skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Portuguese drug use has gone up in fact."

More people using drugs isn't automatically undesirable, as more people abusing drugs is.

Too often drug use is equated with drug abuse, but it need not be so. It's possible to use drugs and not have them affect your life negatively, or even have them affect your life positively (as in the case of the various psychedelic therapies out there to tread everything from PTSD to depression, using psychedelics to enhance one's creativity or for problem solving, or arguably psychedelic use in sacramental/religious contexts).

Another thing to consider when looking at raw statistics that might show an increase in drug use is that people are more likely to honestly report their drug use if they think they won't be punished for it, and conversely are more likely to lie about it if they thought they might get punished or stigmatized for it. In the case of Portugal, their non-punitive approach increases the odds that people will be more honest about their drug use, so the apparent increase in drug use might be just surveys finally reporting the truth about already-existing drug use. Real drug use there might have stayed the same or even decreased while showing an increase on paper.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Fuller
I would support the death penalty for the current perpetrators of this mass crime against humanity. US law, however, does not allow such retroactive application of the law for many good reasons. The perpetrators should be tried in international court like the Nazis were. In the end, let's not forget that their goals were essentially the same.
The other commentor was me too :)

I also like to use analogies. But this one really is misleading.

We are not speaking about juridical crimes here and not about children but adults. It’s one if the main differences between children and adults that society expects the latter to communicate, to express their thoughts, and to take responsibility for their actions or lack of action.

But nowadays in debates like these I see the emergence of a devaluation of these features that until now clearly differentiated children from adults. The individual of age is described like a helpless, voiceless child.

I find this seriously worrying (which is why I spent hours this Saturday in this comment debate, which I rarely do).
The other variant was actually meant to read sin(a)/1 to highlight the ratio in both cases but I abandoned that halfway through because I thought it makes the hypotenuse look special while it really is not in the sin(a)/cos(a) variant where the more natural description would be tan(a)/1 but that kind of ruins the simple association with the side lengths of a right triangle. I had another idea how to formulate it that would not favor one of the variants but as far as I can tell the necessary distinction between the two catheti that exists in German does not exist in English and so I left it as it is.
Hashflare Math: 60x returns in one year?
This was posted yesterday (someone can provide a link), but this rehash of the story is even worse, since it takes several misleading grafs before it acknowledges that the restriction --- which is batshit and toxic --- applies only to CDC's input to the President's annual budget, which is theater, not real policy.

People on the previous thread hypothesized that maybe the administration was trying to secure funding for CDC without "triggering" ultraconservatives in Congress. I doubt it: again, the President's budget is not taken especially seriously in the first place. I think it's not unlikely that this is simply the administration trolling for a conflict in the news that they think will make them look good with their base.

Either way, it is of minimal practical impact. Which is important to know, because many people on Twitter are (justifiably) alarmed that the administration is instead governing what words CDC uses in scientific literature.
"This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics."

He literally did say that. Maybe that's not what he meant, and the gist of what he was saying was correct, but he said what he said. But go ahead and vilify the people who took issue with what reads essentially like a utilitarian apology for homophobia.
Since the repeal of the Glass–Steagall act

Don't forget Bill Clinton's Community Reinvestment Act too. This lies squarely in his lap.
Honestly this usually just means someone calculated a significant p-value... Those terms have become kind of meaningless.
People treat the dissertation like it is a standard. It is nothing close to a standard. It is the source of a decade of time wasted bickering over it.
The sellers are not really to blame here though.

Often they are just Chinese-speaking American entrepreneurs. The problem is the lack of IP protection in China. And lack of any interest in branding and brand differentiation, hence you got "brands" that sounds like they were picked via /dev/rand. And of course everything is probably manufactured in the same 3 or 4 factories.

Lev Andropov: It's stuck, yes?

Watts: Back off! You don't know the components!

Lev Andropov: [annoyed] Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!!!
the EU is not changing any rule, they are enforcing one of the original ones: a state must not make special cases for companies.

The principle is fundamental because otherwise everybody would play favourites with their own "national champions".

The case against Luxembourg is not that taxes there are low, it's that they are low _for amazon_.

What Luxembourg says is not "this is a new rule" but "we have not played favourites".
That's a good point. Of course, it's possible. I just think it should be the last explanation we consider, after definitively crossing everything else off the list.
How to Be Seen as an Expert in Artificial Intelligence
You don't have to trust me, that's why I linked to the source. Check out L21-24 in bootstrap.js.

You can verify that this is the same code as your own local copy of the add-on by visiting about:debugging, clicking "enable add-on debugging," and hitting "Debug" under the Looking Glass add-on.

Here's a press release confirming that we're pulling the add-on: https://gizmodo.com/after-blowback-firefox-will-move-mr-robo...

I'm an engineer in Developer Relations. I'm not in management, I wasn't in the decision chain for this. I'm not here to defend that decision. I'm just here to try to explain, factually, the technical aspects of what happened, and to then reflect your sentiments internally.
>An analyst who attended the meeting at the CDC in Atlanta told The Washington Post that instead of “evidence-based” or “science-based,” policy analysts are instructed to use the phrase, “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”

Sounds like a quibble over form, it's not like they're removing the science itself.
What’s worth exploring is space. Better telescopes, more monitoring, etc will actually tell us something about tye possibilities or existence of alien life.

Chasing down misidentified flying objects and hoaxes will not. The idea that numerous spaceships, each with more potential kinetic energy than mankind has created in its entire history, are just flying around our atmosphere without leaving massive and easily recordable emissions is ludicrous.
Drugs highly criminalized, South Korea: 0.1 deaths/million people/year [1]

This is a much more complicated issue than numbers from two countries could possibly tell.

[1] http://www.unodc.org/wdr2017/field/3.1_Mortality.xls
What makes you think they’d be any different from a regular car, taxi or bus other than what you are wishing for?
Arthur C. Clarke Offers His Vision of the Future (2001)
Yep, US radar never ever shows false signals.
To be clear, i'm not arguing that gays should have less rights. However, if I were to put forward such an argument, it would look like this:

There are all kinds of classes of person who's rights we proscribe. Violent criminals, and those who are dangerously insane, come to mind. It's possible that some of those individuals were born that way - that they were predisposed to that behavior in a way that they cannot be 'blamed' for. Yet we feel no compunction about taking away their rights, because we feel that it's necessary to protect the safety of our civilization. So, in short, it's ok to take away a minority group's rights if the exercise of those rights is sufficiently harmful to society. Now, if you are a religious person, you may believe that Homosexuality contributes to moral decay, and the breakdown of sexual and social norms that serve to promote positive familial and social development. In light of that, you may rationally conclude that homosexuality is sufficiently harmful to society that the rights of homosexuals need to be limited.

Again, I cannot stress enough that this is not what I personally believe. But IMO a person presenting their view in the way that I just did should not be censured for doing so. They should be argued with. We should attempt to convince them that our worldview is better. But they shouldn't lose their job, and they shouldn't be made afraid of expressing their view in public.
Responding to edit:

Interesting that you've managed to twist "a tweet" into being equivalent to an HR complaint. Perhaps that's the bigger issue.

But I also just scrolled through a few hundred or maybe a few thousand #metoo tweets. I didn't see a single example that fit the definition of "complaining that a co-worker expressed interest".

Can you give some examples of those tweets? I feel like that at least should be possible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940674
It separates naming from evaluating.

I have to bake 7 pies...

7

and each pie takes 45min

7 45 *

=> 315

But I can fit 3 pies in the oven at a time

7 45 * 3 /

=> 105

Using infix notation, I would need to consider order of operations, and put operators before data, increasing the mental stack size.

Using a postfix calculator, I can just throw values onto the stack, and start consolidating them with operations.
Child molestation is another can of worm, see the Outreau trial.

Note : I am NOT saying that it is also the case for Dylan Farrow.
Just that sadly the world is not all black and white and for this kind of crime it is very hard to find the truth.
Maybe the key phrase is inadequate equilibrium.

https://equilibriabook.com/
Save the Asiatic cheetah from extinction
A quick search reveals that all of the inmates doing that job are volunteers.

They get to spend time outside prison and interact with people who aren't prisoners or guards. I could imagine volunteering for that if I was a prisoner. That doesn't make using prisoners as cheap labor OK, especially for dangerous jobs, but it doesn't surprise me at all that prisoners would rather do that than sit in a cell.
Well in the UK it was a tax break for rich middle class people - not going to help a single parent who buys her electricity on a key system.
I wonder what a web browser would look like if it evolved inside emacs.
Government run, and focused on rehabilitation and not punishment. Often featured here on HN, actually.
If I had a nickel for every time someone said "don't really understand REST".. often people who both think they understand it say it to each other. It's pretty funny. Guess what, we understand it fine, and we don't like it.
Norwegian islamic republic, with half of nation on drugs, without terrestrial broadcasting and without cash, easy to manipulate:D Fuck neoliberals.
Intelligent Aliens aren’t deer, anyone who has mastered interstellar travel are closer to god’s in terms of the power they’d have over us. No need to hide, and probably impossible to hide their massive power sources.
Seems strangely inexpensive to me. Serious engineering, special train, 1.3 km construction on difficult terrain and only 45 mln. Euro?

In comparision, new Dublin tram line - COTS cars, 6 km line for 368 mln Euro. Or Detroit Qline, $180 mln. for 5.3 km line.
I think there are two orthogonal issues in the discussion which I would like to untangle. Some of the proposed solutions have been about maintaining a "social distance" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15939009) to "reduce the odds" of sexual attraction [Pencesque] (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940041) and consequently sexual harassment at the workplace. Another comment asked about whether pool parties at a conference make sense (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937938)

The orthogonal issues are

1) Non-consensual unwanted advances

2) Curbing avenues for sexual attraction

I call them orthogonal because,

- A person with enough avenues for sexual attraction at workplace or otherwise and choose not to do anything non-consentual and to recognize the people he/she feels attracted towards as equal humans even if they are his/her superiors or juniors.

- A person with few avenues for sexual attraction can choose to be non-consentual and delegitimize the humanity of his/her victims despite the lack of abundance of opportunity.

Mixing up these issues ends up confusing infidelity and sexual harassment. A person who seeks and engages in consensual sex outside his/her marriage is guilty of infidelity but not guilty of sexual harassment. A person who makes unwanted advances towards a married partner is guilty of sexual harassment irrespective of the fact that the victim is a married partner.

Note that I would categorize anything that makes the other person uncomfortable as an unwanted sexual advance. If a person talks about his/her pornography fetishes, but the other isn't interested, it is unwanted. If a person grabs the other other by the waist, while the other does not like it and tries to wriggle free, it is unwanted. If a person asks a subordinate for drinks and the subordinate is unwilling but pressured into accompanying, it is unwanted. Being unwanted is a clear signal for a person to not engage in a certain activity in the future and the victim should not be expected to create a ruckus in order to reject unwanted advances.
> the death of privacy seems almost inevitable

That isn't a good excuse to kill it now.
"You can come up with physical evidence showing that intercourse happened and that she had high levels of alcohol in her system"

And I'm saying that's all that necessary. With high levels of alcohol I claim that she could say "Yes, please" and it would still be rape: she didn't have the capacity for consent.
I've addressed this post with a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15942647

In short, I'm worried that folks will pick up on this anti-Mozilla train and brashly jump to other browsers without considering the security and privacy impact.
>druggies

I hear that word used a lot over here in the UK, usually by people on right of the political spectrum, but the word sounds rather pejorative to me. I presume the people using it mean "users of drugs, excluding alcohol" in order to differentiate themselves from the users of the other drugs.
I also think it was a silly thing to do, but it is not the case that the additional code violated anyone’s privacy.

There’s no need to be hyperbolic.
Does the infrared camera lens zoom or focus by rotating? It looks like it's doing that towards the end.

Something stuck to the front element probably wouldn't be so much in focus, it should be something deeper in the lens. For example a piece of paint can become dislodged (has happened to me with binoculars).
Indian Police Bust MultiLevel Cryptocurrency Scam in India
Thanks for writing this to inform the community. I had no idea this was even going on before reading your article. What browser do you use now?
If he was also drunk, could we equally charge her with rape (or sexual assault) if we have physical evidence that a) sex occurred and b) both were legally intoxicated?

Most incidents of first time sex -- ie the first sexual encounter for this specific couple -- involve alcohol.* Are we going to start willy nilly charging both parties with rape for all such incidents?

* at least in the US they seem to.
"it still won't stop drug users from committing crimes to get their next fix"

Just subsidize the cost of drugs for those that can't afford them, and problem solved.

A fraction of Trump's tax cut should do the job.
It's often new employees fresh out of college who are the worst. They can be obsessed with doing things 'right', which you can't blame them because they have little experience. The internet tells them REST is right, so anyone who doesn't agree with them is wrong.
Indeed; the FAQ gives a shout to Terry Riley.
And what if you don’t have hard evidence? What if you’re an intern who was raped and you just have your word? Do you give up your opportunity to work at Microsoft? Do you go to work with your rapist? Isn’t that also a terrible thing?

Dealing with a work place complaint is very different than dealing with a criminal case. With crimes, we can say “it’s better to let one thousand guilty people go free than to convict once innocent person.” We can do that because a false negative has relatively little cost. As we are learning with the Harvey Weinstein allegations, that’s not true in a work place setting. A false negative means that some woman has to either exit the job and give up career opportunities, or live with ongoing harassment and abuse at the hands of a coworker. And if you set the standard for believing accusers so high that you let one thousand victimized women continue to be harassed to save one innocent man from a false accusation, you get what we have now: a bunch of really angry women.
Attention has quickly become our scarcest and most valuable resource, and filtering out noise is one of the most valuable services that can be provided. The no limits, "let the good in with the bad" approach is just not realistic at this point in human history.

Unfortunately, I don't think that sociologists are going to find the answer alone. It will take others who can engage the theory, but not become swept away in it.
What's most troubling is that Sam Altman is just the sort of person who might be able to add value to the situation by taking a complex issue and thinking really hard about how to deal with it. We need to develop nuanced mechanisms of combatting misinformation and filtering out truly impoverished arguments while letting in unusual, perhaps even incorrect, but potentially valuable ones. Instead he merely repeated dogma of a "marketplace of ideas" model of the world that is clearly inconsistent with the evidence all around us.

This is, at least in part, a technical problem. Zuckerberg seems to be waking up to the role of the failed marketplace of ideas in creating the political monstrosity that we are dealing with now. He seems to be at least thinking through how to deal with it. But it's going to require a lot more than one organization to figure out how to communication must change in an era where the value of talk is so much lower and the value of the attentional resources required to truly listen are so much higher.
A partial list of things more believable than UFOs are Alien spaceships

1) Chemtrails.

2) 9/11 conspiracies.

3) JFK assassination conspiracy.

4) Vaccines cause autism.

5) Cell phones cause cancer.
etc, etc.

The only theory less believable than UFOs being Aliens is flat earth.
Ask HN: Does Google still do 20% time?
The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable. Looking Glass is a really cool idea for users who want it.

But pushing it out broadly, even in an inert state, was not good.

I can assure you that there's an active internal discussion to that effect. I'm hopeful that we'll learn from this.
I wasn't trying to communicate a sensitivity to anonymous criticism, rather I was trying to communicate that anonymous criticism only contributes heat and no progress to a discussion. And then I tried to tie together how that heat can lead to suppression.

I take it from your response that you disagree with that. I would be interested in hearing either how you hoped your original comment would contribute to the discussion or how you think I could have more clearly articulated my issue with it.
Shameless plug: anyone interested in reading On Liberty on their ereader should check out our free edition at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-stuart-mill/on-libert...

It's an excellent read, and is the foundation of a lot of quotes on philosophy of government that Americans will be familiar with, but perhaps unsure of the source. A really foundational book.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937017 (153 comments)
I don’t see your logic here. Slaves worked for free and were a huge part of the economy. Wages are not the only part of the equation.
So sad to read stuff like this, but you're actually right.

This sucks.
I don't know what this even means. Proof of what? Which argument are you making now? That it's all "fake genocide"? Or that these people deserve it because they're "jihadis"?
Linkbait, they don't mention that Solar city was drowning in debt. There was no way it could continue its aggressive marketing. It's one of the reasons it's no longer an independent company. The reduction is not a reflection of Tesla but a reflection of the overall market. People just are willing to spend the thousands of dollars or perpetual lease to power their homes. Like it or not, the switch to solar or similar is for the large utilities to do it. But they won't do it unless they are forced to do it. California has started but its now time for the rest of the country to pass some laws.
Ok, let me jump in with https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/pouch-replicate-webrtc/, you can replicate a totally in-client database between browsers.

The example doesn't use a signaling server, you must copy and paste the ICE candidates between browsers (do not use the same browser for the example, that's cheating) and then the connection is established and the database is replicated every time you add a document.

Also, read the source, it's very very simple (since you must provide your own WebRTC DataChannels).
So many of these stories start with 'Coworkers went out for a few drinks...' It is clear that there are persons that behave in a predatory manner when a soon-to-be victim becomes drunk, and social norms even legetimize this behaviour in some ways.

It doesn't say if the victim here was drunk, but some level of intoxication seems likely given the nature of the crime. This doesn't excuse anything.

I wonder how many of these crimes would be prevented if steps were taken to limit excessive drinking. I don't know how this would actually be implemented, or if companies or universities already do have a policy about alcohol and social events.
> I pledge to give $20 to Mozilla once: - they apologized for the fuck-up - they pledge to stop doing that kind of stupidity - they reconsider the employment of those really responsible for it.

I was indeed considering making a recurring donation after their work on Quantum. But I won't bribe an organization into abiding by its own mission statement and I won't give money to an organization that cannot keep its promises.

I wish the technical folk at Mozilla, who are literally building the browser, would split out, join in with FSF or EFF, and create the fork that we all would switch over to in an instant.
Ethereum is limited. If you ran into limits with solidity then you ran up against the limits of Blockchain tech as we enter 2018. Use those limits as programming puzzles and go create something great. I find the limitations make me more creative. Solidity has some funkyness and that will get resolved, but there is still a ton you can do with it.
I’ve heard some people say that 20% time is still in effect and others say that the company has moved away from it.