skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> That ensures an environment where a huge swathe of the player base will never get the chance to play with, say, a Black Lotus or a Time Walk.

Weeell, that's not strictly true. Anyone can "play with a Black Lotus"- just not in a sanctioned game. There is nothing Wizards (or anyone, really) can do to stop you from printing out copies of any M:tG card you wish and play with it against your friends, with similarly copied cards. The only requirement is that your opponents agree to it.

In fact, the practice is quite common among competitive players, common enough to have a name: the practice of copying the cards is called "proxying", the copies themselves "proxies". In the case of competitive players, they are useful because one needs to practice with a deck even when they don't have the necessary cards at hand (competitive players will often borrow their cards from friends, or even trade in the last minute, just before a tournament). On the other hand, although this is completely a guess, my hunch is that casual players would be much more averse to accepting proxies in their game, than competitive players are.

I digress. My point is that perhaps it's not just Wizards' promise to not reprint the cards on the reserved list that is keeping their prices high (and rising), it's also the willingness of the M:tG playerbase to embrace organised play, in the way it's provided as a service by Wizards. Players buy cards, yes, but they also buy a whole set of social conventions regarding their use, including the rules of the game (nothing stopping you and your friends for making up your own rules...) and the rules of Organised Play.

I guess I'd go as far as to say that what's important to the players is not really the physical cards themselves -the Power Nine and so on- but the opportunity to take part in more or less organised events, with clearly defined rules, enforced by an impartial authority (who happens to be the same people who sell the game).

In that sense, the cards will only ever go out of fashion when the game itself does- and that will happen when Wizards is no longer able to support it financially.
AI Weekly 29 Dec 2017
This should be the legal equivalent of involuntary manslaughter. I certainly hope that's how it is prosecuted.
I am fond of the aphorism that "blame is not a zero-sum game."

Two people can be equally and severally responsible for something.
I just gave it a go. It does a good job, but still the pacing and intonation are unnatural and difficult to follow. If this is the current state-of-the-art, or close to it, I would rather just read. It is possible I could train myself to listen to it.

Hats off to the developers, though. I know human-like text-to-speech is difficult.
I believe the traffic notifications will go away if you turn off "Commute and time to leave" under "Your feed" in the Google app.
Requisitioning disincentivised peasants from producing more grain than they could personally consume, and thus production slumped.[247] A booming black market supplemented the official state-sanctioned economy,[248] and Lenin called on speculators, black marketeers and looters to be shot.[249] Both the Socialist Revolutionaries and Left Socialist Revolutionaries condemned the armed appropriations of grain at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July 1918.[250] Realising that the Committees of the Poor Peasants were also persecuting peasants who were not kulaks and thus contributing to anti-government feeling among the peasantry, in December 1918 Lenin abolished them.[251]

Lenin repeatedly emphasised the need for terror and violence in overthrowing the old order and ensuring the success of the revolution.[252] Speaking to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in November 1917, he declared that "the state is an institution built up for the sake of exercising violence. Previously, this violence was exercised by a handful of moneybags over the entire people; now we want ... to organise violence in the interests of the people."[253] He strongly opposed suggestions to abolish capital punishment.[254] Fearing anti-Bolshevik forces would overthrow his administration, in December 1917 Lenin ordered the establishment of the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, or Cheka, a political police force led by Felix Dzerzhinsky.[255]

In September 1918, Sovnarkom passed a decree that inaugurated the Red Terror, a system of repression orchestrated by the Cheka.[256] Although sometimes described as an attempt to eliminate the entire bourgeoisie,[257] Lenin did not want to exterminate all members of this class, merely those who sought to reinstate their rule.[258] The majority of the Terror's victims were well-to-do citizens or former members of the Tsarist administration;[259] others were non-bourgeois anti-Bolsheviks and perceived social undesirables such as prostitutes.[260] The Cheka claimed the right to both sentence and execute anyone whom it deemed to be an enemy of the government, without recourse to the Revolutionary Tribunals.[261] Accordingly, throughout Soviet Russia the Cheka carried out killings, often in large numbers.[262] For example, the Petrograd Cheka executed 512 people in a few days.[263] There are no surviving records to provide an accurate figure of how many perished in the Red Terror;[264] later estimates of historians have ranged between 10,000 and 15,000,[265] and 50,000 to 140,000.[266]

What did Ben Franklin do that was comparable to that?
> but if you are doing container security correctly ...

The container that wasn't!

(I get the gist of it, just tongue in cheek)
I have a hard time seeing that as an endgame that Uber is well-positioned to win at.

Right now, Uber's core competencies are having a nice app, and managing a bunch of people-centric things like recruiting drivers and getting them to be available to drive at times when people want rides. Of those two, the latter is probably the more difficult one to clone. It's also useless to a company that doesn't employ any drivers.

What they have close to zero competency in is fleet management. That's something for which traditional cab companies have something approaching a 100 year head start, and they which are very good at.

I think that's the reason why Uber has decided that it's so critical that they develop their own self-driving car technology: They need to control a supply of self-driving cars during the critical transition period if they want to avoid being at a disadvantage while it's happening. If everyone's buying commodity self-driving cars from a big automaker, then it's just a game of who can operate most efficiently in order to offer the lowest prices. Traditional cab companies were already good at that, and, if anything, the influence of Uber on their market over the past however many years has forced them to get even better at it.
This is awesome if it means being able to play AOE2 or a clone on Linux.

I'm not sure I understand if engine means playable game..?
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Anyway to install this on an Amazon Fire tablet?
> I think calling it an outright ponzi scheme is not that clear.

It's a very fitting comparison.

Like all ponzi schemes, people are attracted to the bitcoin scheme due to the propaganda barrage on how it's a sure thing and guarantees profits to those who get on board right now. Like all ponzi schemes, the bitcoin scheme depends on the people already onboard attracting more members for them to keep pumping money to inflate its value. Pump-and-dump schemes share many strikibg similarities with ponzi schemes, thus the appropriate comparison of bitcoin with a ponzi scheme.
I agree with that - the cops should definitively be prosecuted under that charge.
...So, if a guy the size of Ving Rhames is charging a petite female law enforcement officer after shouting that he is going to kill her, she should not be allowed to fire.

...So if a guy shouts, "I have a bomb!" and starts running towards a crowd of people, police should stand idly by.

...So if a guy, with a gun, walks up to a cop and points it at his head, no one should do anything, because he hasn't fired yet, so, hey... maybe it's fake and per the GP, he can't be "100% sure" the guy is armed if he hasn't fired a shot.

The problem with these absurd absolutist ideals:

1. They don't mesh at all with the reality of how bad guys work.
2. They expect police to not be human beings.

I'm all for incorruptible robot police who always use non-lethal force, but as long as we have humans, let's be real about it. Things will not change if your only point-of-view is that police are expendable, and that they "signed up for" death. They didn't. They signed up for a job which puts their lives in danger. Asking them to extend that danger to absurdity is...absurd. There are plenty of other ways to fix this, including body cams and proper prosecution (which includes, by the way, the presumption of innocence for the cop...).
I mean, I would totally feel convenient when my contacts are synced on my devices and I get a unified experience. Google knowing about my contacts is just the price I pay to get that service

Well, it's a question of what one is willing to pay. Me, I'm willing to pay actual U. S. dollars to Apple to get that same functionality without giving up (and perhaps I'm naive here) privacy. Personally, I like that well-defined transaction. The transaction that has taken place between yourself (and to some degree, me) and Google is much more fuzzy. Today Google does this with your data, but tomorrow? You call it "adjusting the service", I call it "getting more creepy". No right or wrong, you're happy, I'm happy, but from my POV there is a vast gulf in the price paid for the two competing services.

The instant Apple starts doing Googly stuff, I'll dump them for the real thing. But I'll betcha Apple is quite aware of this.
Of course, but Google Maps gives exactly the value that the patent comment had, just in another unit of measure.
Exactly. We had a similar discussion a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16006674.
All sorts of things are force multipliers for violently disturbed people: guns, cars, explosives, and yes fraud and deception. We should treat people who employ fraud to harm others the same way we treat people who use pipe bombs.

Police violence does seem like the "bigger" problem --- not that the difference tells us anything about how we should handle the ostensibly "smaller" problem. But I'll suggest that there's a "big" problem behind SWAT-ing, too: the way technology intermediates between agents and consequences, abstracts away externalities, reinforces the rationalizing techniques our brains use to salve themselves when violating fundamental inhibitions. In some circumstances, we even celebrate these effects, which seem to me far more menacing than a lot of mind-altering drugs.
>population 729

Did you miss this? These rural communities do not have the population density to support these businesses.

Have you ever been to these communities? There are literally only 2-3 restaurants in towns like these and that is basically all they can support.

Now, Wawas and Sheetz basically fill the gap for "eating out", but it is a very different business model needed to succeed in these places.
Speed never matters more than the quality of the surgery. You're conflating constraints and criteria. Speed is sometimes a constraint, but never a criteria.
I don't disagree with you.

Sort of related:

It's a bit distressing, in away, how hard it is to access information from before like year 2007. Most of it is locked up in government reference libraries and you generally have to bonafide "researcher" to even access physical copies of publications. Oh, and it's not allowed to make copies of the material.

Thanks a lot, Disney.
Calling what they did "swatting" is already a perversion. They made a phone call. Deploying a SWAT team is not, and can not be their decision.
> I think there's enough blame to go around: 1) police send an entire SWAT team because of ONE anonymous phone call, even though they should know by now that people abuse that ability 2) the gamer guy who made the phone call.

The police react to the incentives we create for them. How many articles did you read in the 1990s flipping out because police didn't react to some tip. How much "the police should've known about the 9/11 bombers all along!" In contrast, nobody will remember this accidental shooting.
For a regular person, the potential to need to kill somebody isn't part of their job duties. Of course there are very limited times where it's appropriate to do so.
There are over a half billion Android users in China who are prevented from using any of Google Play Services, and they're still fine.

AOSP may not be as fully featured as it could be, but it's clearly quite possible to use Android without Google.
Just because they don't sell their hardware at a loss, it doesn't mean they want to give up software licensing fees.
Microservices in Golang – Part 5 – Event Brokering with NATS
I think about RV/trailer parks a lot, as I live in an RV and travel a lot. It's a really fascinating part of the American experience, and it is pretty uniquely American, as well. There are, of course RVs and trailers and mobile homes in other places, but America's reverance for the "freedom of the road" or whatever gives the whole community around RVs and trailers a different vibe (even compared to Mexico, where a lot of the RV parks are owned by US ex-pats, and Canada).

The part I find maybe most interesting, and most troubling, is the way classism plays out even among the set of people that live in RVs. I've noticed a distinct set of phrases rich/white people who travel in RVs use in reviews to describe parks that are inhabited by poor people or people of color, which is a subtle bit of red-lining among RVers. And, this reinforces the division; parks that want good reviews from the wealthy travelers take steps to prevent poor people from staying in their parks. Imposing a trailer age restriction is the most common and most effective; poor folks can't afford a new RV. It's maybe even more pronounced among RVers because the rich ones don't want to be associated with "trailer trash", even though they have a lot in common with them.

But, I think the explosion of housing costs have led to an interesting shakeup in the market. RV manufacturers that historically targeted the high end, where retirees would sell their house (or use the equity in their house) to buy a monster luxury motorhome, a few years ago started making lower end trailers again. Winnebago even makes trailers again, which they didn't do for a couple of decades.

There's also a strong bit of nostalgia in the market that's somewhat new. Manufacturers are looking backward for design ideas; partly to make low-cost options again, and partly because the industry got lost in the woods for a long time just making the biggest and most expensive thing they could because that's where the money was. I'm pleased to see the change because old RVs were often beautiful or charming in ways that modern fiberglass rectangle boxes distinctly are not.

One thing I've also noticed: RV park prices in major cities have gone through the roof, while availability has gone way down, in the ~9 years I've been traveling. I used to be able to arrive in a city and get a spot in a park within a reasonable distance, without a reservation. No longer is that true. Austin is maybe the most pronounced difference. It was always a favorite landing place for me because it's a major city with a couple of RV parks in easy biking distance to downtown. Those parks have doubled their rent and have months-long waiting lists now. It's not as pleasant to travel in an RV as it once was, even just a few years ago, if you like visiting bigger cities. And, I think that's because so many people have been pushed out of houses/apartments and into RVs. That's an alarming trend, I think.
Sorry, I just used the link from the little email icon Amazon shows. Didn't realize it had an affiliate link (I don't have an affiliate account that I know of).
Just as at work, I think a good joke is fine - as long as it comes along with some positive content. Otherwise it's just a distracting, meaningless noise.
A Simple Alpha(Go) Zero Tutorial
> why aren't positive reviews considered evidence a conflict of interest?

Probably because they get more ad revenue over a body of positively reviewed businesses.
TL;DR:

Here are three strawmen we can argue about instead of the actual case in front of us, which had nothing to do with Ving Rhames or guns or bomb threats. Oh, and as a bonus, I'll start my three with a story about a big, menacing black man and a poor little petite white woman.

This line of conversation is unworthy of humanity, much less Hacker News.
That doesn't seem like it should be that hard. You are at the concert experiencing the concert, which should be pretty instant and gratifying. Either you like it enough that you don't miss your phone, or you decide that the concert experience isn't what you're looking for.

Being at the concert but doing something else seems like they are doing it to say they were there, and there are are always other ways to signal status people can fall back on.
Looking back, my reply was unnecessarily snarky. Sorry about that.

Inequality is necessary, but the extent of it and the effects bother me sometimes.
> Police everywhere have a shitload of guns.

Wrong, police in e.g. UK or Japan do not customarily carry guns.
And SHOCKER these countries have fewer police-related homicides.
What? Is that equivalent?

Swatting involves sending anxious humans with military grade weapons to an innocent person's house. Those anxious humans are trained to kill. If you Swat someone, and that person ends up dead, you're the reason they died -- and I fully agree it should be treated as a homicide, manslaughter at a minimum.

In your scenario, you are a hostage taker. You've taken both me and the other person hostage with the threat of murder...
What the gamer did here is NOT homicide. It's a misleading / fraudulent call. What the policeman did is homicide and should be punished without mercy.
The article mentions launchers; all the launchers in the app store seem sketchy. Does anyone know of a good Open Source launcher, maybe a version of the AOSP launcher compiled for current Android? I'd love to have something that reclaims the pile of space (thumb-reachable space even) devoted to the Google search bar that now stays on the bottom of the main screen all the time.
> The department should be held responsible even though it was an individual who made the fatal mistake.

Both are culpable, if the facts are as reported here. The cop was either improperly trained or did not have the personality to remain calm in a situation where use of deadly force might be required. Maybe both. That's the department's fault.

But the cop is the one who pulled the trigger.

> As for the person who called in the swat team, it’s clearly murder.

Reckless or negligent homicide is probably more realistic.
When a site asks me to turn off my ad blocker, I read this as "please trust us not to serve annoying or unsafe ads, and pay for us to do so."

Trust? Me pay for it? Pass.
Not to be mean but 160 lbs isn't heavy at all. If you're pushing 200 lbs and go to the gym regularly you'll have a lot less people bothering you on the street. I still wouldn't recommend walking through the Tenderloin alone though.
People in tech tend to look down on MBAs, but these are the kind of pricing decisions you learn how to make. It depends on your brand strategy, the strategies of competing brands, the anticipated lift, your margins, your assumptions about the margins of your competitors, the advertising channels available, your ability to enforce pricing discrimination (the innocous version), the macroeconomic environment... And on and on.

There's never a right answer to "am I charging the best price", it's always a guess.
I honestly don't know how to respond to your level of moral apathy towards the person who initiated a series of events that could predictably, and indeed did, lead to the completely unnecessary death of an innocent person and traumatization of a family and a police force and a city.

The police definitely share some blame, but swatting is absolutely abhorrent. It is not a victimless crime, it is not a casual prank, it is unacceptable, and your indifference is incomprehensible.
Actually it does sound weird to me, because in the vast majority of cases this is simply not true for the US.
In fairness, their options in the civil war were either 'red terror' or a swift defeat, since the White forces (led by the aristocracy and financed and supported from abroad) had no qualms about initiating a 'White terror' to raise manpower.

Forced conscription and hostage-taking among the peasantry was the historical norm and the Red Guards (the all-volunteer force that was the product of the soviets and supported the Bolsheviks) was simply too small to serve as an effective defense force. I don't know what other options they had.

Mind, I'm not excusing subsequent totalitarianism, Stalinist purges etc. if you meant to include that in your post; I'm just commenting on the strategic conditions that obtained during the civil war.
Far too much of the medical "system" in the U.S. is adversarial.

All the harder to remain or get well, whilst in the middle of a fight.

Sometimes doctors. Insurance (and, any number of types of insurance, depending on what's happened). Institutions (hospitals et al.). Lawyers.

Then slap non-disclosure on top of it all, to make it all the more likely the next guy enters, unaware.

That's my "word for the day", with respect to health care in the U.S. "Adversarial".

I'm going to stop writing and just reflect on that, for a while.

(And even when it's not, it can/could be. Something that hangs over the head of every clue-ful patient, as they go through the system.

Maybe it's easier to be someone who doesn't follow the news and keep up on this, who goes through the system blissfully unaware and happens by chance or whatever to avoid the major pitfalls.

I feel a bit guilty, writing about this when a lot of the world struggles to achieve basic coverage. But, I've had the U.S. system screw me over, significantly, more than once. I used to be more trusting. Now, I delay and delay -- which creates its own problems.)
Not anonymously though. They had a system to authenticate their threats to the police.
Honestly, I doubt anything will improve until that sort of situation happens to catapult it into media attention.
I wonder how good the security/data-sanitation is. If you don’t know the language, you might think you’re saying “I will not buy this record, it is scratched.” but you end up with hovercraft eel removal services.
How to Build a Smart Mirror – ReasonReact
Technology needs to be refocused into making homes more affordable to the working class instead of creating more profitable McMansions.