skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now Netflix just needs to accommodate kid's 3-5 minute attention span, which is reason for YouTube's popularity - along with the quick and easy selection of related content.

Then they could take over, and make parents much happier.

Maybe even happy enough to pay an extra $1.99 a month for trustworthy content curation?
I am curious to see if kids in "Netflix Only" homes spend more time watching shows because of binging. When I had Netflix, I found myself watching more than I normally would.
Part of what’s required is Web Manifest and that’s on the WebKit roadmap: https://webkit.org/status/#?search=manifest
We need recess at work.
The ideal would be useful work that is a public good - no one can profit from it individually (other than by using it as a PoW), but the world benefits from it in some way.
I vehemently advise everyone to stay away from BTC unless you really, really know what you're doing and follow the market closely. Instead, I say to just find a small, cheap crypto that has sound fundamentals and go from there. There aren't many, but they exist.
> I'm not sure I'm following your points. You're moving back and forth between enormous historical and current problems and sweeping the platitudinal meat under the rug.

The problems America faces are largely controlled by democratic systems.

Google, Facebook, et al are neither the cause nor the solution to the problems described by the author of the post.

If we decide to turn ad networks into surveillance systems used to commit crimes against humanity it will be because our democratically elected representatives were told to do something by voters and they did so.
There are a few shows like Chuck that were basically saved by blatant product placement. It's funny to watch - breaks the illusion for a moment - but knowing the story behind how it basically saved the show makes it worth it for the fans.
That is simply not true, firstly most cartoons and anime, but also other shows that come with a higher budget seem to be able to avoid product placements.
You can not sample the distribution directly when “it is impossible to solve for analytically”. There are a few methods to overcome this issue, in particular “MCMC methods allow us to estimate the shape of a posterior distribution in case we can’t compute it directly”.

You only need to be able to compute the relative values of the function you want to integrate (in this case a probability density) at the current point and the proposed destination. Where is this function coming from is not relevant to understand MCMC methods, they can be applied in many problems unrelated to Bayesian statistics.

Here is another (non-zero-math) introduction to the topic:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/9612186.pdf
https://www.coursera.org/learn/statistical-mechanics/lecture...
Naw, kids from Netflix homes are just watching long-form commercials. Dino Trucks, Nexo Knights and Ninjago all dominate my boys' Christmas wish lists this year.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I was wondering whether the fact that my kids are not exposed at all to commercials might make them more susceptible to advertising when they grow up.
I wrote a few of those articles!

Say what you want about the company, product, and executive leadership, but for a time Mattermark was a fairly influential organization in the Valley and elsewhere.

Mattermark can probably serve as a case study of how good written content can really bolster a company's credibility and positioning in a market.
Thanks! I'll check that one out too. Note, I'm planning on using PAX extensions for tar, so I can store an unlimited amount of data name/value pairs per file, and also handle unlimited length filenames.
Just don't try to print it out. It'll collapse under its own weight and form a black hole.
First, the regulatory/court sanction will be in one country, or whichever ones bother. In the US for example, these bans are a couple years long.

Second, thats just investment banks and licences in that country and possibly forming your own fund, in that country or with that countrys citizens.

Third, the man was managing other peoples money independently, without working for an investment bank, so it doesnt matter what the broad industry thinks.

Fourth, and if you need a license then maybe it matters, but again not in every country.

Fifth, if you are perceived as making good returns and your potential investors arent making good returns, then they want to invest with you.

The end.
It's a strategy for destroying racism by abstracting it into non-existence.

Do you really believe that? Not many do - most think it is a deliberately racist strategy, and most see that quote as an explanation of it.
Pipeline Support Engineer
Product placement in series and movies really break my heart, because it plain and simply taints the piece forever.

When it's released, sure, okay, so you do your product placement and get some extra cash to finance the series. Fine. But now, your series which hopefully is good enough to still be watched 20 years, 30 years from now has characters randomly bringing up how they drive an Audi and did you see that builtin navigation system or some bullshit like that.

Some TV series are works of art. Thankfully, those tend to not have product placements because they have a high budget to begin with. But sometimes, PP works itself into "classics" and that's when it's really upsetting.
Tokyo subway is privatized and is very very good.
Yeah, but you never have to watch what you don’t want, including ads.
> it seems like a policy that basically subsidizes lower COL locations.

I would put it differently. I would have said it is a policy that is (slightly) less "progressive" in high cost-of-living areas than it is high cost-of-living areas. (Where "progressive" means those with high incomes paying a larger percentage of their income in taxes.)
> difference = aw' - aw
> = (aw * n + 90000000000)/(n+1) - aw * n = 1000000

Somehow aw turned into aw * n there, which sent your calculations wildly off. You want:

n * aw + 90 * 10^9 = (n + 1) * (aw + 10^6)
n * aw + 90 * 10^9 = n * aw + n * 10^6 + aw + 10^6
90 * 10^9 - (10^6 + aw) = n * 10^6
n = 89999 - aw / 10^6

i.e., almost 90000 people, no matter how wealthy the population of the bar is.
Can renewable power offset Bitcoin's massive energy demands?
So does nearly every habitual gambler.

> “Those are legitimate needs that people have, to figure out if there’s a way to gamble their way to another lifestyle.”

I'm not sure who decides what "needs" are "legitimate" -- but can't they just go to casinos, which have been legalized just about everywhere now?

Also I can't believe that quote, sounds like a parody.
Kinda sorta get this with kindle fire and the kindle family or whatever it is called. There are some videos for the kiddo based on age.. for little kids you get the 3 minute nursery rhymes. $2 or $3 a month.
I don't think ads will ever go away, so my main hope is that ad targeting gets so good that the industry is able to make the same amount of money (or less!) while showing 10x fewer ads. Humanity is paying a huge cost at the moment for inefficient ad placement.
Tick or Tock? Keeping Time and Order in Distributed Databases
Some lines are highly delayed and more congested. I ride a few different lines a few times a month when I do business in the city and Queens. It’s definately not as good as it was at its peak, but isn’t that awful either.

Growing up in the 80s, it was dramatically more congested, slower and generally awful. So the tales of impending doom sound like drama to me.

NY politics are a carnival atmosphere right now, even by NY standards. I think these issues are getting more play as a result. It will only get worse as hostile federal policy sucks money out of Nee York.

It’s always easier to build than maintain. This happens in all institutional settings. Stuff will get worse, bonds will get paid off, and more capital dollars will be available to rebuild.
Apple will only provide service under warranty themselves, and issues caused by third party repairs aren’t under warranty. Same as Dell.

If you’re not in warranty, they don’t do anything to force you to go to them. The only difference is that going to Apple is easy, due to their retail stores.
This has been driving me nuts, I'm glad someone is writing about it. I don't think this is happening to show how much the tax cuts are giving back to people, I can't help but think that the reason only high earners are shown as examples is to paint this legislation as only benefiting high earners. If this is the case it has been broadly successful. Apparently half the country is buying into a narrative that their tax bills are going to go up, and I'm not sure where that idea is coming from. ( https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/MonmouthP... )

If the low income earners were included two things would be clear. 1) Many low income earners don't pay federal income taxes at all, many actually get paid by the IRS instead 2) Low income earners actually still benefit by getting either lower taxes or higher credits.

The only example I saw of a regular person was in the Bloomberg article that was mentioned. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-20/how-the-t... The "renter in Milwaukee" went from paying $515 to actually being credited $400.

At this point, there is no way of having a reduction in tax bills that doesn't overwhelming favor the top 50% of earners, because they pay almost all the federal income taxes. In 2015 the top 50% of those that filed tax returns paid over 97% of income taxes (the last table cell at the bottom all the way on the right https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/15in03etr.xls )

EDIT: Based on experience on this board I knew this post would be downvoted, but I'm not exactly sure why. Please help make me a better contributor by telling me what I did wrong as you downvote, thanks!
> it's too technical to be used casually

In casual use with your mobile phone, you are shown a QR code, scan it, tap "OK", and it's done. Not that technical. Billions of people with smartphones could handle that perfectly. You're right about transactions being slow and expensive, and that is certainly a much bigger problem. That and the fact that there are still very few places accepting it.
Until you successfully cash out, you’ve made nothing.
Kind of. It's not the idea that the brain is a Turing machine that's the problem -- I think it's fairly well established that given enough scratch paper, a human _could_ manually execute an algorithm for any computable function. The problem is more specifically that in Pitt's model, all of the behavioral work is offloaded to the abstract logic, leaving none for the physical wetware. Of course, today we know that the brain does have quite a bit of physical structure, and we have learned a lot about how the brain functions by looking at these structures.
As a EU import, I understand. Actually, most of the city is quite dirty, relatively. It's probably even a US issue. Non-rich neighborhoods simply don't get to spend much on anything serving the public, including upkeep. This goes for much of NYC as well, despite it being a 'rich' city.

The information on schedules and changes due to maintenance are overwhelming for a tourist. At nights and in weekends especially, there are often trains being rerouted in very creative ways. Though all of this information is posted, it's often hard to understand for a non-local. It often mentions station names, which mean nothing to you if you don't live here (and even if you do it's not always obvious). Luckily the locals are always happy to help you with directions, contrary to popular belief, so just ask away!
It seems popular to believe that for fluids in general forecast accuracy is dominated by errors in the initial conditions (ICs), but my own look at the problem suggests that's not so clear. I recall skimming a book on forecasting by a weather forecaster and he addressed this misconception. It appears that there are multiple sources of error, from errors in the ICs to numerical integration to the fact that the models they use are approximate (i.e., they don't solve NS; they solve a filtered version of NS with a turbulence model and additional models for other physics like chemistry), etc. My impression is that the dominant two are model inadequacy (the models are approximate) and compounded errors due to IC errors and non-linearity, but which is larger likely depends on the problem, and I am not particularly confident about this in general as I don't have hard data. (Certain types of turbulence models get more accurate as the resolution/computational cost increases, but I can't speak for other models. This fits with what you said about lack of computational power.)

The right way to do this is through uncertainty quantification techniques, and I don't know a lot about those at the moment. Until then, all I can say is that there are multiple sources of error.
Implying that watching more advertisements helps you develop a tolerance for it.
It's really hard to make comparisons here because 'homeowners' in Russia and China, which did not have strong middle classes at the time of their revolutions, tended to also be landlords/rentiers. Arguably both of those countries were closer to feudalism than capitalism, and the collectivist policies which ensued were to a large extent responsive to those circumstances.

The problems with the 'voluntary' nature of capitalism are best summed up by Anatole France: How noble the law, in its majestic equality, that both the rich and poor are equally prohibited from peeing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread!
There's a feedback loop in play:

Smarter people stop watching TV > TV adapts to the new demographics to fight over dwindling ratings > TV becomes dumber > Even more smarter people stop watching TV
> I have my own crypto strategy, and it's about as simple as surfing. Each new wave (no pun intended, if you know what I mean ;) ) may grow and give you something to ride.

All the way to the scene of the crash.
It’s particularly bad with apple because they’re highly successful due to or despite not following common business wisdom, and many analysts seem convinced it’s going to catch up with them any day now
> I would prefer to see studies not just trying to prove things bad (we have enough of those), but focuses on what can be proven to be a positive

The thing is, we dont know yet

So youll have to settle for conflicting studies about coffee and red wine consumption forwarded from your loved ones
Ironically, in Winnetka IL where they supposedly live, they are probably looked down on and viewed as "typical".
Politics as usual, to me, is where people point to the progressive taxes in the US system and say "poor people don't pay taxes" while ignoring the regressive taxes. And then try to stimulate the economy every which way except the one way that makes sense - cutting taxes on consumption. Granted sales taxes are not federal, but there must be federal levers that could be pulled.

I remember reading about how Japan was desperate to increase inflation a bit and then they raised the VAT or something like that - and I was bewildered at why they were shocked that inflation promptly wilted further.

It's disheartening that you hear more about a national sales tax/VAT rather than trying to go in the other direction and eliminate sales taxes, not to mention making capital gains rates the same as all other income.
Training Chatbots and Conversational Artificial Intelligence Age (MCL349)
Me too. I've been playing CS on and off since it came out.

But Netrek is still my favourite multi-player team game.
> my takeaway was, the cars have to be maintained really well and have reliable engines and tires,

Not true. A department I interned with would use civil asset forfeit vehicles as-is for undercover jobs.

New tires and engines aren't important; they aren't using these for pursuits, and authenticity is the #1 most important form of camoflauge in these situations-- your agent's life is often at risk. Having such obvious tells (like whitewall tires, no hubcaps on govt vehicles, etc) is a good way to get them killed and your investigation compromised.
On the other hand, a tax cut helps a husband and wife working 60 hour weeks each, who barely have time for each other, in order to pay for the mortgage, health insurance, and try and save for retirement, and pay over 60% of their money to the government (40% fed tax, 14% state tax, 10% sales tax).
This reflects my understanding. Poor people read less news and vote less. But when they do vote, they prefer government programs. Which lately has meant they prefer Democrats by narrow margins.
If you think that the future of a business or an economy is as predictable as whether a bridge will hold, my advice to you is to stay away from any financial product.
It is unfortunate that a request for a citation is downvoted but not responded to. Not only is the claim that every comedy writer is conservative not supported, it's not even true.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Long (example of conservative sitcom writer)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Sandler (example of conservative movie actor/producer)

Now, I don't subscribe to conservative politics myself. But it is simply a moral wrong to assume an entire profession is united in political views. Nor is it a good thing to invoke such identity politics. Let's move forward and focus on the real issues at hand.
Max Ogden steps down as Dat project lead over sex abuse allegations
Blackboards are much better as lecture tools than digital whiteboards with autoscroll, or most uses of powerpoint, or whatever else people try, in my experience.

I wish that more lecturers would consider returning to blackboards, instead of the lazy slides they currently do. It would both improve their talks and waste less of their prep time.

The nice thing about blackboards is that lecturers don’t try to write every word on a screen, but just talk as normal, only putting up explicitly technical content like diagrams and formulas. They can add or remove things from the board in response to audience feedback, and can improvise new ideas. Maybe most importantly, (sufficiently large) blackboards keep a large amount of context in view at any given time.

Blackboards are especially good as classroom tools because they are a fundamentally improvisational and accessible medium. You can’t prepare all the drawings in advance, which means that anything a lecturer can do on the board a student can in principle also do, and the form of the teacher’s lecture is a direct part of the pedagogy: the student can learn to imitate the same mode of thought with access to the same tools. There can be a drawing- and formula-based dialog between teacher and students in which they are all operating as equal peers, unlike powerpoint where one participant spent hours making a bunch of pretty graphs or typing up formulas in a cryptic markup language, and the other participant gets no insight whatsoever into how.

Making good use of computers would mean handing out interactive demonstrations with their full code available [code might be implemented in some drawing-based environment, not necessarily just lines of ASCII] at every lecture, and then showing how the code works and showing how to twiddle the parameters as part of the lecture, alongside the traditional writing-and-drawing-on-a-blackboard part of the lecture. Ideally students would have some way of also interacting with the same medium during class.

But making good interactive diagrams or writing code whose primary purpose is exposition takes 2 orders of magnitude more prep time than just throwing words and static diagrams up, and is just not feasible for individual lectures in a current education setup. Ideally we would have much better improvisational computer demonstration/diagram tools, but in practice the drawing tools we have are not really designed for a computer medium, and all pretty much suck. (If Bret Victor’s ideas from “Inventing on Principle” and “Stop Drawing Dead Fish” and “Drawing Dynamic Visualizations” were turned into polished, production-ready, mainstream tools, we might have a chance.)

I’ve seen some pretty effective lectures that were done live-coding style, e.g. in some notebook-based tool, but it depends on having the right topic for the lecture.
One side-effect of all these commercials is to shorten the attention span of viewers. I feel that kids are taught to only get into a thought/storyline for a maximum of 8 minutes then switch mental contexts 4 to 8 times before returning to that original story. While I have no evidence about it, I don't see how this can be healthy. In contrast my children watch shows with episodes ranging from 12 minutes to full-length movies of 1h30 without interruption.
I have the same experience. I visit my parents about once every other month and usually end up watching a show or two with them. The programs are amazingly childish junk, the kind of stuff that disturbed me most about high school enshrined as sport. And the advertisements just never stop. If anyone has any doubt what the goal for Comcast will be now that net neutrality is gone, it will be to make Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc cost more than the Comcast On Demand stuff (which has ads you can't fast-forward through, a tiny selection, etc). So once it costs you $12 to watch 2 movies on Netflix instead of $12 to watch movies all month long, then they will feel that the playing field is 'fair'.
Unlimited streaming has its own problems, because your kids know it's never impossible for them to watch their favorite show, unlike with the bad old days of Saturday morning cartoons and just a handful of OTA TV stations. You can just say no, of course, but it's easier when you don't have to.

Actually, the entire Internet kinda presents the same problem for adults and personal willpower.
If you're also selling it, then yes, you're making money. Otherwise, you are merely holding a speculative investment that you may or may not be able to eventually make money on.
It's the name of the imaginary rabbit that a drunk talks on the bar, on a scene of Rigger Rabbit.
Yes, this is not a Bitcoin vulnerability. Getting access to your wallet is not the same as cracking it.
The article said that "common" shareholders walk out with nothing.

Typically, founders and early employees are issued only common stock, while investors are issued "preferred" shares. Unless the founding team invested their own capital alongside the angels and professional VCs involved in their rounds, it's not likely that they were preferred shareholders.

Preferred shareholders are first in line to get cash payouts after liquidation. Common shareholders are able to access cash only after all of the preferred shareholders have been paid.

I wrote a series on the subject I could share if you're interested.
Crashes immediately after the tutorial.
>I was amazed at how much ... dumber it has become

I had the same reaction this Thanksgiving when I was at my Dad's. I don't think it actually has become dumber, we're just not used to it anymore. I felt like I was watching commercials with a bit of content sprinkled in. I cut the cord about six years ago.
Diego Gómez Is Safe, but Threats to Curiosity Still Abound
That's kind of an inversion of who's leading things, but kids television and the toy industry have always gone hand in hand. Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers and HeMan were cartoons before they were toys (I think...) but it was all about the merchandising.
I live in a 'Netflix free' home -- I watch as many commercials a year as a any kid in a 'Netflix only' home. It's not clear to me why the article assumes that not having Netflix means you're consuming commercials.
If you have kids who watch netflix, it's interesting how they recoil in disgust at advertising interrupting a show. And it carries over to YouTube too - if they see pre-roll they skip as soon as possible. It'll be interesting when they're teens what kind of media related app will be the 'it' app for them
China Is Building a Solar Power Highway
Spain also dubs almost everything. At least, they are quite good at it