skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My understanding is that English is the intermediary language, but not on purpose- they tried to create an "interlingua" but they trained with too many English-to-X and X-to-English data and ended up with a model of English as their intermediary language model.

And it's hard even for them to know because their models are opaque and hardly amenable to principled examination.

(I mean, you can't prove anything about them, so you can't really know what they're doing in there).
So he got it somewhat backwards. A more likely scenario is a grossly overpopulated, polluted Earth supplying a minute fraction of the population who live money off world. The major hole in either argument is that we’re about as close to thriving offworld as we are to flying by flapping our arms. The list of unsolved problems to make self-sustaining human presences offeorld are staggering and multigenerational.

Barring some really impressive and rapid breakthroughs in materials science, energy production and storage, and so much more, it’s just sci-fi with a coat of paint. Of course those same breakthroughs which would make Mars colonies possible (aneutronic fusion, new battery tech, superior robotics, AI, real understanding of our immune systems and bioflora, lightweight radiation shielding, something more than chemical rockets, and more) would be cheaper to use and more effective on Earth.

Mars isn’t going anywhere, but I tend to agree with GP that pretendimg our species is about to leave Earth in a real sense is dangerous fantasizing. It’s a worthy and necessary long term goal for the species, but we’re far from that accomplishment. I think it scares people that we have messes to solve here which we can’t run from, whether that’s overpopulation or an extinction event like an asteroid.

Well have rockets to get us there, but why? We’re not backing up the species by going to another planet unless we can survive without Earth. We should try to make it offworld, but we need to keep this world from dying as the primary focus.

There is as yet, no escape.
I think "magic login links" are fine for most services. Doing 2FA with that is not feasible though, unless you want to argue that receiving the email counts as "something you know" or that "something you have plus something else you have" counts as 2FA.
Don't blame algorithms for human nature. That thing is ultimately just minimizing a loss function and if recommending garbage gets the best results, that's what it will do.
Your friends however will be able to keep track of the references to the same person in a conversation, even if they get the gender wrong. In GT's case it's evidence that it can't do that, and therefore will mangle longer passages that require this level of understanding.
A lot of the negative comments wrt cost are versions of this: what a ripoff, you can get better components for way less money in some other PC and/or if you build your own.

That's nice but it's not Apple's market. Apple's market is not other PCs, and it's not build your own.

This criticism of Apple has been around ever since Apple has been around (1970s). While the criticism has basically stayed the same since then, Apple has not stayed the same, they have grown. Their products have improved. Their market share has grown and it continues to grow.

Some people pay more money for a Benz, and other people say Hey that's a ripoff, I can buy a Toyota that gets me to work and back, just like your expensive Benz, for half the price! What a ripoff!

Apple is not in the business of making inexpensive PCs (and accepting all of the tradeoffs therein). The trends show that more and more people are willing to spend their money on Apple products.

They are clearly doing something right.

If you are enraged by their success, perhaps you are not their target market. And that is ok.
I want to be able to create a social network without having to highly moderate everything!

No one (in the context of this debate) is asking YouTube to ban videos.
The Nintendo Switch and Labo Make Pieces of Cardboard Feel Like Magic
I don't want this to sound snark / too direct but...

Bill Gates must have some sort of formula. My sense is also, some of that formula is what he can contribute. You can't do much contributing when you're dead :)

Nothing of value is easy. And big progress / big change takes (big) time. The longer you wait the more difficult it is to move the needle.

My question is kinda like an A/B test. That is, instead of waiting til the race was over, what would the impact had been had some of this started 20 years ago?
If you're on iOS you can install content blockers... https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/purify-ad-blocking-perfected...
Show HN: Interactive Conway's Game of Life with good graphics (MIT License)
Dr. Mine – Automatic detection of in-browser cryptojacking
I wasn't really talking about the 10% savings thing, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said?

I do agree that the malware risk that current ad systems cause is bad, and it would probably be good if consumers behaved in such a way that the sort of ad systems that are a malware risk were no longer more financially viable.

However, I don't think I have any substantial objection to the style of ads on project wonderful, which do not allow embedding any extra JavaScript or anything like that, only permitting an image, a link, and a hovertext value, iirc. No tracking or malware risk there I think. Or, at least negligible risk.

If you have a proposed improvement on how to lead people who desire a product to discover that said product is available, I'd be interested in hearing it?
I know. This sort of thing is the reason I'm not a mac user anymore. Remember the old PowerMac towers? Expensive, yes, but those things were made to be opened up and upgraded.
I'm resisting googling this Hater app because reading the whole tale of Brendan reads like the greatest satire of the startup world, ever. But I'm afraid if I Google it I'll find out it isn't satire...
How ‘Fat Leonard’ Infiltrated the Navy’s Floating Headquarters in Asia
> The extraction of water beneath the lake bottom won’t last forever. The state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. When it goes into full effect, in a decade or two, more than a million acres of cropland across the valley will have to be retired.

Every time I read something like this, it just baffles me. Not only are we technologically capable of producing the water we need for aggreculture via desalination, but we also have a delivery system already in place. Instead of funneling water from northern rivers, those same systems can be filled with water sourced from the ocean.

Power can be sourced sustainably as well, as it doesn’t matter what time of day the water flows or if there are fluctuations, so long as it averages out and can be balanced in the overall system.

A project like this could not only fuel CA economy for years to come, but also make farming something that not only mega-business can sustain. As is, the finances are fairly precarious and you need serious cash flows to be able to withstand the bad years. However, we can avoid these bad years all together.
Perhaps Apple has market research indicating that most companies don't upgrade or repair these kinds of machines.
There's also a write up of the project if you scroll down. It was written with three.js and uses raymarching to create the visuals.

If you hold shift it pauses the simulation and allows you to toggle cells on/off for live experimentation—just let go of shift to resume.
> Meme-making DVR: Why can’t this exist?

Mandatory copy protection on HDMI output controlled by TV station, analog signal distorters on the crappy analog outs, and to top it off if you're using material under "fair use" that does not stop rightholders from lawsuiting you jnto bankruptcy. In addition the DVR may not be legal to sell as it may be used to strip DRM.

> Ad free YouTube: why not?

EULA violations at the very least, and if you're saying "x supports YouTube" without licensing the trademark, you're at risk of being sued.
Basically as PeterP has stated. LEAs will need a warrant. Because of liability, they probably won’t give that data up willingly.
That could be a viable path for some services. It really depends on the use-case, e.g. the kind of information being stored and how it's used.

You could have the user register by providing an email and clicking a verification link, and then optionally allow em to link third-party services. Regular account access is allowed after authenticating through any available method, but administrative actions require going through the email flow. That way you reduce the risk from a compromised or malicious third-party. Of course, this would assume that email is a good identification authority, which isn't always the case.
>> This translation is by definition not gibberish.

You have a definition of gibberish? ~.^
Sometimes I wonder if there is a class of startup founders who are basically only doing what they are doing for their own personal brand building and after a few years or whatever you become semi well known enough in tech circles to parlay that into something else or an acceptance into some b-school and go back to a real job.
Yes, it's insane. It's a lifestyle accessory.

But put in the context of _workstation_ prices -- which I guess is what it's sort of in the category of -- check out what a Sun 2 (68010) workstation cost in 1986:

"A color 2/160 with 8Mb of memory, two 71 Mb SCSI disks and 60 Mb 1/4" SCSI tape cost $48,800 (1986 US price list)."

That's $109,766.16 in today's dollars.

Or more modest and perhaps more comparable, an HP 9000 Model 705 PA-RISC workstation (32mhz, HP-UX) in 1991 was priced around $5000. That's $9000ish in today's dollars.

People bought stuff like that back then. Low volume, prestige item, specialized market, and I guess Apple must figure they will still do that now.

Workstation class machines have always been overpriced.
Less capital growth? Perhaps. But I'm suggesting that capital isnt the only measurement?

How many live is Buffet saving from X while his capital is locked up in traditional growth? Big efforts take time. Most of the low hanging fruit is gone. Starting sooner beats starting later.

Imho, of course ;)
Sorry about that, it was sad but still felt it was interesting enough so I shared it here.
As pointed out, this has been discussed before. The effect is explainable with electrostatics. As in "If you assume a net charge on a human of X and a equal polarity charge of Y being generated by the motion of the tape, a force F would be felt by a person approaching that went up with the inverse square of the distance." Simon Field has a great demo where he throws around pie plates using this effect.

The challenge arises with explaining how the charge is contained such that the opposing charge that is being attracted does not break down the insulator between it and this charge. One thought experiment that I heard at the Boston Science museum was to imagine you are inside the ball of a very large Van De Graff type generator. If you were charged to the same polarity of the outer sphere, you would be repelled by the sphere toward the center. The harder you tried to go to the edge, the more you would be repelled. And, assuming you were insulated from the sphere. By clothing or some other apparatus, there would be a point where the electrostatic repulsion would keep you from being able to touch the sphere and effectively discharge your charge into the sphere.

This only works as an explanation if the manufacturing facility was acting as the sphere, and on entering it you found your self inside that sphere and with a net charge of the same polarity.

What is most remarkable about the story, and causes many (myself included) to doubt it, is that 3M is/was a company that was famous for its core competency of taking unexpected effects and turning them into products (the post-it note story is a great example of that). Because of that competence, it is challenging to imagine that they had accidentally created something, which if understood better could potentially be the foundation of a multi-billion dollar product industry (force fields are widely sought out by people wishing to exclude access). And yet they left it as a "wow, that's funny" sort of moment? A more expected outcome would be for 3M to build an identical plant to see if they could replicate the effect and if they did, begin to instrument and remove components until they understood (and probably patented) all of the ways the field could be generated. And then decided if it was possible to make as a product or not.
(I work for Google, opinions are my own)

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046?hl=en

Google does let you delete your account. But it can take a few weeks for all the data to be really deleted (there is a recovery period, then some lag to delete everything).
Maya civilization was much vaster than known, newly discovered structures reveal
It is not about making a new Barbie doll. It is about selling something that would modify the programming of the current, actual Barbie you bought and change its behavior.
Validate email addresses before people can use your service. I lost count how many people have created accounts using my email address just because I happen to own the Gmail for my name. Banks, health records, dating sites and even students emailing me their homework thinking I am their teacher.
I had to read the comments before realising that the headline referred to the US state, not the country. Perhaps it would be useful to add (US) after the name to avoid such confusion?
It's through the gaps; it's not like a giant window you can stare at someone through. But the positioning is incredibly unfortunate.
I actually quoted a portion where they admit to the limitations of what they can determine and that there may be unknown and unknowable factors at play. So I see no reason to throw shade here.
In respect to the first quote from the article "computers could think like humans do -- using intuition rather than rules". Is this really a good description of neural networks? I don't think so, to me it sounds like a bad misrepresentation of what neural networks are by a writer who can't describe the way ai works without humanizing it inaccurately.
Keno Meechie – Hotel Party( Prod by KidKeva)
Presto generates Java bytecode which is then turned into machine code by the JVM JIT.
Candid Discussion with a Consumer Focused Venture Capitalist
Without meaning to, and without any of that I still managed to destroy a set of dimmer switches with a static shock from my finger, in winter. Boy did I feel stupid.
Earthbound had a pretty fiendish one too, with the game not only increasing the difficulty of the main game by spawning extra enemies on a pirated version, but also wiping out your save data after it deliberately crashed at the final boss fight. Given that this was a 30 odd hour RPG, god help anyone who suffered from that one.

There's also the infamous scorpion trick they did in one of the Serious Sam games too. If it detected the game was pirated, it'd load an invincible monster that could kill you in seconds and would hunt you down through much of the game. Certainly made for a memorable experience, though it may also gave a bunch of people the amusing extra challenge of trying to avoid the thing for as long as possible.
Whoa, crazy, is CDE still alive? I remember back in the day I wanted to build a GUI application, and was utterly defeated by Motif as a toolkit. I wasn't a very sophisticated programmer (I think I was like 12 or 13), but I still remember how opaque it was. Qt was a breath of fresh air!

Oddly, I still really, really, really like the aesthetic of the CDE. I think if there were a modern, HiDPI version of it, I might even use it.
Doesn't Google have tons of old backups in cold storage? Are those old database records also cleaned up?
My first dual cpu motherboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6

So that's 1999, 19 years ago. You're absolutely right.
> you are not your body, you are not your brain, you are not your genome, you are not your connectome, you are not what you eat, you are not your social network, you are not your taste in music, you are not your history

This totally reminded me of the Chuck Palahniuk quote from Fight Club: “You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

This article covered a lot of ground, I quite enjoyed it. It made me think there’s a big irony, or maybe it’s a paradox.

We need the existence of true randomness in physics in order to allow for free will. And yet willfulness is the exact opposite of randomness.
Cookbook for a self-hosted Docker Swarm cluster
Some of the harshest criticisms of Apple have been coming from diehard fans in Apple's market niche, such as Marco Arment. See: the Touch Bar, the keyboards: https://marco.org/2017/11/24/fixing-the-macbook-pro

> They are clearly doing something right.

Mac sales are down 5%.
https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/iann...

https://monoskop.org/images/7/74/Xenakis_Iannis_Formalized_M...
To restate my previous comment, the fact that you can understand a badly mangled phrase is not evidence that it's not gibberish- it's a testament to your ability to glean meaning even from gibberish.

Is a machine that produces gibberish that's not too mangled to understand better than having no translation at all? It certainly is. However, Google's hype machine will not stop there- they consistently overstate the ability of their systems, by a very large margin.

If Google was saying "look, we have a machine translation system, it's a bit shit but it gets the job done" that'd be fine. But they don't say that. They pretend their system actually solves machine translation, for real, like AlphaZero solved Go. You just have to watch the triumphant press releases that come out of Google.

For instance:

https://research.googleblog.com/2016/11/zero-shot-translatio...
It looks like outdated shit, and that makes me happy. I worked on CDE HP systems for many years, and I liked it. The fact that it looks bad now is proof that we've come a long way and that great progress has been made, hence the happiness.
It’s one of those overlooked facets of Nature. Much of the Great Plains sits on the Ogallala Aquifer. This is an underlying terrain, to depths of hundreds of meters, filled in by sediment from the Rockies (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer#General_cha...).

The greater part of the LA Basin is a floodplain which consists of hundreds of feet of sediment from the San Gabriel mountains.
Worthwhile, yes, but harder to do. Those countries have less reliable data to work with, and not such a nice sharp cutoff. Here, babies born in the winters of 43-44 and 45-46 can serve as control groups for those born in the winter of 44-45.
I guess I meant Youtube is augmenting an existing tendency within American society, rather than creating a new phenomenon out of whole cloth.
CRDTs: Distributed Semilattices (2014)
Interested in this one. Could you provide a specific example?
There's already a plethora of cheap Pi-like boards out there from various companies with gigabit ethernet that's not USB-based and other nice features, many of which have the advantage of having more established software support. If you're willing to give up features like graphics which this board also lack, you can even have a 100% open source software stack on them.
No. In fact, Rader was once considered to be a pillar of the community.
If your random number generator is pure software, it’s repeatable.

People sell hardware random number generators that are based on Geiger counters, since radiation is (as far as we know) truly random.
Doubtful. They’ve been going in this direction for a long time, and their results seem to indicate that there’s a huge market of people who just don’t care much about modularity, expandability, etc.
When you are in a sphere you feel zero net forces from the sphere.

Here is an example using gravity but electrostatic forces should operate the same way. https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/Numbers/Math/Mathematical_...

You can only feel forces if it's some other shape.
I don't know what you think is "false" about my scenario. It's fiction, but it's far more realistic than the picture you painted. Your claim that

>There are very few scenarios now where the consumer benefits from saying "no" or "less" to their doctors.

is totally off base. The primary benefit to saying "no" is avoiding damage to your health from dangerous and unnecessary treatments that American doctors have a financial incentive to sell. People in the U.S. have their life expectancy reduced every day because we, almost uniquely among developed countries, have removed nearly all limits on the cultural acceptability of medical professionals and the medical industry as a whole treating patients as sales marks rather than patients. If you would like to experience this firsthand, respond to any AdWords or TV advertisement for a medical treatment. The sleaze is limitless.

>They tend to gloss over who actually decides when a procedure isn't worth it.

Salaried civil servants with advanced degrees who have an interest in cutting through BS to protect the health of the country. If you want to reduce people like Frances Kelsey to "unelected government officials" be my guest, but you're only showing how naive you are.
Yep, many companies don't upgrade these machines and actually dump them at the end of the warranty. Hacker news actually turned me onto going to ebay to buy used workstations as a pretty good source for inexpensive computers that have Xeons. HP or Dell give you a 3 year warranty, you don't upgrade or change parts because that fucks with warranties, then you dump them onto a reseller. Or, frequently, you actually rented it from HP or Dell for those 3 years, and they are the ones dumping computers onto resellers.
Amazon wins a pair of patents for wireless wristbands that track workers
Active noise cancelling doesn’t really help with the type of noise you get from a lot of people talking in a space, and the best passive noise canceling headphones are generally not comfortable enough to wear for long periods of time.
(also work for google)

It is pretty easy to delete your account on many social networks. The following support deletion:

* Google (all account data)

* Facebook (all account data except messages that others have received)

* Reddit

* Instagram

* Snapchat (requires you to "deactivate" for 30 days)

One thing that is confusing is that many websites also have a "deactivate" feature. Some users may confuse the two and mistakenly think "deactivation" is the same as "deletion".
Web Assembly and the death of Javascript except as a compilation target
Hence the additional suggestion to

4. Allow multiple identities to link to a single user account
Elon Musk's Tesla to give solar panels and batteries to 50,000 SA homes
This was my first exposure to Unix desktop I used CDE on irix in that late 90s with Softimage for 3d animation. CDE had no bells and whistles but it enabled you to devote all your processing power to the task at hand.