skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for taking the time to write this - very well thought out and well reasoned.

I don't think one can ignore the disconnect between the stated charter of top universities (basically to do research) and the motivations for the majority of undergraduates who actually attend them (prestige, which hopefully leads to a high paying job). I doubt that all donors give these institutions donations to further their research goals. I know for one that if I were given the option to focus the impact of my donation, I'd readily choose it be applied to a practical, skills-focused program within the research-focused university that I attended. Furthermore, the undergraduate programs of top private universities in the United States aren't funded by tax payer dollars - they're funded by sky-high tuition. As the OP shared a class applying to the undergraduate curriculum at Stanford, a tax money argument isn't relevant here. If the course were geared toward Masters or PhD students - different story.

Finally, universities seem incredibly resistant to re-evaluating their place in society in the 21st century economy -- at least in the U.S. From childhood, a college degree is pushed as a necessity for financial success. Top universities like Stanford are sought out not just for their academic rigor, but for the network and prestige afforded to their alumni, who can parlay these things into a strong career path and a high paying job. Univerisities seem deaf to this reality. I'm sure they understand it, but for whatever reason are reticent to acknowledge that their role in society and to the economy has evolved since their founding.

I think Stanford should be applauded for offering this course - would love to know how many students registered.
There's a lot of arguments that various people make regarding the supposed superiority of different setups.

1) It is claimed that using keyboard-only controls reduces "context switching."

2) It is claimed that tiling window managers are simpler and more logical, because you use more of the screen real estate and keep everything open all the time.

3) It is claimed that vim and emacs are better because the brief keyboard commands allow for amazing power with few keystrokes.

Alas, these are almost all arguments voiced by people who grew up with technologies built around severely limited hardware constraints. GUIs were terrible for the longest time, and ten or twenty years ago you certainly couldn't get acceptable performance on them when working remotely.

There are very good reasons why people would avoid all of these tools. Hardware is much better. Compositing window managers are much better.

It is particularly understandable that people avoid vim and emacs. And there's really no empirical evidence at all that they save time, improve accuracy, or anything else.

And any empirical studies on this question would have difficulty isolating the variables. People who do understand systems at the low level, and with all the historical context, could very well be better programmers in some ways... but not because of their environment.

Thinking you could become like Richard Stallman by using emacs is cargo cult reasoning.
Epistemologically, the Internet:
As a kid in rural Florida, it was the 3G usb modem that allowed me to use the internet at home.
Hugely pivotal. I could browse Wikipedia, Hackaday, 4chan, etc when ever I wanted and I just started chugging.

Negative Socially:
2013, Getting wrongly charged of a crime, going to jail then having to fight it at 19. really altered my view on how just the world is. I was verifiably innocent and the ordeal was dragged out for six months. The terms of my bond made me lose thousands to drug tests and missed work, then the judge throws it out right before the trial. Still a little angry about it, but it really opened my mind to the idea of the social injustices the State can facilitate.

Positive Socially, careerwise:
After that, being given the chance to run the local music store in my city. It was the Marching band and Orchestra sort. It really helped with social anxiety and learning to talk to people. Before that I would compulsively rehearse what I would say before I used the phone or approached someone. Dealing with people made me feel comfortable in my own skin.

Careerwise:
At 22, I worked for one of the largest optical components and systems manufactures in the world assembling and testing lenses for the optics in one of Illuminas genomic DNA sequencers. Learned a lot about software, optics, manufacturing, Six sigma, Lean, corporate/ business stuff.

Career2.0:
Starting a Startup. It's confounding, exhilarating, risky, and hard. The hardest thing I've done so far and I love every minute of it. I would shill it, but it doesn't face the public yet. I'm very proud.

It's been a journey, these are the moments I feel guided me to who I am.
The email in my profile would be best. Thanks!
> I think it is bullshit, because black and white slot machine still is a slot machine.

> Turned on grayscale in macOS(System Prefs - Accessibility - Display) before googling this articles, can confirm that still receiving dopamine hits.

It's not a solution to the whole problem, just part of the problem; specifically this part:

> “Color’s not a signal for detecting objects, it’s actually something much more fundamental: it’s for telling us what’s likely to be important,” Mr. Conway said. “If you have lots of color and contrast then you’re under a constant state of attentional recruitment. Your attentional system is constantly going, ‘Look look look over here.’ ”

These companies are manipulating every physiological knob they can. This is one, addictive dopamine hits are another.
The eastern block was obviously huge, some parts like the Baltic countries were relatively well off, others less so.

The same as anywhere else in the world.
Sure, but let's not forget that these weren't just beautiful, historic structures sitting on display. They were used daily to inflict countless horrors on the citizens of Benin or really anyone who was unlucky enough to be captured by someone operating in Benin

> But the way Benin treated its slaves and the public display of large quantities of human remains hardened British attitudes towards Benin's rulers. Since 1863, the British had been trying to force the King to stop selling slaves to the Arab traders who had replaced the Portuguese after 1836 and to stop the practice of human sacrificial crucifixion.
I mean, I disagree with your disagreement, but do either of us have data to back ourselves up? The idea that people would or wouldn't do one thing?

I do know one thing: Facebook news has become a source of derision due to its quantifiable impact on divisiveness in the US politically. And a scandal erupted on the topic of Russia funding of political ads.

There's a fantastic article on the general topic of Facebook news here: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511...

With all this mess, it's inconceivable that only .01% of people would toggle these settings.

I won't argue against the idea of the UI being too complicated, that sounds absurd to me although I'm no UI designer.
Richard Rorty’s prescient warnings for the American left
Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production
California has the highest poverty rate in the USA
I went from rural Nigeria to an MIT-backed startup – with just a Nokia phone
I paid for Bleem. Even though I had used other emulators for things like NES, Sega, etc, it seemed like absolute magic to be able to throw a PS1 game in a computer and have it work.
I'm going to remember this one for a long time! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/crypto-cr...
That makes me very sad. I believe nuclear power should be developed further, and California, as a state could find solution for the waste problem, without waiting for the government. After all it is the richest, and most innovative state in the US.

Nuclear could make human kind 100% green decades ago, if not for FUD surrounding it.

I love wind and solar, but they are still unable to supply stable power 24/7 (and I love what the Tesla batteries do to solve that eventually), and can't be used globally.
Schleicher's fable
Reports of credit card fraud pile up from OnePlus customers
Apparently this is common enough that there's a saying "People don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses" and this is backed up by some surveys suggesting that bad bosses/supervisors are the reason for 75% of job leaving events and also the number 1 cause of unhappiness at work.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/people-dont-leave-bad-jobs-bo...
I found that proof of burn actually was exactly equivalent to proof of stake in terms of overall security. I.e. not good enough.
I'm fine with video, but I'd like the volume control to be single video specific. Right now, if you watch and listen to one video, the volume remains on for the remaining videos that autoplay when you scroll by. I'd prefer that volume is off unless I tap on a video.
Thinking about photons is bad for you, especially if you are doing quantum-optics. It is almost always better to think about quantum fields, and in this case the quantumness adds nothing to the physics.

The "photon" is just a quantum of excitation of the optical medium (in this case the EM compled with the electromechanical state of matter in it). These exictations obey wave equations, just as classical waves do, and hence Snell's law.

It's true that you can also (almost) think of photons as point-particles travelling over every possible path in time-space and then do infinite-dimensional path-integrals. That point of view is important for a physicist to understand, but it is not needed to explain refraction.
That doesn't compare it to Pot sales. They might get good margins on cocaine but what proportion of their profits is what would matter here. That is they could be making even better margins on cocaine than that today, but if 90% of their profits come from marijuana sales...
> That’s how cartels get power in the first place, but once they’re there, they’re in the business of preserving revenue streams and territory and thus power.

An anarchocapitalist would note that this is straight out of the statist playbook. What distinguishes cartels from roving bandits that pivot to stationary? It's hard to lay the blame for this on capitalism per se.
[Offish-topic] Lately I've been thinking about solving the last-mile problem through a free-space optics approach for suburban areas. Stick a mast on your roof that can illuminate your neighbor's masts; relay to a FTTC node for backhaul.

Sort of like an extended range LiFi / mesh setup. It's attractive because it could avoid RF licensing entirely, but rain/dust/smoke is an issue.

Does anyone know if any company is doing anything like this right now?
I suspect this is going on today. Cryptocurrency traders place a lot of faith in the exchanges. A bad actor at an exchange could manipulate a price upwards:

- Create a ton of volume and potentially and upward trend (two bots trading with one another, increasing the price each time)

- Generate hype around a coin

- Let FOMO take over

If things start to go south, disable withdrawals, deposits, or freeze the market until you can get it under control.

I doubt any of this manipulation is even illegal?
Well, here's why I wanted to bring up QM: the principle of least time is really most at home in geometric optics where beams of light are arrows and everything is steady-state. In that view, things are indeed nonlocal: I can alter the arrows drawn for a beam of light going from A to B by doing something over at point C. Wave optics would understand this as interference, but if we insist that we want to keep the arrows then we have to introduce the path integrals.

Essentially, geometric optics lets us draw arrows and assert refraction, QM lets us draw arrows and derive refraction, but wave optics doesn't really involve arrows at all.
I'd argue that nothing useful is coming of it now, and that during dot com, the internet was extremely useful.
To bypass the paywall, try going to Google and typing in the name of the article ("Why Uber Can Find You but 911 Can’t"). That worked for me.
> You said there were "no options to pay in the phisical world".

No, I said I didn't notice them in the physical world (and I still haven't, fwiw). Never seen any physical store say "we accept Bitcoin", never. I was clearly talking about my anecdata which is still, from my perspective, valid.

That has a different meaning than what you make out of it. I never wrote about the online world. You gave as example Thuisbezorgd; that's not the physical world. That's not a brick & mortar store. They're a virtual middleman service.

I avoid them btw, because I can get cheaper deals by cutting them out as middleman and giving a higher tip to the hard working delivery boy instead.

> (mollie, btw is one of the largest, if not the largest PSP in the netherlands)

Really, never heard of. I guess iDEAL and PayPal just went out of business. Good luck competing with iDEAL, btw.

> You could also just admit that you were wrong because you were not aware that there is an actual community out there, even in your hometown, who accepts Bitcoin, pays with it and as such makes it an actual payment system.

The existence of something doesn't describe its state or, in this case, adoption level. The adoption level (or market penetration) is very important in the subject of payment systems, but you prefer to ignore it and spout red herrings like this instead to pursue your character assasination agenda.

> You could admit that you were not aware of this, but that now you are, you know that Bitcoin is used; just not in the way you envision it, or not by the people and companies that you would like to.

I was aware Thuisbezorgd accepted Bitcoin. I was also aware that it wasn't being used much, as I quoted. That article was no news to me. The question whether its used or not is important in the discussion as put forth above. Is it used a lot? No, not really (far less than 1%). The question about transaction costs/time was also still up in the air. I guess you don't know the answer to that either.

> Also note that many people (I'm not aware that you did this!) mention that bitcoin is both a failure because no-one ever pays with it, yet also mention that it is a failure because the confirmation times are high and fees are growing; which is a direct effect of too much people using it.

My orig. point was it doesn't scale.

As for what you wrote here the fact transactions happen doesn't mean people are paying with Bitcoins in the physical world. It might as well be a bunch of astroturfers (the way Reddit came to existence), or a bunch of people buying drugs (the way Silkroad ran). You don't know.

But we do have a statement like the one from Thuisbezorgd.

Now I'd like to see a statement from a serious computer manufacturer like Apple or reseller like Media Markt or Bol.com stating they accept Bitcoin (all I read is businesses like Steam quitting accepting Bitcoin as payment method instead). Things like that are a sign of widespread adoption. What isn't a sign of widespread adoption: 8 bloody restaurants/pubs in the capital city (!!) accepting Bitcoin. That's a sign of a tiny, irrelevant niche.

PS: Oh, and with regards to the bubble, we didn't discuss Tether.
1.4 billion daily active users. Your use of the phrase "most people" is not in line with reality.
no skin in this, but maybe it is legal to create a digital copy of your own but illegal to download someone else's generated copy? Not sure if they could say that you couldn't play the backup directly (as in, that you'd be forced to push it to an official cartridge or disk), but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low.
Well said.

> Our experience of greatness is a function of our being present in the moment, absorbing and making memories of the feelings we had. Why should the knowledge that some other folks experienced a better thing, or many other folks experienced the same thing we did, change how we feel about what happened to us?

Back in the early 90s I had the highest score on the Street Fighter(?) cabinet in the local pizza joint. Try as they might, nobody could beat it-- I was a god amongst the neighborhood kids. Then 1996 came around, and with the internet came evidence of what high scores other people around the world were hitting. The best I could do, what my peers were proud of me for, meant nothing when held up against the greater community. My world was crushed. I was nothing special. If my friends were this proud of a loser, then they must be losers themselves.

But for the brief period of time in which I lived in ignorance, hanging out with friends, hustling for quarters and bonding over pizza and friendly competition...man, those years were golden.

To this day I eschew competitive gaming-- I'd rather work towards a co-operative goal or PvE with friends/my kids than have it rubbed in my face constantly that the world is full of people who are more exceptional than me.
Also Bleem! and Virtual Game Station for the PSX, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix_Virtual_Game_Station
On the one hand, I like that they're doing old physics. There is a tendency to do only cutting edge physics such as modern quantum mechanics research, particle physics, even string theory. There is little chance to convey an accurate understanding of this to a layperson. Every part of physics was at the cutting edge at one point in time. The physics that is now hip will be old in 100 years, and it will be no longer interesting for science journalists. Celestial mechanics, classical optics, classical electrodynamics were at the cutting edge some time ago, and they're still super interesting. They also have the advantage of being thoroughly understood, so there's a chance to convey genuine understanding. In that sense, this article is great: it truly explains Fermat's principle as a physics college student would learn it. It would be even greater if it had more physics and less metaphysics. On the other hand, would that have reached the front page of HN? Probably not.
Exactly. I don't understand why universities aren't willing to make an addendum to their charters to be both research and job-skills focused. I've yet to hear a good argument for why this can't be done. In my opinion, most arguments boil down to "because we've never done it that way."
Interesting. I am curious to know who drove up the Bitcoin price to $18K.
Because it is dull, long winded and misleading.

Perhaps it is fun for people who like being misled?
Scala Native may sort of fit the bill
> 1) Randomness (or entropy) in a p2p system is bounded by the data present in the chain. What this means is that (at the very least) an attacker can know ahead of time whether he will win the block reward, because he has all data necessary to compute the result of the random function, no matter what components he is required to use. He can then chose not to participate if he will lose.

You could require miners to announce their proof of burn well in advance of the block they will use it for. Those announcements could be stored in the block chain so that the network can easily agree on when each announcement was made. If the distance in blocks between a burn announcement and the block it will be used for is less than K, the network would ignore that announcement.

So if you want to predict the outcome of block N, you would have to win block N-K and all the blocks in between (or be colluding with all the winners). If K was small you could just burn more than the block reward justifies, discouraging competing miners from burning, but if K is sufficiently large (e.g. 1 month), that would be prohibitively expensive.

> 2) Finney attack. It is completely trivial for an attacker to generate an infinite sequence of valid blocks in which he is the solo participant and is also the winner.

I think you could come up with some rotation mechanism so that only certain accounts can participate in a certain round. It could perhaps be weighted by stake, so to participate in all rounds, one would need to control 100% of the currency (or some lower threshold could be chosen to minimize the rounds that no miners are eligible for).

> 3) Making the block reward equal to the burnt amount makes this functionally equivalent to Proof of Stake for the case of the single miner. However, if you don't make the block reward at least equal to the amount burnt, it is not profitable to mine.

I think you're looking at it backwards; the block reward should be chosen based on the desired inflation rate, and miners will adjust their burn amounts so that burn costs will always roughly equal block rewards. If the costs ever exceed the rewards, it will be brief; some miners will sit out until mining becomes slightly profitable again.
As countless other countries have been doing for ages. Even Belgium does it:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.Nextel.Emer...
>ThatGeoGuy: "A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original."

A dollar bill stolen in a robbery is "pretty hard to tell apart" from a dollar bill you received as change from a legal cash transaction. It is silly to argue that how those bills were acquired is not a factor in your claimed ownership of them.

>Those seem like conflicting statements, if you assume that "such copies" means both "a ROM made from an official copy" (i.e. read by the individual from their own cartridge) and a copy "downloaded from the internet".

I read it differently. The subject of the sentence is "an official copy" and the "vs. downloaded from the internet" portion was a prepositional phrase. On second reading it is certainly possible I misinterpreted it. The author should have used a conjunction like "and" instead of a preposition like "versus" if they wanted both copies to be the subject.

>And further, Nintendo claims that game copying devices themselves are also illegal.

Nintendo says nothing about making ROMs from official copies. It does not claim they are illegal. They are definitively legal. However almost all games sold today have some sort of DRM included. A copying device is illegal if it tries to circumvent this DRM. Therefore if a game has DRM, there is no legal way for a person to own a ROM of that game.

To summarize Nintendo's point and the one that Tech Radar seconded, the only legal ROM of a commercial game is one you create yourself from a DRM free game that you already own.
It is presumptively discriminatory unless you do a formal study documenting that high-IQ employees perform better than low-IQ employees. PG&E and the NFL use IQ tests in hiring.
I think it's relevant for instaaa to point out that the 'Show HN' is meant for authors to submit their own projects, not have others submit it for them (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

heybournry (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15733432) and jasharland (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15479847) identified themselves as authors of instaaa before.
I am not sure where you pulled your definition of intersectionality, but doesn't sound like anything related.
I am not sure neithee why you added the fact that she was a woman to the equation when the comment clearly was targeted at her race / culture. It's annoying cause it somewhat implies that the million of immigrant men don't go through so similar if not worst experiences
To make electric cars really mainstream, I think it would help to make some standard, easily removable battery modules that different manufacturers use. Then they sell the electyric car without battery and you lease the battery from providers something like a gas stations.

It's not a new idea. I think it is just a matter of waiting for the market to be ready. But its kind of a chicken and egg problem.
For purposes of taxation I believe.