skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many Americans are really attached to the vision of hopping in their personal vehicle with no additional transaction friction and going on long road trips.

EV charging infrastructure isn’t yet well suited to medium to long road trips, so some people discard the whole idea because they’re upset by suggesting a different distribution of friction in their lives.

Whether the actual friction is big enough to matter is hard to say. I drive outside a 100 mile radius about twice a year, and I don’t mind renting cars when I do, so it doesn’t seem especially onerous to me, but don’t underestimate people’s love for their particular car/dislike of rental cars.
Not to mention that Indo-Arabic digits are almost universal, other characters are not. Picture a chinese or armenian with a password that uses characters from their respective alphabets trying to type it on each other's ATMs.
Note that this:

>The parent now owns everything anyway.

does not (perhaps surprising to some) allow you to break laws or agreements entered into with other parties without consequences.
There's an xkcd for this, isn't there? https://xkcd.com/1831/
My (non-technical) friends have found Signal to be mostly easy to use. You should give it a try yourself!
I've read the books by Frank and I agree that the quality declines after the first books, mostly because the scale change, but the writing does not cope with this change.
Sure, that makes sense to me. But this seems more like "the company said it wouldn't allow anyone else to query the database" before I bought it. Now that I'm owner, do I still count as "anyone else?" I'd argue not.

Edit: that's from a US perspective. Sounds like France (& the EU) put additional restrictions on how personal data may be used even after it's voluntarily provided.
Encoding Type class in Scala
> European data protection authorities can only impose small fines at the moment, but a new EU privacy law entering into force next year will increase fines to up to 4 percent of a company’s global turnover.

Would it be 4% of Whatsapp's or FB's revenue?
I think I'm going to stay home today because I'm feeling polonium deficient.
Nim looks super cool! There goes my holiday free time..
Why? For almost everyone, it would be less work and give better results to just have a WebASM app render HTML. Except for "legacy" apps written in C++ and some native UI framework, why would anyone bypass using what is already there and works in a browser? It would be like writing an iOS or Android app by using C++ and bypassing the native UI toolkit.
We can't comment on art? Can't lament its waste and implied value of the environment? Can't make suggestions on how a greater impact could be made (even if only to the commenter) with a few small tweaks, while still keeping the core values in place?

Sorry if it seems a bit snarky, but art is open to criticisms and critiques.
that, and he noticed the numbers in the cords matched the numbers in a census record.
The Future of JavaScript Is at Our Fingertips
How do I go beyond basics?
SEC Halts Crypto Over Manipulation Concerns After 2,700% Jump
He did by using temp account.
FDA approves gene therapy to treat rare form of inherited vision loss
I'll not argue with you that Git's syntax is weird. It's an airplane that was launched as a kite by Linus and then assembled into an airliner while in flight by the passengers. Could definitely do with a revision.

The neat thing is that Git is an expression of that UNIX philosophy in which tools have various layers that are separated. You can have the crazy Git syntax but you can also write another command (or a GUI) that wraps Git and gives you the set of sane commands you wish it had, and which covers 90% of your use-cases, while still keeping the original around in case you need it.

[Disclaimer: I've spent the past couple years doing exactly this (the GUI part) for a digital archives application. And to lmm's point up above my app does hide the staging step from the end-user.]
It will be nightmare if you have to comply to every laws of a country just because you have users in it.
To continue the Ishiguro and Hemingway theme, two of the books I enjoyed most this year were The Buried Giant (Ishiguro) and The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway).
That is the way it currently works, yes. If your foreign web service is not approved by the Chinese government, it will most likely be blocked in China.
I like it. Another one for part 2.
I uninstalled WhatsApp the moment it was bought by facebook. Foresight is 20/20.
Python development for infrastructure management using Salt
Also: The presence of microplastics in commercial salts from different countries (nature.com)

253 days ago

223 points

56 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14073368
Which Samsung model do you have?
I'm not sure the headline is at all connected to the article.

The article points out very real concerns with exchanges.

But there is such a thing as a "strike price" when converting BTC to fiat, just like there is in the stock market.

When you sell (or buy) your coins on Coinbase, it gives you a strike price that updates periodically. But when you hit the submit button, that transaction is locked in, so you know exactly the amount that will be transferred to (or from) your traditional bank account.

There are very real flaws in the current exchanges, but "price being fictional" isn't any more real than it is on the traditional stock market.
". It announces an algorithm called AlphaZero that, given the rules of any two-player game of strategy and copious hardware, trains a deep neural network to play the game at skill levels approaching perfection."

I have a particular interest in having a computer play the game Magic: the Gathering at an expert level. In some ways, this seems like an ideal fit for AlphaZero - it's a two-player strategy game with a finite number of valid plays at each state, yet I'm still not sure how to deal with four key elements:

1. The game is random - it has a deck of cards that are shuffled.

2. The game has hidden information - cards in hand are hidden.

3. The cards can change the rules of the game itself. For example, a card could change the win conditions of the game. There are over 20,000 unique cards with more regularly being printed.

4. A major part of the game (perhaps the most important) is that each player chooses their own combination of sixty cards from the ever-increasing pool. This makes understanding the "metgame" extremely important - a "deck" that was good a week ago may be outclassed the following week as players react.

In addition, there are many decks that win with odd combinations of cards and often the only way to beat these decks is to know in advance how to stop the combo.

Any ideas on how best to approach this problem?

Right now I am working on building a very simple version of the game with both players playing the same three cards with no randomness. This will eventually feed a simple genetic algorithm to test different quantities of each of the three cards to find an optimal "build".
How often do Ruby's stack struct definitions change?
UA Magazine's Most-Read Stories of 2017
> There is no "war against Javascript" as the author suggests.

Well, there's my war on Javascript, that I wage in my head every time I have to use it.

> Again, there is nothing inherently threatening about Javascript.

Well, it's not inherent, but it exists. Javascript has (had, with WebAssembly) an inherent advantage in that even though you could compile to JavaScript, there was an inherent mismatch the farther your language semantics were from it. CoffeeScript is straightforward. Others are less straightforward. Rust requires a huge amount of runtime to be shipped even for WebAssembly.

> It is not tied to the web browser anymore.

So, the beachhead is secure, time to advance into the countryside, eh? ;)
The author of this petition regrets posting it. At the end of the page, his comment begins with:

> I put this petition up because I was upset and I was on strong pain medication. Last December I was in a vehicle accident and am still trying to get the surgery and such, it really messed up my knee and leg and put me in a wheelchair. If I sit up for a long time it really starts hurting.

> So after spending the time to get to the movie, watch it, and get back I was in ridiculous pain. I was frustrated and medicated. So, I made this petition. It was a bad idea at the time and I feel that we are pooling our efforts in not a healthy direction.
:) I was rather hoping that reading a single page (instead of a couple of pages) and then stopping would qualify.

Anyway, what I meant was that the plan was tentative. (I have read Guns, Germs and Steel and a few reviews seemed to liken Sapiens to that book. So was looking for some other perspectives.)
I've been following the conversation for the last couple days and I think I may have a solution.

I have been working on a program to block telemetry tracking at the OS level. It's called PrivacyWall, and it was originally meant to stop unwanted data collection by Windows 10. I built this to be a solution to block unwanted data collection by companies that sellout their customers to advertisers instead of putting their users first. It is more powerful than an Adblocker because it operates at the OS system and is able to block tracking by Windows programs and the Windows 10 operating system. I just added support to block Firefox tracking with the telemetry urls that Looking Glass is sending data to.

I haven't been able to work on it for the last 3 months because I was trapped by the hurricane in Puerto Rico without power, internet, water.

It's not ready for prime time, so this is a beta. You can try it here: https://www.privacywall.org

I'm making it available for free for non-commercial use. PrivacyWall blocks a list of known Firefox, Chrome, and Edge telemetry urls and Windows 10 telemetry urls when you turn it on. You can also turn it off easily through the task tray. After you install PrivacyWall, no program on your computer will be able to send data to those urls anymore behind your back.

If you try it out and like it or hate it, please send me your feedback. Let me know if there are more urls I should add to the block list.

I have limited time to continue supporting this project. If anyone is interested in helping out, let me know.
Incremental feedback.

How this works depends on the project. Instead of one multi-year project, it needs to be broken down into digestible chunks, at the end of each you have to have a mechanism that tells you a simple 'yes, keep going' or 'no, you need to adjust'.

I'd argue that this mechanism is almost always your end users. That feedback regenerates your interest periodically and will push you to keep working on the project.

Without feedback, it's harder to justify your time and effort when interest starts to fade.
TwArχiv – analyze your Twitter Archives
Seconding Murakami. The Remains Of The Day is the best book I read this year. It talks through a lot of ideas I see get mentioned on HN.
Probably less likely to downvote. Kaczysnki is obviously intelligent, and from what I remember of his manifesto from the last time I read it he makes some reasonable points, but I don't think his interpretation of the world is a good one. It obviously prevented him from integrating himself productively into society. You can choose to believe the things Kaczyski believes, but I don't think it gets you anything worthwhile, or you can choose to believe other things that still recognize some of the tragedies that go on in our society but allow you to engage with them in a more productive and meaningful way.
How many of you have packages stolen? Some of my friends constantly have this problem.

There should be some ideas like this to solve it.
The French system for protecting personal information should be a model for the rest of the world imo.

(As an Englishman it pains me to say that)

A company can never really “own” your data there. It merely can be lent it for very specific purposes. Using it outside of those purposes is punishable by law and that permission can be revoked.

It’s very pro-citizen.
Nobody sane would want e-voting. It has exactly the same problems as voting machines and in addition to that is heavily vulnerable to DDoS attacks and ID theft.

Tom Scott on electronic voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
But why on earth would you do that? That would be like bypassing the native UI framework on iOS or Android. It gives a worse experience for users, and is likely more work for you, the developer.
> On the one hand yes, on the other hand mobility at every level has never been greater, even if still not at the optimal level.

Source?
Once/If ethereum payment get popular message apps like toshi or status.im may get popular as well
* Currently reading: Edgedancer

* Flowers for Algernon

* Going Rogue: Spells, Swords, & Stealth

* Split the Party: Spells, Swords, & Stealth

* NPCs

* Children of Time

* Death's End

* The Shining

* IT

* All 7+1 books of The Dark Tower
I wholeheartedly disagree. It is a security issue, privacy issue, as well as many other types of issues.

Installing an extension without my permission is a privacy issue. It doesn't matter what that extension does. It doesn't matter if that extension is literally just an icon on a tray or if it literal spyware. It doesn't matter if it was ever enabled. You can't claim to be privacy conscious and then do something like that.
One source I found says the expression is probably Latin in origin and that the pumpkin was literal back then. So dried pumpkin skins were used as purses, and salt as money, then the original sense might have been to be rich, rather than smart. But it was some random website, so take this with a grain of salt :)
I don't think this is for me but I love this crazy idea and I love that someone is pushing the boundaries of my assumptions.
DuPont, Washington Fought to Keep Amtrak Out Before Killer Crash
That’s exactly what is happening: Windows 10 "China Edition" or some moves from Apple to comply with Chinese regulations for example.

Respecting local regulations is not a mind blowing fact. A foreign company cannot sell heroin in the USA under the pretext it is legal in their country.
WebAssembly doesn't change this. There's nothing preventing people from doing this with javascript (plain or asm.js flavored) and canvas/webGL, and yet no one does. It just doesn't make a lot of sense.
My target this year was one book every other day, same as last year. Goodreads has my ratings https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8007012-aditya-y?shelf...
I hadn't heard of this, and for anyone else wondering, it's a sci-fi novel

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Rising-Pierce-Brown/dp/034553980X
Recommend:

1) The Power Broker - About Robert Moses, the most powerful city planner in New York from the 1930s to the 1960s. Great if you're interested in city planning, how people gain and exercise power, and the real politik of government.

2) The Jungle - Remembered as an exposé of meatpacking, but really more than that. Phenomenal story about early 20th immigrants to Chicago trying to take part in the American Dream but struggling to survive. Surprisingly relevant today.

3) The Big Con - Fascinating look at con artists in the first half of the 20th century.
That's definitely a risk, and for all our pressure to go to college it's less bad in the US than elsewhere.

I know Japan still has "simultaneous hiring", where a whole graduating class gets hired at once, and if you don't have a degree and a job on schedule you either avoid graduating or risk being marginalized. Compared to something like that, the US is still admirably willing to let people take time off school, drop out, or just spend some time unemployed after graduating.
7 Strategies to Boost Sales Around Christmas Time
PPP is a laughably bad approach to measuring the economics and well-being of a nation.

If you go by PPP, you'll be falsely led to believe Iraq is on par with Iran and just a little behind Turkey. Iraq is a barely functioning, destroyed nation, in the midst of a full rebuild.

According to PPP, in 2016 Puerto Rico was just barely behind Japan. New Zealand is below Puerto Rico.

According to PPP, Equatorial Guinea is approximately on par with Finland, France, Canada, Japan, UK, Belgium.

Oman and Saudi Arabia are above Belgium. Saudi is above the Netherlands and Sweden. Is PPP aware of the actual living conditions in Saudi Arabia at the median? What the median income is in Saudi Arabia? Nope.

Like I said, it's laughable.

PPP purports to enable a better comparison stick. It fails entirely in all cases. Belgium & Denmark are below Saudi? The only proper response to that is: bullshit.

PPP is not only universally wildly inaccurate, it leaves out dozens of critical economic factors that are derived from objective economic capability rather than what the price of a hamburger is from one nation to the next.

PPP is a subjective measurement, and a particularly bad one. Who is on the ground doing the perfectly objective comparisons in every nation simultaneously, living there for a decade to really get a sense of things across the whole economic landscape? Nobody. PPP leads to mediocre guess-work, which gets you to New Zealand being below Puerto Rico.

What is your military capable of defense wise? Try basing that on subjective economic relativism, see how it works out for you in a war.

What kind of medical technology can your nation afford? What's the level of medical technology that your people have access to at the median? That collapses under PPP, because the best and latest medical equipment is expensive.

Can you buy a BMW or a $4,000 poorly made car that is guaranteed to fall apart and have far more problems than eg a Lexus? While simultaneously, who would confuse the standard of living impact of driving an extraordinarily mediocre $4,000 vehicle vs a Mercedes or BMW?

If your GDP per capita (non-PPP) is eg $35,000, then I can stack you right up against Japan or New Zealand and immediately have a good idea of what your national income potential is far more often than not, and I can tell a lot more about your nation's real capabilities at the median.

The medtech & car examples are representative concepts, they apply to pretty much everything else that defines standard of living. PPP is a dumb (its simplistic nature ignores almost everything that's actually important to the standard of living of actual humans) economic concept in the best of cases; in most cases, it's entirely worthless.
wolfram is an element now? Maybe get your health info from somewhere a little more reliable.
In fact, one would need context to conclude that "crypto" refers to cryptography, and not something else like cryptozoology or cryptofascism. There's also probably at least one legitimate metal band with "crypto" in their name.
It's not just about party, an unusually disliked candidate can tank most districts. In the end it's a very complex optimization problem with benefits in the short term measured vs the risk of losing redistricting power in 10 years etc. Even a slight bias can let you shift resources to more competitive races etc.

PS: IMO it's really a scale problem. If districts give a ~3% advantage that's huge in aggregate, but races still feel competitive. However, we are currently in a situation where nobody bothers to run in many races and that does not promote democracy.
These are all hard sci-fi, and much like Dark Mirror, given today's troubles, it's simultaneously entertaining while being intellectually stimulating, but in a way that feels relevant, even if not immediately actionable.

The first is what got me hooked, and back into reading.

The Wages of Humanity, is a short story by Liu Cixin. The short story used to be available by itself on Amazon, but now it's been disappeared[1]. It can be found as the last story in The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection.[2]

An assassin is being offered exorbitant sum to kill the three poorest people for some reason, and the book explores why, to a thrilling conclusion.

Since I found it as a stand alone story I cannot comment on the rest of the books in that collection. From there I read into The Three Body Problem[3], and Dark Forest by Liu Cixin; first two books of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The only reason I don't mention I have not (yet) finished reading the third book.

[1] This link now returns a 404: https://amazon.com/dp/B00CSW0UZI but it's what the URL my Kindle points to. Search does not find the stand alone edition.

[2] https://amazon.com/dp/B00CXUKNA2

[3] https://amazon.com/dp/B00IQO403K
You're awesome.

Thanks for the honest insight -- really, that's so much better than the general silence we've been seeing.

A regular "State of Crystal-lang" blog post would be sufficient for me to hang on. Even if the posts might be "haven't done much. this is what we'd like to work on next, these are the roadblocks, etc. you can help by doing XYZ".
Thanks! I never thought about applying this to my todo list, but its a great idea!

I have done something like this for creating "recursive recipes" [1] which generates similar looking dependency charts when you start probing how to make a recipe from scratch [2].

[1]: https://github.com/schollz/timetomakefood

[2]: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/6550035/34167929-6...
Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives (2014)
The us is such a decentralized power that business interests influence policy. China is a business interest. On the political level China seems to be a rival, however the true nature of our relationship is equivalent to that of business partners.

Political leaders will talk shit about china while more powerful big businesses are essentially reliant on trade with china. There is nothing to keep in check because nobody wants to keep china in check.

Another thing is you seem to imply that they need to be kept in check. Centralized powers are better at keeping themselves in check then a decentralized power. No other powerful country in the world right now can even attempt to implement population control the way China did it. If the US becomes an environmental apocalypse in the future its because they couldn't take drastic measures the same way China did with their one child policy. I am aware that there were unintended consequences of the one child policy but i am referring to the underlying motives and capability of carrying out such policies, something that is impossible for the US to do. If anything the US is the runaway power that needs to be kept in check.
Wolfram is an alternate name for tungsten, and the reason tungsten's chemical symbol is W.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten
Pentagon Scientists Recover Strange Alloys from Unidentified Objects