skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What is going on with the cars on the top floor of this parking garage in Queen Anne? They seem to stay in the same spot for months at a time.

Most likely city vehicle parking. They are all painted the same because they are probably part of a fleet. Most likely they are different cars that all look the same.
Nuclear fusion.

The main problem today is superconductors' size. You need space for refrigerator circuits, that are not superconductors.

If superconductors operational temperature are high enough, you could just refrigerate the entire room. Making superconductors more dense and powerful. Making fusion possible in extremely small spaces and making it even cheap.

That is you could do fusion expending millions instead of billions.
> that are successful, but not market-leading

I was thinking, isn't this just Google's standard competition with Apple Pay and PayPal/Vinmo?
> If energy cost were the main obstacle, upper-income people would already have hovercars, because spending 4x more on fuel than people driving wheeled vehicles would be fine for them.

They do, they’re just called “helicopters”.
You keep talking about absolute, not relative, costs. I don't know why you keep doing this.
They shouldn't keep renaming products, especially when they don't control the ecosystem. I know a few apps and many merchants that still have Google Wallet branding - which should have been updated to Android Pay two years ago. Now there is another layer of confusion.
Not to try to invalidate your point (because Microsoft is definitely guilty of this practice), but SkyDrive was rebranded for legal reasons*, instead of marketing reasons.

https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/28/uks-bskyb-wins-judgement-a...
Interesting. But it would be good to have some data showing whether this effect on traffic is real and, if yes, what magnitude it has. However, even if the data supports the idea, the conclusion that rent control in general is bad is not really supported because rent control could be implemented in different ways that do not hinder mobility. Germany recently introduced a new rent control law the goal of which is precisely that.
> Instead of playing the housing bubble game, my wife and I commute in 60+ minutes each way. Partly because it enables us to raise our kids in a neighborhood with young families. But also just out of spite.

Who exactly is being spited here when you waste 10% of your life sitting in a car 'commuting' ?
I don't read that as a name-it-claim-it spell. I read it as an accuracy claim. That the competition is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't know what's "woo-woo" about that.
Trend Micro spotted 36 malicious apps advertised as security tool in Google Play
> your TI calculator was a tinkerer niche that was similar to the openness and simplicity of early home computers

It wasn't in the Netherlands. A graphical calculator was required for math and many kids learned at least some programming by creating their own little programs to cheat in tests. Also, you could get code for games and then program them. The newer ones with USB cables made adding games much easier though.
Spectre and Meltdown: Tapping into the CPU's Subconscious Thoughts
In 2000, the streaming media player market had RealNetworks in first place [1] with 12% market share, Apple with QuickTime in second at 7%, WMP in distant third at 3%. By 2004, QuickTime had over 36% share, WMP in the lead at 38%, RealPlayer just shy of 25% [2]. WebSiteOptimization.com's January 2008 report [3] about streaming media players uses data sourced from Nielsen for the years 2003-2008 that shows the steady rise of iTunes, the flat trends for QuickTime and RealPlayer, and the more modest growth but higher absolute numbers for Windows Media Player.

Clearly, the install base of these products significantly contributed to the software people used to manage their portable music players. In May 2003, a Nielsen report put Winamp's install base at 5.5 million, Windows Media Player at 43.1 million, RealNetworks at 26 million, and QuickTime at 13.5 million [4][5].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/10/business/technology-micros...
[2] http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-product-marketing-says-qu...
[3] http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0801/
[4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/music-players-market-share-wina...
[5] https://www.cnet.com/news/aol-trumpets-new-winamp/
BTC PoW hashing power is supplied by ASICs so it's impossible for BTC miners to do anything with their hardware other than mine BTC/BCash.

PoS mining is just rewarding the rich simply for being rich. What could be wrong with that?
He didn't say it was easy. He said it's overly pessimistic.

I would tend to agree that "It completely removes any ability to be a productive member of society" is not only quite a stretch, but pretty insulting.
But the point is to have a word that points to the thing that is in common between those two cases: the action of professing a belief because it is good PR, whether or not it is true. It is the single-act equivalent of what would be referred to as "sociopathic narcissism" if it was a continuous property of a person: a desire to look good that will use the truth if the truth suits, or a lie if a lie suits, without caring which is which.

To be clear, usages of the term "virtue signalling" to describe the behaviour of an individual, don't usually usually imply the same degree of sociopathy that it does when applied to the actions of a corporation. An individual doing "virtue signalling" is simply learning signals that tend to make people react by calling them a good person, and then parroting those signals, without necessarily doing much to learn about the content of those signals.

A better term for the individual behaviour might be "cargo-cult virtuousness"—which makes even more sense when put together with an assumption that people will be cargo-culting the "ritual" of a virtuous behaviour from other people who also cargo-culted the ritual, and so the ritual being performed will decay in this retransmission until it consists only of the observable actions that get people to call you virtuous, without holding any of the content that actually is virtuous.

Which is to say, in an environment with centralized teachings of moral ritual (like a religious congregation with active preaching), the only kind of virtue signalling that works is to actually do consensus-virtuous acts, because everyone is both aware of what the virtuous rituals are, and also aware that everyone else is aware of what the virtuous rituals are. In such an environment, it requires an active intent toward deception to merely signal virtue.

Meanwhile, in an environment where the idea of virtuous ritual is merely spread memetically, between families and peer groups, it is easy for a the idea of a virtuous ritual to become corrupted such that people can actually think themselves virtuous (and others can actually think that person virtuous) based solely on the performance of the "hollowed out" virtue ritual.

To reiterate, the point of virtue-signalling is to point to the thing that goes on in both contexts above: the thing that is active deception in communities with centrally-dictated virtue ritual; and the thing that is unquestioned cargo-cult-ism in communities with peerwise-transmitted virtue ritual.
Very true. Also astute re: reading. I'm sure by now we all've heard the twilight zone trope of the isolate fellow who only wants to spend his time deep in his books, being of little value to anything or anyone else.
This is the real problem in my view. I blame Apple for this mostly, as they are creating consumption platforms instead of creativity ones.

It is not just tinkering, these devices are made for you to consume, not to produce. Which is a great shame as they are natural creative platforms, we just need somehow to break the chains and liberate them, both phones and tablets.
I would assume it's so you can't just cheat by looking at a friends answers and seeing what they got right or wrong or whatever.

One of my friends friends won last night at the $10,000 prize level but she only got $24 after all the dividing up, so it seems like tons of people are winning.
Sequoia China investment values Australian design company Canva at $1B
If everyone in Google is getting outraged over something that is debatable and that much of the population agrees with, isn't that a sign that Google is kind of in a cultural bubble, an echo chamber? If Google is striving to be a global, multicultural corporation, shouldn't it be allowing of a diversity of thought as well?
Having had local newspapers write about close family members of mine, I’d encourage you to reach out to freelance journalists and see if they’d be interested. They may do it for less compensation in exchange for the exclusivity of the story, and they typically bring other skills to the table that are useful when telling a person’s story (interviewing people, basic investigation, etc).

This is my general advice without knowing the details of what you’re after.
Is there a way to enable parental controls with an alternate phone unlock PIN? If so, then my comment is silly and I am silly. If not, then it stands. That's where the control belongs, so one can freely share a working PIN with one's kids, with no need to turn on a setting buried in menus (not to mention always remembering to do so).
The phrase was "Why would there be an expectation of a sharp ..."

I agree - why would we expect a sharp transition?

When a radioactive particle decays, it too is a sharp transition. (By which I mean the time scale is very short. At sufficiently fine resolution, it's hard to tell exactly when an atom of element X becomes something other than an atom of element X.)

That there are examples of very fast transformation doesn't mean that Radim is incorrect in asking why we would expect the difference between life and non-life to be one of those sharp transitions.

In a tabula rasa sense, it might be a good cautionary reminder to consider exceptions like what you pointed out. But it's "pretty well established" (to quote Radim) that the boundary between life and non-life is not distinct. The standard question is, are viruses alive? The usual answer is "no", but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimivirus#Implications_for_def... pushes it close to yes.

Humans have created an organism with a synthetic genome. Give another decade or two and biologists will be creating semi-alive forms to explore what the boundary means.

Further, there are definitions beyond the strictly biological one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Definitions .
I'm not sure that fungus gains anything evolutionarily meaningful from learning to infect this particular banana.

The only thing you get from this is annoying humans, which doesn't sound a very good evolutionary strategy (second only to being used in Chinese traditional medicine)
The number is inherently less because you can't watch TV in the car, you can't watch TV on the bus, you can't watch TV at work, etc...

Now that happens everywhere. Use levels of TV vs smartphones aren't close. The comparison is simply absurd because of the nature of the technology.
It's more complicated than that because distractions play a huge role. If you've got access to endless stream of entertainment and games you're obviously less likely to find time to explore the other stuff that you can do with computers. I know quite a lot of tech savvy and smart people who loved tinkering with computers but never really got to the point of being able to do anything professionally because they've got distracted by too much Starcraft, WoW, etc...
As I posted elsewhere, our teenage son has a flip phone. He always has, and he always will, until he can buy and sustain something more fancy himself.

As far as desktop, he runs whatever the latest version of Ubuntu LTS. He does not have administrative access to it.

I wrote a small program that watches the title of whatever the current/foreground window is and compares that title to a configured list of regular expressions. If any regex matches, then the program kills the process. It logs the current window name in any case.

So we basically blacklist the web sites/apps/whatever that we see in his activity log as needed.

He is required to have a 'chromebook' for school, and they provide one. But instead we got him an old sturdy thinkpad, put Ubuntu on it, and it has the same basic logging/security framework, but with a different blacklist set of regexes.

We have received very positive feedback from his teachers, who struggle to keep the rest of the class off of inappropriate (for class time...ie, time wasting) web pages.

I've been asked how this minor miracle is accomplished, but things go right downhill when I say the first thing you need to do is throw away ChromeOS and install Linux proper.
As long as you consider it possible for Russia to have a 'good reason' to take land by force, it makes your comments on the article about 'war preparations' a farce.

Obviously peace is the ideal, but it's clear who the more agressive party is, the article is not about them, peace is also always bilateral. For Finland this is not about ignoring diplomacy, they don't ignore it, because they can't.
The Kyocera DuraXV (https://www.kyoceramobile.com/duraxv/) has navigation and I believe can act as a wifi hotspot, but goddamn, they want $260 for it which feels like a hell of a lot for a basic phone. Also I'm on AT&T and I think the DuraXV is Verizon only.
>violence was endemic in Latin America before 1973, and that the U.S. did not cause that violence

I must still be misunderstanding; you're saying US interests have had no involvement with the violence in South America before 1973? If so that is assuredly false.

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

-Major General Smedley Butler, War is a Racket (1935)
"We have a verdict, and darn it, we will find a crime to fit that verdict."
memes like avocado toast

Add some red onion, tomato, salt&pepper, and you have one of my favorite memes - lunch.
Low voltage distribution networks in data centers. Forget 48v - you could centrally distribute 3.3v power for CPUs. 1000s of 80% step down converters become 100% efficient.

Superconducting ring storage of electricity.

Probably some break throughs in electrical storage because SQUID devices can now be commodity parts in hard disks.
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098676 . Also, it's a Demon Thread - https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/BZtAavpsy9WtMYgEL/demon-th... .
God I hate Google Groups. I actually need some info from some of those groups and because of account b0rkage and shenanigans it is just too much of a hassle. Weren't they originally Usenet groups or something? Initially they were being decent Web stewards of them (_that_ was a long time ago) but then they got subsumed into the corp. as all things must. It's as inevitable as night follows day. Utter shame.
Windows Phone 8.1 had an amazing feature called Kid's Corner[1]. Galaxy phones have a similar Kids Mode[2].

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10661/windows-phone...

[2] http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/apps/kids-mode/
Never use the best linear unbiased estimator? That's a strong statement.
Started doing back-strengthening workouts, and try to stand a lot more during the day at work.

Also don't let myself use my phone while walking, as that was a big issue for a while.
If you have money, why aren't you paying your credit card bill on time?
Smartphones are much harder to lock down than a laptop. I don't know about the iPhone but Android makes it a pain in the ass -- don't suggest stuff I've looked very hard already, some things you could do are simply impractical.
It's a standard feature on Xiaomi phones. You can set up two user profiles, each with a different lock screen password. Each profile is effectively a different phone - different apps, different settings, even a different SIM card if you like.

http://xiaomitips.com/guide/how-to-use-miui-8-second-space-f...
Gmail with the split inbox has that feature (although for the life of me I can't get it to put updates/promotions into the same bucket, though they are) and inbox allows you to bundle and split things even more.
I agree that bitcoin's public ledger isn't conducive to anonymity (even with address mixers thrown in, and those are totally worthless given the high transaction fess).

But that doesn't preclude a new layer on top of bitcoin, or using an alt-coin (monero) that has anonymity baked in.

I would say that USD/Euros do have the risk of deanonymization (unlikely as it may be). The government would simply need to say "all bills $20 and over will be worthless in 2 weeks, you need to exchange them for new bills at your bank where your transaction will be recorded". India just did that with not 100 Rupees and higher.
Or in the words of the ancient philosopher plato upon learning about the written textbook

"""If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."""

And just as Plato had a point but missed a greater one something similar might be said about the campaign against the a decentralized authority free media landscape that seams to be replacing it.

Were kind of seeing a kind of trend where every new media invention goes though a cycle of hype and fear towards a new normal and usually a new political and cultural structure. And i suspect that a lot of the "fear" is at least partially a part of that process.

Not to be said that smartphones are different from for instance newspapers in having serious and dangerous problems* but it's equally dangerous to respond to new by trying to preserve an equally broken old model for information/entertainment distribution.

*Remember the Maine?
I feel fairly comfortable saying that in a group of Ethiopians in 1991, probably more than 4% are pregnant. For comparison, I've read that 10% of Syrian women in the refugee camps were pregnant at any given time. Doing the math (with world bank stats):

Ethiopia fertility 1991: 7.2

Ethiopia female life expectancy 1991: 49

Total pregnancy time: 7.2 * 0.75 years = 5.4 years

Lifespan proportion spent pregnant: 5.4 / 49 = 11%
If I didn't work for a telco, I would still carry a basic phone.
Median is a type of average. You are confusing "average" with "mean".

To be fair, it's not clear which form of average is used in the article and your assumption that it is the mean is likely correct.
> If this article is really meant to be readable by non-Haskell programmers, the example code snippets should also be provided in a more mainstream language with static types, such as C++, Java or perhaps JavaScript+TypeScript.

First of all, the definition of "readable by non-Haskell programmers" will always be somewhat subjective. Depending on their background, aptitude and motivation, many non-Haskell programmers can understand Haskell code just fine.

Setting that aside, the techniques described in this blog post simply wouldn't be possible to express in any of those languages. Just having static types is not sufficient. Even in vanilla Haskell, most type-level programming techniques are not possible to express, and certainly the type systems of Java etc are not capable of it (without significant extension).
It isn't like helicopters were unknown in 1968.
I would really like to do that, but honestly, I don't think I could get by without google maps and either uber or lyft. Looking through my smart phone, those are seriously the only applications I need. The other 60+ apps I could do without.
Been a while since I read it, but I believe he actually advocated for that. First he tried to establish that the sexes have some differences, then said we should see if we can make the workplace culture less biased toward the male-friendly characteristics.
I will remove the link to make clear that this is not about my product.
This is interesting. The situations you describe as boring, I find interesting and curious.

For example, while walking to work, I usually pass one of our homeless guys down the road and give him a nod. It's worrying if he isn't there. Then there is the like 200 years old guy in his plant shop, who usually has some interesting stuff going on. Then there is a cooking school with courses in tasty stuff. Then there is the school with a dangerous crossing there, kinda want to watch out for the kids there.

Subway. If you look around, there's so many interesting people there. People are telling so much about their day by just being in the subway the way they are, and with their stuff. And be careful - some people even speak with attentive dudes.
lg Exalt
What your response misses is the time component of vacancy.

If I have rent control, I will list at a higher price and let the property sit vacant for longer to find a tenant because the law says that I am limited in the ability to later adapt the rent to the market.

Without rent control, there is much less incentive to leave a property vacant, looking for a tenant willing to pay a higher price point.

Most microeconomics courses teach that markets don't have one price for a good, and one of the lessons will be in strategies, such as coupons, that owners of goods use to sell into the market at multiple prices. There isn't a single number that a landlord can rent a unit out for in a given market.
It’s a walrus No, it’s a giraffe No, it’s MicGoat, a new app to debate issues
Everyone was publicly disagreeing with him though so why should he remain private?
New York Leaders Are Failing Its Subway Riders
> most electricity still comes from coal

This is not true anywhere in the US, and use of coal is in decline everywhere.
The collapse of the early high-minded era of tech is almost complete. The world envisioned by luminaries like Kay & Papert, where computers would be programmed by people as part of a process of developing individuals' potentials, has devolved to that of Facebook, Google and Twitter, where people are programmed by computers purely for the self-interested purposes of tiny financial elites.

It was perhaps predictable that a society with greed as its primary organising principle would end up deploying new tech like this. But the sheer speed and comprehensiveness of the takeover has been breathtaking.
I think you're overlooking that you type at over 100wpm. (So of course typespeed isn't your bottleneck.)