds. You should really only have more of your wealth in Amazon than what would be allocated to it from something like an sp500 index fund if:

1. you are wealthy enough to take the risk

2. you are smarter than everyone else and know AMZN is a great stock

By the way, chances are you aren't smarter.
Was not aware of that! I was being partly sarcastic. The problem with any such system is that there will be people whose job is to deny claims. Of course there would also be some people trying to make unjustified claims too.
> I simply assume that I know the inner workings of my own mind better than anybody else can.

I think this is a very bad assumption; Eric Schwitzgebel has spent a lot of his career making the case that it is a bad assumption: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/

a good example paper: Knowing Your Own Beliefs (2011), http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/KnowOwnBel.h...
>Why'd I switch to rural life? Quality of life.

It's amazing to me that for all our modern tech and conveniences it's not made us happier in fact the old ways seem much more enjoyable and appealing.
"Have I gotten smarter? Or is it just that British people are stupider than the Chinese?"

Wow, false dichotomy and either racism or ego, take your pick.

Hard to keep reading after that.
Ask HN: How do you decide when to start your own business
As a full time software engineer, I am wondering if I need to work on my profession, learn new areas such as ML or start implementing my simple ideas and publish them in my free time and at the weekends. Improving my skills on software engineering gives guaranteed value slowly over the years while starting with small apps gives better foundation to do my own startup company later.

Can you please give me you feedback/comment from your experience, which helps me to decide which way to go.

Thank you :)
> “If functional programming is so great, why is it still niche?

It's niche because learning a language is the exact opposite of fast iterative process with immediate feedback. The feedback cycle of learning and evaluating a language is 6th months to multiple years, which means it takes a lot to really evaluate one. Then the added issue of network effects (ie needing others to know the language in a team).
Mixed Results for Fecal Transplant in First Randomized Trial (2015)
Bitcoin Price: A Fall After Almost Beating the All-Time High
I signed up before their tos said they would sell my data. I have no problem with it being freely available for researchers, but them selling my dna for profit is complete bullshit.
The article even has an image of the interface from 1988.

> And with the release of Mathematica 1.0 in 1988 came another critical element: the invention of Wolfram Notebooks. Notebooks arrived in a form at least superficially very similar to the way they are today (and already in many ways more sophisticated than the imitations that started appearing 25+ years later!): collections of cells arranged into groups, and capable of containing text, executable code, graphics, etc.
You should blog about it, haven't seen something like that before.
This is not entirely true. You can opt out of commingling. It's true that you cannot tell if they are commingling or not as a shopper. It depends on the seller's setup but commingling has lighter labeling requirements. Depending on the product type that can either be an insignificant added cost or a significant one. For higher priced products the benefits of commingling aren't worth the risks.
The secret to fast-food "quality" is the same as any other restaurant: fat, sugar and salt.
Well, they're not going after Christmas Dinner.

It has been a tradition all my life, and in the lives of every Brit I know that on Boxing Day (which is what we call the day after Christmas Day for those of you who aren't British), the family will have sandwiches using leftovers from the Christmas Dinner.

This turkey, cranberry, pigs in blankets and vegetable concoction is a very, very fond memory from my childhood. I'm instantly transported back to a very happy time in my life whenever I eat it.

It's not surprising then that retailers have tried to mimic it in the month or two before Christmas, and that I will readily give them money for this brief glimpse of happiness in the middle of an otherwise miserable, boring or frustrating average working day.
Policy based on science trumps bronze age mythology, so "it depends".
Does My Business Need a Blog? 4 Powerful Reasons the Answer Is Yes
Last week a train broke down on the tracks between our house and the small produce market we usually go to. We didn’t want to wait, so we turned around and went to Giant (the large super market in our area). It had been a long time since we got produce there and it was absolutely terrible. I forgot how much better the local stuff we get is. Most of the time, I will only ever go in the morning because the place fills up in the afternoon and I generally dislike “the expiernce” of going there. All this to say, in our case, it absolutely is the produce.
The quote in that article disparaging MBAs is funny, because Amazon famously prefers lots of MBAs.
Huh? London is swarming with Pret a Mangers, and Greggs doesn't have much of a presence here.

While there is nothing particularly special about a Pret a Manger sandwich, it is made on the same day that you buy it.
AWS Elastic Volumes for RDS?
So Elastic Volumes - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ebs-update-new-elastic-volumes-change-everything/ released on Feb 2017 was a huge deal but was limited to EC2 right.

As of Nov 22, 2017 and as per this announcement -
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/amazon-rds-now-supports-database-storage-size-up-to-16tb-and-faster-scaling-for-mysql-mariadb-oracle-and-postgresql-engines/, it seems as though Elastic Volumes have now been extended to RDS which would be an XMAS surprise!?

Am I reading this wrong!? Can anyone confirm?

"In addition, Amazon RDS now leverages Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Elastic Volumes to minimize the time required for storage scaling operations. To learn more, please visit the Storage for Amazon RDS documentation page."
How abstract types can bring meaning to primitive values. Haxe programming
yeah, i have mixed feeling about it, sorry i posted it. But the open source projects I've been sifting through are all broken to some extent. I was hoping someone might point out a better option than this closed source :(
Experiment to turn conservatives into liberals. Results of political divisions
so oranges are bigger than apples..
The fourth generation lives from the third and two well, the fifth generation again works their fingers to the bone making things.
You don't understand. I don't think the US is doing something immoral by stopping immigration. In fact, in the long run maybe it is positive for the world. The guy being deported in the article would surely be beneficial to his native country.
Understanding the Chinese Government’s Approach to Cryptocurrency
I generally prefer free cash flow yield (fcf / dollar invested), although both PE and FCF can be fucked with depending on how certain expenses are classified. That being said, if I had to choose one of the two, I would go with FCF yield every time.
https://archive.is/aJPVG
> "That might not come as a shock to most people, but to economists of the libertarian, free-market bent, it’s tantamount to heresy. Tricksters and con men, they say, will be weeded out of the market by their bad reputations. That’s a pretty big assumption, and might rightfully strike most non-economists as wishful thinking. But if you look at economic models, you’ll find that few of them include successful fraud and deception as a possibility. Modern econ relies so heavily on the assumption of rationality that there’s just not much room for tricks and scams. Obviously these models are far removed from most people’s experience of real markets, in which deception is common."

this is the achille's heal of libertarianism. it simply leans too heavily on the rationality assumption, while also ignoring many things of value in our lives like love, empathy, conversations, the future (unknowable) value of natural resources, homemaking activities, etc. it's political use (in the mano a mano sense, not in the government sense) is as a rationalization to be a jerk to your neighbor.

complex financial instruments are simply a manifestation of that mindset.
Note that while Chrome is currently the top browser in Germany, it's still not as big as Firefox used to be:

https://imgur.com/a/dx5n8

wishes Mozilla luck in reversing the downward trend
They're already on mobile in the stable release. I'm posting this comment from Firefox Quantum on Android right now.
I agree, it still needs a strong use case. IMHO, new network architectures are generally overhyped. Even AlexNet performs wonderfully well in most problems once you add nice initialization and batch normalization.
Well, I can neither see the appeal of gods. I guess many people just like to have uncertainty removed from their life even if that is not actually true. And that is probably the point that I don't get, why or how people get something out of those, well let me call them lies.
Is there anything about this Pascal superior to the Borland pascal of the time?
Or is it the tech? Agriculture tends to run at the forefront technology adoption, so you have a chance to play with tech you are unlikely to find elsewhere. That’s what drew me to farming.
I don't know how long you've been living in the US, but that simply does not ring true any more.

If you walk into an average M&S "Simply Food" - and these are now everywhere and they sell 20% of all sandwiches eaten in the UK each day - you will be confronted with 15-20 different sandwiches in wraps, subs and traditional bread.

Not one of them will be the vision or memory you have of a thin slice of ham and a thin slice of cheese. The closest they sell to that has a decent amount of both and the sandwich is a good 2" thick.

There is typically a range of options with some that are "lighter" and some which pack in more ingredients. That's for price point reasons. Even in M&S you can get a sandwich, packet of crisps and a drink for £3.50 - for that, you might be prepared to forego some salad. If you want a little more, you can, and you will pay a little more for it, and you will be sated.

To me the sandwich industry has really changed over the last 5-10 years - far, far more choices.
Because they lost WW II and had their country occupied for decades by Americans and Russians, both of whom many Germans resented (at least according to my parents who were part of the occupying force).
I've been using Firefox Focus on Android for most things, and if they don't work then I use regular Firefox. I rarely have to use Chrome.
An Island to Oneself
Show HN: MVP Ruby Open Source Football Survivor League
Automate GitHub Pages with IFTTT, Glitch and Jekyll
The universe is big and scary, and decidedly not anthropocentric or even comprehensible,.. some people want it to be, decide that it is, and believe that.
Some may not know about Harvard's Extension School:

http://blog.markshead.com/911/harvard-online-masters-degree-...

Master’s degree (ALM in IT): mostly on-line (8 weeks on-campus) for appx. $30K.
Ask HN: Python3 list parsing issue
Sandwiches in supermarkets generally stay on the shelf for a day or two. They don't contain any preservatives AFAIK (except perhaps in the bread).
I've never heard a good case that emotions exist. I'm a believer that we have both a sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system that are activated reflexively by the same types of stimulation that activate them in other animals; and as humans who deal with abstractions as physical metaphors, those abstractions stimulate our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems by activating the same ancient reflexes.

As humans are rationalizers, they construct reasons for these nervous activations after the fact. If you inculcate them with simple slogans that become habitual, they will interpret themselves in terms of those slogans. It's a failure of introspection, or rather a rerouting of any rational introspection through a lens of theory-theory[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-theory
I remember when Chrome has started their project. People were mainly switching because: tabs crashed independently from the browser, and it was way faster than Firefox. You don't need much to get people to switch.
Plus, that sentiment is only true with a narrow set of upper middle class, white collar assumptions. What about hard working retail workers or factory workers? Or look how vast the race and gender disparities are...
I looked into joining a crew on the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers once and I remember being told that long-distance sailing is less about sailing and more about making repairs at sea. Controlling the boat seems like the easy (I know, "easy") part. What are they going to do when their robo-boat's rigging is damaged?

I'm sure they've accounted for this—they're obviously not dummies. I'm just curious.
If you check the ingredients list you'll find they don't use many preservatives because there is little need, and so use of them would just increase costs.

The ingredients you've bought and put in the fridge are no more or less likely to use preservatives than the ones that go into a supermarket sandwich.

The cost and ability to make it your own in terms of ingredients is a good reason to make your own, but the preservative argument? That doesn't make sense to me.
Shadertoys' authors never fail to amaze me.
you are correct: http://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/about/history.html
For what it is worth, Bill spends a lot in the third world, where a more equitable US would have minimal impact on the standard of living.
I like optimism in the article, but raise of sandwich is nothing to celebrate.
I think most supermarket sandwiches are on the shelves for about 2 days max. On the second day if they've not sold then they cut the price drastically to sell them.
Blue Origin has just as ambitious goals as SpaceX. Millions working in space, industrialization of space to the extent that it actually starts reducing industrialization of Earth, etc. They even have a rocket on the drawing board somewhere, New Armstrong, that will likely be a 1-for-1 competitor with BFR, if not larger, and with full reuse (like BFR).

But as far as actual execution, yeah. SpaceX is way ahead and Blue Origin has been incredibly slow. Um, I mean "gradatim."
Boston Apartment Hub: Failed to grow a side project into a business
Wolfram really is a terrible liar (also very, very smart). He knows damn well that Maple had notebooks in the mid-1990s, because it was one of Mathematica's main commercial rivals, so "started appearing 25+ years later" is nothing other than a lie.
I write LastWeekinAWS.com using an entirely serverless workflow. DynamoDB holds the links, populated through a scheduled Lambda function that pulls them in from Pinboard. Lambdas handle building out the newsletter from a Jinja2 template, building the archive on a schedule, and injecting static headers into the CloudFront distribution.
There seems to be a correlation between gut balance and lifespan, in animal models, [1]. I wonder if a suitable fecal transplant could (somehow) promote longevity.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116130646.h...
In my experience, you learn useful things faster when running your own company, compared to working for someone else. Pretty much by definition, you tend to specialize when working for someone else. You can get unusually good at a certain thing, but you miss out on other things that you could be learning. The thing you specialize in gets boringly easy (from the perspective of what is good enough for the employer), and everything else remains a black box.

As a software engineer, the challenge is learning sales, and the art of distribution in general. If you don't want to do sales, avoid B2B software startups entirely, because that is pretty much always the bottleneck unless you are doing some kind of fundamental innovation.

I don't know anyone who was so good at technical things that a market formed around them and their technical skills, where I know several people who basically knew they wanted to start a software company, started it, slogged in obscurity for 6-12 months thinking product was the most important thing, and then either gave up and got a job again or learned sales in order to survive, and then after another year or so had a business with more fulfilling work and income than the job they left.

The key, regardless of how technical they were, was figure out how to be passable at sales before they ran out of money. Passable sales and passable product ability in practice seems to run circles around great product ability but insufficient sales ability (anecdote, at least for B2B since no one I know has a successful B2C startup). So that is probably the biggest observed blind spot for a software engineer.

The other thing is that a particular idea might have a shelf life, but the concept of starting a business doesn't. Besides having kids or impulsive lifestyle inflation, you can pretty much put off or pull forward starting a business with impunity and you just accept the trade offs. Having a job is without question an easier way to make money though, it's just a harder way to make lots of money or have deeply fulfilling work. I suspect much of the problem actually isn't the job itself, it's the nature of specializing.
Nice video, however instead of riding the hype train of arxiv, could we wait until peer review analyzes the paper?

If someone other than Hinton presented a YADLA (Yet Another Deep Learning Architecture) that does not achieve state of the art level of performance in the basic datasets, it would not be very well received.
I built this app to automate the management of our football survivor league. More information on the project can be found in this blog post:
http://www.mjproductions.biz/2017/11/24/ruby-football-fans-a.... Would love feedback and issue submissions!
That would just destroy HN , :-)
But how do Beorg and Synchthing play together?
If you never set foot onto EU soil, you can safely ignore the Gdpr. You might be blacklisted by EU ISPs though.
You're forgetting all the offal based dishes (black pudding, white pudding, liver, etc.), the various ways we will repackage pork (scratchings, sausage rolls, etc.) and the regional specialities (black peas, jellied eels, etc.)

That's just for starters.

P.S. - it's Roast _Beef_ with Yorkshire Pudding. Roast Lamb is lovely with some mint sauce, and you can put a Yorkshire pudding next to it, sure, but most people would consider it more traditional to use beef.
Which country? I'd love to pop by the orchard!
Personally I find the peculiar implication of a simple question so appealing. Will we eventually be able to create simulations that one would be unable to differentiate from reality if that simulation is all they had ever known? The answer there is quite self evident, yet it simultaneously somehow implies it is highly likely that we are ourselves within a simulation.

The reason is that we can safely assume that we are within one of n + 1 realities. The n simulated realities and the 1 real reality. Unless you attribute some sort of exceptionalism bordering on creationism to our existence, there's every reason to think that n is going to proportional to the number of advanced civilizations in existence and is presumably going to be very very large. And as you increase n the odds of us actually being in the 'real' reality, which are of course just 1/(n+1), approach 0.

Like you mention it's something that doesn't necessarily go anywhere. Even if you "prove" it after death, that life you'd be experiencing at that point faces the same logical issue - at least unless the argument loses consistency at some point. Something most seem reluctant to admit is that it's also comforting as an atheist. I always expected the infinity of time after my existence to be very much akin to the infinity of time before my existence. That's just disappointing. The seemingly high probability that all is not as it seems is certainly emotionally appealing. But it's certainly not just the emotional appeal driving me there - I could obviously have chosen to invoke Pascal's Wager in the decades of time prior to considering this, but it seemed fake -- this, somehow, does not.

It also answers, or at least compellingly kicks the can, of the question of existence. If I write a program to spit out a random number, I presume that there is no entity that suddenly whisks into existence under the false impression that it is choosing a random number - which it then decides upon, before then being whisked out of existence. So why am I, the 'thing' spectating the outcome of the series of chemical and electrical reactions carried out by this body, here? Descartes would have quite the time if the answer to our little question had been yes during his time. It changes the picture so much more than the dreams that drove his ponderances.

---

From a scientific point of view, it's obviously not a great concept as it cannot be falsified. And like you mention, it also cannot really be physically proven without begging the question. On the other hand, it can be treated as a soft science and if a preponderance of evidence does lean towards supporting it then we can at least say, "Hmm.. well we can't really say anything for certain, but that's certainly interesting."
Well theocratic governments used to be the norm in Western society. Then people realized that things like kings "ordained by God" and other such nonsense wasn't actually good for then. This might have to happen on a multi-generational level, but regardless people eventually realize what's good for them.

Lastly when you realize not to worry about people with illogical beliefs, and instead focus on educating those who are either open to information, or already support your beliefs you'll focus your energy on the things that you can actually change. Yelling, worrying or typing "you're wrong" to dogmatic religious adherents, homeopathic healers or conspiracy theorists is not going to change their mind.
Some areas are not capable of growing whatever you would like. Huge areas of the United States don't get enough water to support most kinds of farming. In northern Montana for example, the average land required for each cow/calf pair is 40 acres. If you had 80 acres there and could scrounge up enough water you could rent some equipment for a few days each year and grow alfalfa.
That man has done so much for humanity, I believe he really deserves that $100B.