skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> why would anyone think this person's trite and wholly conventional political opinions are in any way interesting or noteworthy?

I would think so because Feuerstein's examples had shown that many people distracted by examples, that means that they are greatly interested by politics. If they didn't care, they would not notice the nature of examples.

The other side is readers are unable to deal with their interest to politics and to not be distracted from the main topic of the book. The goal of book is not to teach readers to concentrate on what they are doing, so maybe dull examples would be more appropriate.
Well, I see where you are coming from, and I don't necessarily agree that the examples he chose are very good ones.

However, I think the overall point he makes is worth some consideration. Many technical books (consciously or unconsciously on part of the author) frame software as something that primarily satisfies commercial or business interests. If you want, that in itself is a pretty polarising agenda, and I often found myself moaning when reading yet another database book that gives "managing employees" as an example. Why not use something mostly unbiased, such as "invitations for your birthday party"?

That being said, I also agree with the author on the lack of public discourse in North America. I recently moved to Canada and I am astounded by how little politics are discussed here, even in those places where they should be discussed (e.g., take a look at the trifle on the CBC News website "Politics" section). Democracy lives from talking about controversial matters, and I always get angry at people suggesting "not to talk about these things at work (or family dinner for that matter)". This is not how we move things forward! This is how I radically changed my mind on many matters over the course of years. So, I'd suggest that we should embrace the extremes, discuss them in a civilised manner, and meet somewhere in the middle. Avoiding these topics altogether is only strengthening polarisation. Whether a book about technology is the right place to do so, is rightly open for debate.
I wasn't aware it worked at all on Windows now, that's cool. Doesn't seem very simple to install though. This is the installation guide for just one of the prerequisites: http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-microsof... And as you mention, only Nvidia.
Just open the start menu after a fresh install. Candy crush, Facebook etc. will welcome you.
I don't think it's definitely true that will work well. AlphaZero did significantly better than the original versions of AlphaGo (which did learn from existing human games). However, even training those nets will still take a fairly intensive amount of computational resources.

As for that koan, I'm not convinced it's very applicable here. My interpretation of the koan is that the entire setup (training process, structure, etc.) all encode domain knowledge. In this case, I think AlphaZero's domain knowledge is transferable enough that I don't think it's relevant.
D is in a tough situation right now

I think its good all around and balanced languages, but, there is always a better language for any use case, where D is an alternative

Ocaml, if you want performance close to C/C++ plus and high level abstractions

Rust, if you want manual memory managment

C# and Java, if you want large ecosystems and advanced features

Also C++ is now moving and improving fast
Even Ada is sort of making a come back
"There is a maximum total mining revenue even if Bitcoin becomes the only globally used currency.".

How are you coming to this conclusion? In addition to the coinbase, miners earn fees, which are valued according to current market conditions (supply and demand)
i would expect it to differ based on environment and trigger, but most likely she will just run after me without changing much of behavior :) I love the fact my both kids are persistent. I just need to get through their childhood and direct their powers to good beginnings :)
I feel like Engadget could use their screen real-estate a bit more effectively ;)

https://imgur.com/a/TwXwA
An education doesn't just benefit the one getting the education. The entire society benefits.

Educated people are crucial to successfull companies, thereby creating more jobs.

Educated people are crucial to a healthy democracy, where populist politicians have less chance of getting elected.

I would argue that it's probably more important for the entire society for someone to get a good education than for the person himself. Therefor education should be subsidized.
“And some see it as an avenue for self-expression and having some "fun" on the side.” this usually leads to more interesting reads. Not for everybody, but even Shakespeare had contemporary critics.
«is truly astounding»

Would you say that the worldwide electricity consumption of Christmas decorative lights (2.3 GW assuming it's 3× the US) is "astounding"? Well, Bitcoin miners consume less than that: I estimate 1.7 GW based on my previous research bounding it to 0.6-1.2 GW as of July.

http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption

Why do miners receive such a disproportionate amount of criticism considering that so many other energy uses are vastly more wasteful by multiple orders of magnitudes... Cars alone waste 95% of their fuel energy. The US wastes 61-86% of its energy: https://cleantechnica.com/2013/08/26/us-wastes-61-86-of-its-... But, no, the average HN reader seems more concerned by these miners using 0.01% of the world's energy.

In the future, we may eventually reach a point where the energy use starts becoming worrying, but we are currently very far from that point.
> Translation: The ARM "computers" will only run software Microsoft blesses. Can we call it a computer anymore?

Why don't people take Apple to task for doing the same thing? You can't take an iPad and install Linux on it, or Windows for ARM. You're locked into running iOS. Apple doesn't even allow downgrading iOS.

Same with Android devices that come with a locked bootloader. You can't install anything other OS version/flavour than what the manufacturer dictates.

Yes, it's unfortunate that Microsoft has this policy, but why is it that people only complain loudly about locked bootloaders when it comes to Microsoft products?

Apply the same standard to Apple and Android products with locked bootloaders. Microsoft isn't the first one to do this, and they won't ship nearly as many devices as other manufacturers who lock down the boot process.
I think a lot of the criticisms of his approach hinge on making false equivalences (what if he was a white nationalist!) and we should be careful of that. His examples are partisan, but not particularly extreme to my eyes.

If the author wants to write a book with an inbuilt smaller audience more power to him - the more extreme it gets then presumably the smaller the audience gets.
Firefox Breach Alerts Prototype
Here's a study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/

> Gun ownership was a significant predictor of firearm homicide rates (incidence rate ratio = 1.009; 95% confidence interval = 1.004, 1.014). This model indicated that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9%.

Firearms ownership rate doesn't correlate directly to firearms crime rates, but the change in ownership does.
Can someone kindly post links or books for a beginner to dive into learning C++? It is a bit intimidating to approach fresh.
Interesting. I'm still processing this essay.

Perhaps the problem to many is that this approach interrupts the flow necessary for fast learning. When I read a technical tome, I'm trying to understand the technical content as rapidly as I can. Trying to consider the political points, even if I agree with them, would greatly slow my learning via distraction and thus would inhibit the reason I paid for the book. It does feel a little misleading, like a bait and switch, if I had to pay for the book and this wasn't made clear somewhere: "I paid for SQL but I got political assertions instead that I could not easily skip."

I do agree that there is inadequate real political discourse, but this doesn't seem like a solution. But it's a free country, write it and see who wants to be your audience.
It isn’t about mining it is about empowering everyone to be able to transact without middlemen.
Is it really though?

A big class of imperfect information games can be modeled by having a record of everything the agent has seen so far. Then it has exactly the same, if not more, information available than a human player in the same position. We know that with equal information AIs can make better decisions than humans (see also, AlphaGo :] ) so at that point the AI could reasonably be expected to achieve superhuman performance.

The "imperfect information games are harder for AI" crowd are going to be surprised by just how badly humans deal with imperfect information. AIs have a much better memory than humans do, and much more potential to use actual probability which humans are truly shocking at utilising (although neural networks don't seem to utilise this edge; so far).
Lock screen, start menu, various system menus at that.

There are a few less of them if you remove internet access.

Then there's the nagging about getting office or whatever latest software that pops up in the corner occasionally.

It is somewhat dependant on your version of Windows 10.
All of the big corporate net neutrality supporters are universal hypocrites about blocking anything they don't like when it suits them. If you take a look at the history of: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter they've all done it at various times.

The comical turn of control that Twitter instituted around their APIs for example. Oh, Twitter likes to control its own service and network? Big surprise right.

If Comcast should be semi-nationalized into a heavily regulated public good, then why shouldn't every major web company be similarly nationalized? From Yelp to Zillow to Dropbox to Airbnb to Uber to Lyft to the giants like Google. These are big companies, what's the moral basis to force a telecom carrier to obey a net neutrality concept, but to not force huge services like Twitter or Snapchat to have to operate their own services on a strictly wide open basis such that they're barred from restricting or throttling any connections to their services? Why shouldn't all Internet services be forced by law to provide fully open API access to all of their non-sensitive data, with zero restrictions and throttling? They shouldn't be allowed to discriminate in any manner on the ability to access their data. It's an entirely arbitrary line being drawn, derived from subjective bias of the supporters.

With these companies it's always do what I say and not what I do.
Humans are also much weaker than AlphaZero in these three games. The difference in the numbers of positions searched might be responsible for a substantial part of that.
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."

- Aldous Huxley
I've been a long-term customer of them, but I'm continually under-whelmed by them.

They admit, if you push them, that they economize on front-line support. I think what you relate is a consequence of that.

In a previous thread, I went on a massive whinge-fest about how they had "sun-setted" the one-time $15 payment member account that I set up for my father and that they had previously advertised using the words "never expires". I stand by that because they were in breach of contract.

On the other hand, I don't think they are charging enough really. I would probably be prepared to pay more than I do if I had confidence that they weren't using low-skilled labor for front-line support.
It's not an unsolvable problem with good apps/software though. A key as a sequence of characters is confusing, but depicting an actual key cut in half, that needs to be combined with another, would make sense to people.

As was said elsewhere, a lot of this will come as the space matures.
I’d agree if this was an active discussion between the author and me. But I’m posing a question to an author of a piece written 17 years ago...

Allow me to reframe the question: if you’re fine with the book as-written, would you still be fine with it if it expressed the opposite political views?
Leaving aside the politics, boy does the listed example suck.

Relational databases are about relations. The trite little employee/department examples we've all seen before work because most people learning about databases immediately can understand a whole bunch of different relations that can occur here. You can think about concrete problems you might want to solve using that data -- figuring out who has to do annual reviews of what employee, doing payroll, etc. You can get a book's worth of mileage just adding things to that simple set of tables.

Meanwhile, in this example -- if the ICJ wanted to make a database of war criminals, this isn't close to how they'd do it. Storing the sort of data in the example... using Excel might be overkill, you could do that in the text editor of your choice. This isn't even a toy problem. It's not a simplified version of the real thing for teaching purposes, it's a polemic slapped in the middle of a bunch of boilerplate SQL for no other reason than because the author is bored of writing SQL tutorials and is spicing it up by throwing in a bunch of polemics. There's no connection between the material there and what the user is supposed to be learning. It's distracting. It can be nothing but distracting.

If you want to say that using business-oriented examples propagates a certain sort of politics, fine (although nobody is using Oracle for anything else, the license costs rule it out for hobbyist products). But make your examples illuminate what you want to teach, not distract from it.
"We are not now, and never will be (barring radical changes in our economic system) living in a world with abundant energy."

Unless we build nuclear fusion reactors, which seems quite likely on the 400 year time scale you're talking about.
If he was just trying to rattle off a list of maximally controversial issues, there'd be some right-wing ones on his list. If your goal is to offend for the sake of offending, it'd be self-defeating to only offend one side.

The guy has an ideology, he wants it to inform his writing. You may disagree with the ideology, but the simple fact of your disagreement doesn't mean it's incoherent.
La Marseillaise is undeniably martial. It is not particularly nationalistic, however. It does not extol the virtues of France, it does not affirm territorial claims, it does not attack any other country directly or by allusion. All of these are fairly common in national anthems in the era. By contrast, the central theme here is basically "Fight! ... Because we're really screwed if you don't."

While I don't deny the issues with nationalism, nor that national anthems were a major tool of fomenting such nationalism, I think it improper to assert that La Marseillaise was a major contributing factor to that end.
Amazon is not a monopoly, Google is. Retail is ENORMOUS and even in the area of online retail, which is still only a minor segment of all retail sales, Amazon still only has something like 30-50% marketshare depending on the type of good/week of the year. There is no "search" outside of the Web and google controls 90%+ of it.
So does an Apple store have to carry Chromecast and fire TV?
Google this: Windows 10 ads site:reddit.com
And it expired 8 - 10 years ago

> Microsoft's obligations under the settlement, as originally drafted, expired on November 12, 2007. However, Microsoft later "agreed to consent to a two-year extension of part of the Final Judgments" dealing with communications protocol licensing.
This was a fun read although as others have pointed out, the end conclusions are not supported very well by, and maybe are irrelevant to, the article as a whole.
It is wrong to format an HN textual quote as a code block ;-)
While certainly effective, it would also be a good way to paint Google as the villain in this matter. It's childish, irrational behaviour in my opinion.
China is the biggest importer of raw materials; they have some, but so does Australia and South Africa. Also, rare earths aren’t really that rare, just messy to process leading to higher costs (in the west) or severe environmental damage (in china). Environment protection will have to change regardless, or china simply won’t exist as a viable place to live anymore. Sure, we will need to pay more for rare earths as more responsible production comes online, and china loses its environmental 差不多 advantage so that capacity doesn’t have to be there.

Chinese investments are pretty focused in speculative asset bubbles (like real estate). When that bubble pops, there will be similar pain to Japan, but the world will recover fairly quickly.
The mining algorithms are the source of the supply, the most important element.

There are many other blockchain designs now, so Bitcoin is already obsolete.
Your commitment to arguing hypotheticals instead of engaging with anything the author actually wrote is impressive.
How Much Does Bespoke Software Cost?
Take a look at Cloud Firestore.

The author talks a lot about scalability but Google recently posted [0] that Cloud Firestore is similar to Firebase Realtime DB and more scalable.

[0] https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/rtdb-vs-firestore

"Cloud Firestore is Firebase's new flagship database for mobile app development. It improves on the successes of the Realtime Database with a new, more intuitive data model. Cloud Firestore also features richer, faster queries and scales better than the Realtime Database."
It uses more energy, but means you don't have to trust anyone to transact. It remains to be seen just how much that property is worth. (Quite alot, I suspect).
Being unknown chinese models, most likely.

From the brands people buy from in Europe, only Sony allows it officially, by providing tools on their dev site.
I went from using primarily C++ to using primarily Python and now to doing some development in Rust. Rust is suitable for systems programming. Like C++, it's also suitable for application programming, which is what most development is. One need not be writing kernels to justify using Rust.

At my job, for example, I'm slowly introducing bits of Rust here and there to do some data engineering. I wouldn't use it for high-performance numerical computations, but ergonomically it's almost as easy as Python (for me) and the safety, type, and other guarantees it provides make for a more robust pipeline.
True.

But even so, the average Coinbase user's reaction to receiving their first Bitcoin is "Now what do I do with it?"

Both of my parents had this reaction. And the only use they've found so far is to gamble it on altcoins like they have in the past with penny stocks!

So the whole "transferring coins or buying goods and services" part has a looooong way to go.
Great idea! Here's a link to a Google spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jjUYOQMuZ4cRyTv1M5X8...

Also I started a Matrix chatroom for discussion around this topic, I'll try to watch it and answer any questions that I can:

https://riot.im/app/#/room/#startyourownisp:matrix.org
The new Apple is just another corporate-American company run by an MBA. That's exactly what such companies do.
Chromebook developer mode is pretty free-range and just requires pressing a key combo during boot.
In one way, the last draft is more canonical than the official spec - if you are talking chapter and verse to another person about the spec, odds are good that they are referring to the last public draft also.
Which isn't effective at ending hierarchies if the distribution of coins is even more unequal than existing power structures.
It's pay-per-user-install so I think it is very easy to determine if it is worth it for you/
I agree with the article, at least in that our values and beliefs end up embedded in the examples (e.g., all the emp/dept examples).

You need to use some kind of data to help the reader, an abstract concept isn't going to work.

I do disagree with the author in that pushing a political viewpoint in an example is in poor taste and makes understanding the example difficult for readers unfamiliar with any jargon.

Maybe examples that draw from nature (e.g., taxonomy hierarchy) or the humanities (e.g., cataloging a library) would be different enough to be refreshing and less... capitalistic.
It's so wild how certain topics will trigger a response. Your comment was about nuance, and I replied with (what was meant to be) a mostly complimentary comment, expanding on that topic. But you latched on to the vaccine part of it that was meant only as an example. Something about that subject really gets people's blood pressure up; I notice my comment above was downvoted as I predicted - although not by you, as far as I could tell. (FWIW a nuanced discussion about vaccines isn't germane to this topic, so I will respectfully pass on that.)

Anyway, I think you're right about social media amplifying human nature, but I don't think it's about opinions. I think most people don't really care too deeply about most things -- one major reason why voting turnouts are so low! Sure, they care about one or two things passionately, but they're mostly moderate on most things. More universally though, people care about attention. They love attention. It's wired into our DNA; babies do everything they can for attention, because attention is survival.

But it turns out that having moderate views isn't really all that interesting. It doesn't demand attention the way having (or representing to have) extreme views does. So are the extreme views genuine, or just a show for attention?
Agreed. I could not even put in production since it was requiring too much memory so my droplet in digital ocean was failing to compile. I Had problems with CORS in Kermal framework, Crecto was crashing for no reason (so I switched to manually writing mysql queries, but not the ideal) and no one could help me with those problems.
I switched to Elixir/Phoenix and it was great, but I still want to see Crystal in a few years again, it's a great language.
$99/month is a steal for CloudApp for iMobile
The security of the network can be measured by any user. Multiply the mining difficulty by the efficiency of mining hardware and the price of electricity and divide by 2; this is the cost of running a 51% attack.

The beauty of the mining mechanism is that having transactions processed provides security at the same time. As long as users see value in having transactions processed they will be willing to fund miners with transaction fees.

However, you're right that users aren't paying for security directly. The fee market may not actually give miners enough revenue to ensure network security. When the block reward goes away electricity consumption will certainly drop (relative to transaction volume), but it may even drop too far to the point where the network is no longer secure from 51% attacks.
You'd think, but they still let some absolute trash through:

http://bylr.net/3/2017/11/99month-is-a-steal-for-cloudapp-fo...

It's incredible that on one hand, they can pull up competent and dedicated developers for a minor transgression, but then allow something as ugly and misleading as the above example.
Or Yandex: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2015/03/mozilla-makes-yandex-...
There's another film "The Arrival" that's a year older than Contact.
The app isn't that recent, it just only was made available on the Play Store; it used to be exclusive to the Amazon App Store, which had to be sideloaded.