skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>How would you describe in a single sentence the growing precision of our calculation of the speed of light constant over the last 300 years?

I don't know, first I'd talk about how it was discovered that light behaves like c really is a constant (that's not intuitive nor trivial). You could guess from Fizeau (1851) and Michelson-Morley (1887) experiments, but it wasn't really until the 1905 Einstein's paper that it was understood that you don't need aether, the speed of light can (and should) be a universal constant and it all makes sense.

>How would you describe in a single sentence the way Einstein used Mercury's retrograde motion to assure himself of the advocacy of his theoretical mathematical model for gravitation?

He shows (see here: http://www.gsjournal.net/old/eeuro/vankov.pdf) that his theory (after reasonable approximations) predicts a precession of the perihelion of Mercury that agrees with the experimental result, then he stops. That's what you do in Physics: look, my nice theory predicts this observable in agreement with the experimental data. That's a very good sign, but the data could be explained by other theory as well. Data can "prove" that a theory is wrong (if your theory has falsifiability, as it should), but they can never show that your theory is all that there is, nor your maths... There are other theories of gravitation, for instance Logunov's, that are interesting and agree with data (more or less) but have a few problems with maths.

BTW, I don't think he ever really doubted his GR theory, it comes from a very simple, yet profound idea that once realised had to be right. You have to do all the technical work afterwards, that was difficult, but a few mathematicians could have done/did it (Hilbert). In any case the idea is to check your predictions with the measurements from more and more precise experiments to find out if you're wrong, not the other way around (that... well, I've met that funny epistemology a few times in social sciences.)
I think this is the most important thing listed - nutrition, exercise, avoiding social media will allow you to get to an increased attention span, but won't take you there, and meditation will.

The closest meditation exercise I've found that is basically a workout for your attention span is to sit still somewhere quiet and count your breaths, in and out. Breathe in 1, breathe out 2, breathe in 3, etc. It may help to visualize the number as well. Every time you catch your mind wandering, you gently bring it back and begin with the last number you remember. After a cycles of this, you'll find you're able to count for longer without becoming distracted. Do this regularly and see if your attention span on other tasks is increased as well.
Why are you so bullish in crypto? Would love to hear your thoughts here (or send me a DM if you prefer).
I wonder if government ownership solves the problem, and whether it might create new ones (lack of innovation being a big one). But, there is definitely a major problem, and I'm hopeful that an open internet is able to solve it.

There's the problem of API access; you still can't make a mobile web app as good as a native mobile app and it may always be playing catch-up (both because of policies at Apple and Google and because of the nature of chasing new features from outside). But, at least it really is "our" platform (if we can keep it). With WebAssembly enabling development in any language (eventually) and easing porting from native to web, things are looking up, but it's still not an even playing field.

So...on optimistic days, I think the web will win (again), and will prevent the mobile OS walled gardens from owning our future. On pessimistic days, I read an article about a new platform for apps that is even worse for developers than the App Store or Play Store.

I guess my action plan is: Help the web win and hope the app stores die.
never used them, but i'm thinking more in terms of powershell (pretty sure displaing images isn't something it does though). if images in particular work ok then that's one thing that i can scratch off my list of annoyances with ssh.
Something I always like to add to suggestions of meditation is this clarification: clearing your mind completely is not the right way to do it, because completely clearing your mind is nearly impossible. At least for most, maybe some folks can do it. I cannot, and I don't know anyone who can. Instead, it makes me more susceptible to distraction, because brains want to be brains, they want to think and do work.

A nice side-effect of that approach, or perhaps the whole point of it, is that you can now consider meditation as a general thinking tool rather than a more specific way to deal with some specific problem as in OP's case (solving attention problems).

Instead, like OP says, meditate on something instead. Consider if the difference between zero, one, and a million. Zero thoughts works but is hard, one thought works pretty well, and one million thoughts is simply restating the problem.
Although this wasn't your primary statement, wanted to take a bite out of your second clause about "encouraging cheaper product companies" as this is a point close to my heart as a regular advocate for consumer demand driven economics.

Boeing or Spacex's product demand is driven directly by transitive demand for an affordable product; air travel and to give one "space" example; gps, are both "consumer tier" products that facilitate a whole vertical of production. I'm hard pressed to think of a single super-expensive item that doesn't in some way link back to consumer demand; outside of additional injections via nations. To me this seems intuitive; as I'm hard pressed to think of another driver of production with comparable volume, and as such don't see any reason increasing that source of demand would bias "cheap" products any more than they are now.
Agreed - this plus dedicating time every day to some kind of training/workout. IMO the human body wants to move and work - its not meant to sit around like a blob all day
Your boss is not your friend, but your boss can be your mentor. I've had to form a level of trust with my boss because I really needed his advice as a first time tech lead.

I knew the technology I was implementing pretty well but now knowing how to approach higher ups and people in other departments is just as important.
I agree, but, I also wonder if some of this 'it is okay to share' is because of social media's influence on what is acceptable to disclose.
Sure, it's becoming real tangible now money, but that's taken nearly 50 years.
Rescale (YC W12) is one of the silicon valley's fastest growing startups
House Committee Unites to Clamp Down on Indian Firms’ Use of H-1B Visas
I've been working on this lately as well. Not finished with the process but here's a few things I've tried:

* Read part of a book before starting work.

* No HN/reddit/etc until noon.

* No Facebook until 6PM.

* Disable almost all notifications.

* Only check emails/texts once an hour at the top of the hour.

* Use software that respects my desire for focus.

The last one is currently the most interesting to me. When I was going through disabling all my notifications, I realized you can't truly turn them off on FB messenger. You can only mute them for up to 24 hours. After that I decided to remove any software from my life that was created to manipulate users rather than empower them. That's mostly meant switching to OSS apps and self hosting.

https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted has been an incredible resource
The growing peril is only for long positions. Peril for long positions is profit for short positions.

Seeing this article advising "reducing your exposure to tech by selling your tech stocks" assumes that you have no choice to participate other than buying. They are looking at half of the market(buy-side) and ignoring the equal-sized selling-side of the market. Stocks going down == Short the market. Stocks going up == long the market. The direction is unimportant, the volatility is absolutely important - and there is an awful lot of it(volatility) at the moment.
Sub title ought to be part of the title.

"A story about the people who want to escape connected technology, and the refuge they’ve built for themselves."
Perhaps. The foundation of the parent's claim, rested on the French middle class seeing stronger wage growth than the US. That claim is very painfully false, as French wage growth is typically far lower than the US wage growth across the board. In fact French wage growth has been extremely poor for the last two decades, which shoots a massive hole in the premise about their labor code somehow being beneficial to that middle class (persistently high unemployment + very low wage growth).

How long can French wage growth continue at 0.5%, while the US continues at 2.5%, before the gap gets extreme? I think it's probably aleady nearing that point, as it pertains to developed nations standards. And that obviously isn't to say the US is the best in the world at any of this, it's simply that the French economy has performed so miserably in general. They've basically been failing to keep pace with global economic growth for three decades, watching their macro, per capita & household rankings slide persistently.
I'm first in line to make fun of the title "scrum master" and other nonsense. But the things that have crept in seem to have because they work.

I'm results driven. I don't care who comes up with what or what it's named. If it works, I'm on board. If it doesn't, I'll lambast it.
New Turkish Decree Paves Way for Militia Violence
The problem remains that the likes of IBM and Accenture are at least as mendacious as any Indian outsourcer, yet this gives them a pass.
If what they do is actively and solely intendedto be hostile to you (without provocation), yes.
It's a thing I want very much. They just sucked at building it, as has every other company attempting it.
To help the foreigners, generally in the USA getting most of your lifetime income from the government welfare means lower class, from a job means middle class, and from investments means upper class.

There are of course numerous lifestyle choices and plenty of classes copying other classes behavior often without even understanding the reason why. Our economic system is set up to keep the classes separate to the point of nearly being unable to communicate with each other. It is almost like three separate cultures that happen to coexist in the same space, mostly. Tomorrow I'm paying estimated quarterlies, which is a phrase that won't even make sense to people not in the upper class, whereas in comparison our mass media pop music is solely lower class to the point that you need an urban dictionary website to make any sense out of "our" music if you're not poor.
Try notational velocity, or nvalt. I think you'll like it.
Was anyone able to do anything useful with tensorflow?
> It also casts some new light on the "Russian bots are taking over" establishment meltdown.

To be fair, "russia" spent $100K on facebook ads and won the election for Trump. /s

If you pay attention, it's obvious there are some russian, chinese, saudi, etc manipulation on social media. But the vast majority of the manipulation and "fake news" on social media is pushed by the british, israel, EU, Canada, etc. Not only that, their social media manipulation is also backed by the establishment media.

How much "Prince Harry marries X" and british royal family is all over the media and social media along with the sock puppets manipulating the conversation?
Thank you IshKebab, https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ is the answer I was looking for.
> The user doesn't notice, and the attacker gains some control over the cryptography used.

In my case user will because the tls client wont accept insecure version request. Connection broken. Client will notify the user of server still using a insecure version.

I think this might be the misunderstanding: A good client/server never establish/accept insecure versions.

Yes MITM gets to pick but if he picks insecure version, there is no connection.

POODLE was never attack on the protocol but poor implementations.
The latest update to the post is pretty funny though. An ear scanning device?!

Let's see how long it takes OP to realize he opened the app and it persisted a location Thu Nov 30 2017 20:04:08 ("gps_time_ms":1512072248998) when location service were turned on.
Ask HN: Who makes the most advanced text-to-speech technology?
I want to convert some articles and books to audio so that I can listen to them while walking. I would like to try the current leader in commercially-available text-to-speech.

I have tried a few text-to-speech offerings, such as the ones included in Firefox and macOS, but they sound robotic to the point that they are difficult to listen to. The pacing is unnatural. I am hoping there is something available that is better.
As someone pointed out above, this deal seems to be modeled after DST’s 2009 tender offer for Facebook shares - they paid a 35% discount for common shares from employees and early investors. DST cashed out in the IPO making a return of around ~18x.
I guess as someone who doesn't own a TV I've not been exposed to much of that, but I do wonder whether the success rate of such an initiative would be lower among opioid addicts. "Please step forward, admit to the world you're addicted, and in 10-15 years you might get a coupon for free drugs."

Also, what are we really looking for? Do addicts really know whether they were overprescribed? Is being addicted sufficient cause for a lawsuit?

Anyway, I'm not saying it's unsolvable, but I can imagine some tougher hurdles than the class action suits I've been privy to.
If he wanted to send existing boring tech to Mars he wouldn't have to start a boring company to advance the state of the art. He could just buy an existing product and start figuring out ways to launch it.
At least something original from Steve
Who Would Pay $26,000 to Work in a Chicken Plant? – ProPublica
+1 for reading novels. You may have to try a few before you find one you really like, but once you become invested in a story, it's pretty easy to spend a few hours a day reading. In my experience, it's been a pretty effective way of breaking the scattered thoughts/quick reward cycle. Some novels I've enjoyed recently: the Southern Reach trilogy, and Oryx and Crake.

Meditation is also great, but I think the barrier to entry is pretty high for someone already struggling to focus. Certain types of yoga (Iyengar/Hatha) can be good gateways into meditation.
Packagecloud.io now supports Node.js packages
If the US did what the EU has done, I would probably have to wait another 50 years for products I use every day like
- Google Maps
- Google Speech Recognition
- Google Photos Search
- Google Home

I'm thankful that my government has allowed innovation to continue. I'm glad they have represented my interests as a consumer by favoring technological growth over protection I neither want nor need.
I think he thought produce was a verb and not a type of raw food
One very small sample -- I had a student try training tensorflow to solve NP-hard problems, we couldn't get it to do any better than random guessing. I wasn't really surprised, because you need to make many interlocked decisions, all in one go, and all correctly. Also, it's (at least for me as a human) almost useless to try to learn from other similar looking problems to spot patterns in answers.
I just started using an app called Offtime. It will lock you out of certain apps for a period of time. I'm finding it to be extremely useful so far.
all we need to do is bore down and put a lid on top. years later we can make it more complex.

we could drill a few holes into lava tubes for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_lava_tube and direct light into it for something a bit more elaborate.
Logistics, hardware, advertising. All very different for sure.

Every successful business has to be “tech” in this century. Tech is how you achieve high scale
Economies of scale, most likely. Every home must have one or more smoke detectors. How many people order a CO2 sensor? Maybe 1 in 1,000?
What about neutrinos from outside of the solar system?
Please don't take HN threads into such nitpicky weeds, whether you happen to be right or not. In this case I don't think you were—Muphry's Law and all that—but there's nothing wrong with being wrong as such. Far worse on HN is being snarky.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I know I got NP hard while reading the article.
Are you suggesting an index fund that passively shorts everything? I don’t think that’s in my 401k.

(I use Hedgeable which is the most complex robo-advisor, but as they say they hedge long instead of using options. Please sign up, I’d be inconvenienced if they went out of business!)
You can also just run the standard Firefox on Android, and install uBlock Origin.
ADV of 311 shares according to Yahoo. Do not buy.
The best advice when learning math or anything is to "solve the smaller problem". Try to break the problem down into smaller pieces and work from there.

Trying to understand something complex as a whole can be daunting and intimidate people from even trying to understand it. But if break it apart into smaller parts and solve/understand those, many times, you find that it wasn't that complex in the first place.
To be fair, that’s what you’re talking about. I am mostly talking about SSH access.
BTC doing the most as a currency when their chiefs get kidnapped.
I've been reading Dreamland by Sam Quinones, which goes into detail and background of the past ~50 years or so about how we got into this situation. A large part of the WHY you're referring to I'll summarize as

1. Pain being identified as a vital sign and hospitals/institutions new-found focus on tracking and treating pain

2. Deceptive pharmaceutical marketing that painkillers are a be-all solution to pain and also non-addictive (Purdue/Sackler seem to be worst offenders here)

This lead to doctors prescribing opioid painkillers to many of middle-class americans who would likely have otherwise not come in contact with drug addiction. The book so far has been a really good read and also goes into detail around how heroin started spreading through the rust belt as well (feeding on the existing prescription addiction). I highly recommend it (about 65% through it right now).
> This generation of internet users is a lot more willing to pay for content than mine was.

I haven't seen any evidence to suggest this is the case. Do you know of any?
I think one of the points that is worth making, is that middle class is not what it used to be. It should be OK to consider a $130 meal if you are middle class. The economy has been booming (for the rich). But the middle class is no more...
Check the /cores directory, it is possible to waste a few tens of gigabytes there easily.
Thank you for elucidating
> Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last.

And yet it seems to me that the typical software/technical interview process emphasizes #8 more than the other seven. Maybe like the drunkard searching for lost keys under the lamp post. Quite sobering.
Yes it does. The 80/20 rule cleanly fits an exponential distribution. The assumption is then that the work to implement any given feature in a project follows an exponential , and this appears to hold reasonably true in practice.
This feels more like cooperation rather than democracy, bit like game theory?
How can that be true when Uber is cheaper than taxis?
What do you mean by "answers cannot be edited"? They definitely can be, and not just by the person who posted it. I've updated an older answer or two.
http://www.thespreadmind.com/The_Spread_Mind_S7.php

This is obviously false to me.*

If a robot vacuum recognizes a roadblock and stops, its inner representation of the roadblock is not merely an agreement (with whom anyway?).

That representation is internal and (normally) only accessible to the software of that particular robot (it may even could change over time - of course it would be a bad programming practice except for malwares - so no agreement is needed but only some kind of behavioral self consistency). And it have real causal power: it makes the robot stop and turn.

That representation is stored in memory cells wich are (usually in a normal household) not roadblocks.

*(AFAIK this viewpoint is called functionalism. It just somehow feels natural to me as a developer, but maybe it is just taste, and it is just as twisted for a philosopher as the above identity theory for me...)
Yeah, I feel like there should be an affordable air quality monitor (with an accompanying app) that you can just slap on walls...
What is your assertion? Let me help: "The accumulation of wealth amongst the top % is cool because the ratio of absolute poverty has decreased."

I mean, that's awesome. The problem is just about everybody else is moving downwards.
A pertinent comment, I don’t know why you were downvotes.
> It ensures that the variable could be evaluated at compile time

Why couldn't a variable without constexpr be evaluated at compile-time? Nobody ever explains this.
Audio hypnotherapy, meditation, chanting aum
This is true. The mechanism is decentralized, and so very powerful. In capitalism speech is proportional to money, so those with money speak more loudly and more often than others. The Adam Smith ideal is that successful capitalists use their soapbox to ideologically reproduce. However, the soapbox is used to mislead, weakening society at large to enrich oneself. Each individual is weakened only slightly, but in aggregate the benefit to the attacker is enormous.

Doves want drugs. A smart business wolf constructs a sophisticated machine (business) that in order to sell drugs, hires genius level lawyers and chemists (techie wolves) to do an end-run around the law, strengthen legal and technical barriers-to-entry, and perhaps make a good side-business with private law-enforcement in several ways (make new addicts, fund recovery programs, sell recovery drugs, and also sell private prison services, which is the most lucrative of all).

It's thoroughly, blatantly evil. The law is clearly insufficient to control the wolves - it may even be that US democracy is insufficient to control the wolves, since doves can't even be counted on to vote in their own interest, thanks in no small part to being mentally disabled by the wolves.
Common stock is worth less than preferred. Most stock is not preferred. Therefore there was never $70B worth of Uber stock in existence.
This was a hot thing a few years ago. These guys still seem to be around:

https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/05/thalmic-labs-raises-14-5m-...

https://www.myo.com
I believe if you keep badges enabled, that’s just enough to fool it. And I do keep badges enabled, because they’re passive and I learned not to care all the time about them.
Charitable organizations are often exempt from property taxes on property used for charitable purposes.
Many elderly people are no longer able to drive and aren't technically comfortable with using mobile phones.

App based ride hailing dominance reduces accessibility.
I doesn't sound all that unlikely to me that all these temporary UI freezes are related to the new APFS then.

"How to skip converting to APFS when installing macOS High Sierra":

http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/17/how-skip-apfs-macos-high-sier...
We may have more definitive data in a few years due to Flint, Michigan.
A password manager that is open source, self hostable, works on all platforms, and most of all, is good. Even the 'good', proprietary ones (1Password, Lastpass), just aren't very good.