skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found immediately ironic that I was reading a post about how Google values the user so much that they built Chrome, a browser that gets out of your way and gives more of your screen over to the websites you are viewing but the site where this article is posted covers half my screen with site-navigation chrome that is 80% whitespace and that pops in and out semi-unpredictably. Sigh.
What a great problem to have!
WhatsApp Pay Launches in India
Great thoughts. Remote companies are async by nature, and Slack goes against that. It means that people need to be always on to get the benefits of Slack - which is silly, you'd rather focus on actual work and let people get back to you when they're ready to.

> A good alternative to Slack would be a Reddit-like interface with threads and an asynchronous model.

You're describing Twist -- twistapp.com.
I disagree. I think there are many minds that would be capable of what these people did (not everyone, certainly not myself, but thousands of people alive today).

It is a case of having the right person in the right place at the right time, Einstein would have not had his theories had he been around 20 years earlier, or if he had not had the opportunities that he did. And if he had not been around then I think it would have been others. It is about the environment, Calculus was developed by two people simultaneously.

As to why we haven't had someone who has done this, well who's to say that we haven't and they are just overlooked? Or that greater capital expenditure it has to be groups of people (finding DNA, cloning, Graphene, etc). Or that there has simply not been the right environment.
Bill and Melinda Gates answer 'tough questions' in annual letter
This is essentially an argument against altruism.
That's one cynical tour de force of western education in nutshell. Well done sir. Perhaps - the whole truth is a bit more nuanced? Could it be, that the tenents of professional management have seeped through society because people believe they must know what they are doing since they are professionals. Leading to overgrowth of industrial processes. Thus it is not the intent of the system design but merely the end result of looking it through the industrialists cold calculating lense (i.e. professional management) and using their toolkit?

If all you have is a hammer -, etc.
A contrary opinion based on experience - instead of focusing so much on how bad the code is take the time to get to know your coworkers better. Talk with your manager and the business leaders about the business. Learn more about the business you are in and how your code makes an impact to that business. At the end of the day the goal is not to produce clean code. It's to make your company successful.

I'm not saying code quality doesn't matter, of course it does. But there is a bigger picture and if you don't take the time to become a part of that you will not be very relevant.
Most of what people call "artificial intelligence" today is machine learning, neural networks, things like that.

Norvig's book is more about the "old A.I." or symbolic AI, which many people felt crowded out neural networks in the old days, but then itself kinda faded relative to other things.

In the early 1980s, for instance, there were games like Zork with a natural language interface. Graphical user interfaces and menus really displaced that, then 3-d came along so that graphical video games are much better than they were in 1980, text games not so much.

The "expert systems" technology has been rebranded as "business rules"; your bank almost certainly has at least one license for IBM iLog and there many products such as Drools, Microsoft BizTalk, etc. That technology is also good for "complex event processing" and it may someday be seen as a rosetta stone for solving the problems of orchestrating asynchronous communication. (It is very good for combining automated and manual processes such as "send this to the loan office for approval")

Other areas in symbolic A.I. research are still active such as constraint programming, SAT solvers, semantic web, etc. They don't get as much press as deep networks. Problems such as route optimization, production scheduling, etc. all involve search processes similar to what is done in computer chess. "NP Complete" problems frequently are involved in "artificial intelligence".

Also many things that were once considered "A.I." are now mundane. For instance, the technology now used to create lexers and parsers for artificial languages was originally designed to model natural languages. Most of the features of LISP have made it into other programming languages such as Python, BASIC, TCL, Java, Haskell, FORTH, etc.

Symbolic A.I. did not die out, but it did fracture in many different directions so that it doesn't really seem like "one field".
If it worked for a year without bugs, then it's not garbage.

Did it work? Can you read and understand it? Then it has value.
Totally. (Parent here, checking in..)

My kids get very limited screen time, and are expected to fill their life with art and activity that does not involve, at least not directly, cheap electrons. Expected, because its what we, their parents do by way of example.

And I'm damn proud of my kids now. They're the ones pointing out how their high-school is taken over by mobile-phone-zombies, utterly un-interesting and useless peers.

So, yeah. Its an epidemic. Kids don't need technology. It has been so for thousands of years, and I truly believe in an event horizon where there are limits to how involved in 'the next great thing' kids should be allowed be, and to engage.

I'm all for using computers productively. I'm not cool with 20 kids standing at the train station not talking to each other, not standing on the right side of the yellow line, not paying attention to the train that is about to push them off the platform, just so they can push a few pixels around. This is junkie dystopia, people.
Ah another prediction post. I've been mulling over a public accountability ledger (AAAS anyone?) for a time now.

The idea formed while reading The Motley Fool "analysts" make arguments for or against a certain position. As I began to read regularly I started to trust certain authors and ignore others, yet I was filtering on how much I agreed with their arguments instead of how often their predictions were correct.

Enter a service that records public predictions then verifies them X days/months/years later, keeping track of some metric like a "correctness score" for each predictor. Could be an interesting, tech-light side project.
Improvements on type handling with the latest Swiftifty ObjC to Swift converter
One of the hardest parts of automatic conversion of code is the loss of context. The latest release of the [Swiftify Converter](https://objectivec2swift.com/#/converter) has made some great improvements when handling types that were not certain in the context of the conversion.

Take a look at this code sample! https://objectivec2swift.com/#/converter/code/d8k7r8/4

Try it:

* [Online](https://objectivec2swift.com/#/converter)
* [In Xcode](https://objectivec2swift.com/#/xcode-extension/)
* [In Finder](https://objectivec2swift.com/#/xcode-extension/)
* [In AppCode](https://objectivec2swift.com/#/appcode-plugin/)
* [Advanced Project Converter](https://medium.com/swiftify/converting-your-project-to-swift-with-swiftifys-advanced-project-converter-b9eb051ae504)

Thanks for reading. I'm really excited to hear your feedback.
How does this not violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Unless the explanation is that the atom moves around a lot in that tiny space, so we haven't actually determined its exact position and momentum.
Curbed NY: 5 Pointz graffiti artists awarded $6.7M by federal judge
Curbed NY: 5 Pointz graffiti artists awarded $6.7M by federal judge. https://ny.curbed.com/2018/2/12/17005324/5-pointz-lawsuit-graffiti-artist-settlement
The NBA's Wine Society
I whole-heartedly agree with you. I’ve been restricted on HN for much less. My posts are always respectful and encourage productive dialogue, yet I believe I’m perceived as a troll because I’m direct or maybe aggressive. Again, I’m never disrespectful but I’m willing to directly challenge incorrect thinking, you can check my history for yourself.

The regulation on style instead of substance on this site really make me question their commitment to intellectual / productive conversation.

Sometimes I wonder how long someone like Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, or Theo de Raadt would last on this site. I don’t think very long. A site that would ban the most influential hackers of our day simply for bad etiquette doesn’t really seem like a site for hackers.
My kids are in school doing common core and that's not what it's like at all. They do worksheets around learning specific small-bore topics, but otherwise do a ton of book reading and long-form writing assignments. Unless you have a cite, I don't think you're representing what the people in this article are talking about.
>if we forced some liability on companies for what the software they sell does, that would change a lot of things fairly quickly.

Absolutely that would change things, especially the cost of software.
Ethical use of browser based cryptocurrency mining
Giving the winnings in a cryptocurrency would both preserve anonymity (pseudonymity?) and permit audit of the winnings.
Saving to my feed for later use. Thanks
> She can't do that either.

But, why? Because she accidentally signed the ticket before realizing that it invalidated that option? She holds the winning ticket, just let her redact her signature from it legitimately and claim her winnings.
What does this have to do with a real estate sale 10 years ago?
But he isn't being paid for being 1% faster .... he is being paid because he is the FASTEST. It doesn't matter if he was 0.5% faster, 10% faster, or any other percentage. It matters that he is the FASTEST. That's the label that draws people's attention, not the 1% incremental faster-ness. =)
It seems to me that it's irrelevant if you agree with Google's Ad Strategy or not. The problem is that Google gets to make the choices, they are now in a position to decide, via the proxy of Better Ads, whats allowed on the "Open Web". IMHO, this is just one more step in a less-open Internet.
What if instead of adding a soda bottle, they recognize there's a soda bottle in your friends' posts already and bump those images up in your feed?
The weather is much better east of the Cascades. But a 2 hour drive (in good weather!) means it's not something you're likely to do all that often.
But they are supposed to account for your orders and not just bill you out of thin air, right? So what is so cumbersome of keeping track of the orders. It is literally biggest part of their job - taking an order and remembering correctly who ordered what.
Ah, it must just be the route I am on then. That is unfortunate. They don't even have screens.
@vinrob92 - This is great of you to put this discount code here. I am strongly tempted, but it is unclear on the website what the value proposition of the "premium" service is. Looking side by side, it just appears to add "logo, branding, and illustrations" to the basic plan. But wouldn't that fall under "graphic design" in the basic plan? Can you explain here what "premium" means in your service offering?
Well, they essentially copied the look of the BMW 1 series. Too bad BMW is giving up on the sports pedigree of the 1 series by switching to a FWD base.
In order to have torrents, someone has to buy the DVD or BluRay. If fewer people are buying that stuff, there are fewer torrents. Could be a factor? Only takes one person though for a given movie.

There is a trend now that the encodings are larger. A 110 minute movie can be anywhere from 5 to 10 gigabytes or more in full high def. Sometimes you can find newer movies in smaller sizes; sometimes not.

Downloading and storing that is inconvenient compared to streaming. It takes longer; less powerful mobile devices don't decode the large stuff very well; you may get skipping if you happen to view these huge downloads over shitty Wi-Fi in a crammed airspace.

An 0.8 to 1.5 gig download is still a reasonable alternative to streaming.

I was traveling back in January and crammed 16 movies into as many gigs of free space on the 32 gig SD card on my tablet for watching on planes and in hotel rooms. I did that by running almost each one of them through ffmpeg to get the bitrate down. In some cases I tweaked the resolution. In one or two of them, I re-coded the audio to a lower bit rate (256 kbps to 128: it wasn't a musical movie, WTF!) Almost no perceptible loss of quality; all perfectly watchable.

Pain in the butt to do that, though!

Basically, I have this theorem that two hours of a perfectly watchable movie with good sound do not require more than around 1.5 gigs of H265+AAC data. When I see larger sizes, I tend to become kind of reluctant to pull the download trigger.
All it takes for a 22 year old to write invasive ad tracking code, VPNs that spy on users, deceptive interfaces that steal tips or addict users, is around $150k combined compensation.

Can we stop pretending we (~tech/software) are superior to other industries? We are as bad if not worse then finance, big oil, etc.
AFAICT firefox does that when it starts causing problems for the page, and causing unresponsiveness, but not just for processor spikes.
Poppy Robotics Project
> Google Photos is far and away the best photo product for me

This statement intrigued me a bit, so I decided to check out what Google Photos is (sorry, you have so many products and change them so quickly I'm not keeping up anymore). So it looks like a refurbished version of Picasa. I understand why someone would like to use it, but I also know why neither me nor many of my friends will ever use it: since we're forced to use Google services almost everywhere, every instance when we don't is a small win. For a growing number of people reducing dependency on Google is of paramount importance.
Being able to take half a billion dollars of free money anonymously and safely is hardly a right.

This is such a loaded statement, in multiple ways, that I don't know where to start.
Outdoorsy, the ‘Airbnb of RVs,’ rolls up $25M in fresh funding
The lottery works because people are driven by hope and are bad at (or don't care about) math. No one goes around verifying that the people who won the lottery actually get their money.

Why would fraud be inevitable if you were allowed to form an anonymous trust before claiming your winnings? You still have to produce the winning ticket. What new vector for fraud does this open up? If the people running the lottery are corrupt, it wouldn't seem they need to use anonymous trusts to siphon off money.
Well that's ... kind of the point, isn't it? If they're not going to be compliant and respect our privacy, or even if they kind of would like to be sort of privacy-respecting in a sense except that their business model precludes them from actually being able to be compliant however since business models are rather subject to change especially with the SV "get venture capital and break stuff" mentality, such that even the "in a sense" part is exceedingly likely to become unjustifiably cost-inefficient as soon as the business gets big enough to believe they can get away with it (like, you know, Facebook, Google, etc), ... then, good riddance, right?

I mean, just because a company believes they can claim to "respect your privacy" without actually being compliant to the EU regulations specifying they should do such, let's call it a cultural difference then.
So you have no problem providing subservience when asked by a bureaucrat?
It's really really hard to avoid moderators to turn into little desk despots with the passage of time. I don't have the answer, save getting really emphatic and patient persons to manage this cases.
They should have given him a 2nd chance after explaining the reasons behind the first penalization, instead of that, they required subservience.
> Google could try to support itself by selling something, besides advertising.

what could they possibly sell that would even come close to replacing ad revenue?
Looks like they're trying to get for free, all that information your ISP is collecting about every website you visit, that the FCC gave the go ahead to resell. While also cutting the ISPs out of the equation.

https://gizmodo.com/do-not-i-repeat-do-not-download-onavo-fa...
Depends on the age.

I avoid/restrict almost all screen time for my almost 6 year old. Why? There is unlimited content and you can essentially never get bored, which means you don't need to think about what you want to do.

In my experience kids are the happiest in self-directed play.

Once they've learned self-control/having balance (which not even most adults can handle), then I have no problems introducing technology.

Technology is fine if used as a tool, but for me, has no part in entertainment for my kids (up to a certain age)
One thing to try, especially with Glucose: turn off the preprocessing. The preprocessing seems to help with really "hard" instances like you see in SAT competitions, but takes time and doesn't really help with simpler ones.

We use SAT solvers extensively in the Phil[0] crossword construction tool, to figure out when the grid is overconstrained, and which letters have only a single value in all possible solutions. We ended up running Glucose (compiled to wasm and running in the browser) because the simpler solvers couldn't solve many instances quickly, and with preprocessing off but most other parameters at their defaults. I didn't do a careful evaluation of all solvers, but it might be interesting.

I really need to write this stuff up.

[0]: https://github.com/keiranking/Phil
I've found this animated page to be the most useful in terms of understanding how they work at a glance:

https://www.jasondavies.com/animated-bezier/
A fascinating story!
This has never been a goal of the Department of State - only the excuse.
Indeed, there is a problem with the "they choose to do it" argument: namely that if enough clueless people around you choose something that you don't want, the choice may be foisted upon you by social forces.
It's all anekdata, but I never had this problem in US restaurants. Even at bigger gatherings when kids will sit together with other kids at the other end of a table, it is never a problem to pay for your spouse and that kid in a red shirt. After all, that's why they charge mandatory tips on bigger parties.
Someone without 2FA might check their email on that system. Their bank might send them email...
And the site he's helped build based on the technique:

http://www.readingbear.org/
I attended the ARinAction summit earlier this month, and heard an interesting tidbit from the MIT Media Lab's Pattie Maes: She requires new students joining her program to watch Black Mirror (1).

In contrast, when I attended business school one of the models held up to us in the very first week was the team at Harrah's who designed a loyalty program for frequent gamblers (2). I remember one of the professors or someone in a video interview we watched crowing, "it was like printing money."

Neither the case nor the instructor had anything to say about the fact that this was basically a technology-driven scheme to extract as much money as possible from members of the public, including gambling addicts and other vulnerable populations. The "big question" at the conclusion of the case reads:

When asked about the company’s long-term vision for its RM system, a member of Harrah’s RM team became thoughtful for a moment. He responded that, while all of the near and longer-term developments described above were critical, he thought there was one important aspect of all RM systems that needed further development. "What I’d really like to know — and I pose this as a question for researchers in revenue management — is how to integrate information about price elasticity into these systems. Clearly, changes in price affect the level of demand we experience. However, none of the systems we are familiar with capture this effect."

1. https://theoutline.com/post/3167/black-mirror-mit-class?zd=4...

2. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/ited.1090.003...
Just a quick update: Thank you for using it and playing around with it. Looking at the usage and results I found a quite a lot of things to improve. Which is great, since it's hard to develop something like this without real usage data.
Certain elite grad program dept's might have best-in-world knowledge in a particular niche e.g. ETH Zurich has these acrobatic indoor drones better than even NASA / US Military / Boeing right now. If I were doing a make or break indoor drone startup, it might be worth it to pay a fresh grad to clone his research environment in my company; an aqui-hire of sorts. This escalates when two mega corps, like say Alphabet and Apple fund competing indoor drone companies at the same time.

I think self-driving tech has matured past this phase where a only few key university dept's have most of the intellectual capital, but I still here mid-200k figures for freshly minted PhD's from the right school.
With respect, this does not answer my question: are you a biologist?
Manufacturing a false winning ticket would be a sure route not to get paid.
Terms of services are not laws.

People mistake them for absolute laws but they can be challenged and many of them are not even enforceable.
I agree, but it seems to me that being dragged down by technical debt is massively more common in our industry than missing important deals because of excessive emphasis on clean code?
Seriously? They most certainly already do.

Which is why stuff like nudity and swearing is almost never shown on basic cable (advertising sponsored) but is shown on premium channels such as HBO which don't rely as much on advertising. Then every couple years we have people who get fired from TV or have their shows cancelled after advertisers pull out due to some controversy surrounding them.

Soap operas got their name by originally being sponsored by soap companies.

Then there's the advertisers that suspended YouTube ads after Elsagate, which prompted YouTube to clean up and ban certain content and channels, including one of it's top 100 channels Toy Freaks.

And, yes, some political opinions are simply bad business, which is why we don't see them on TV.

This isn't new, this has been the way the world works since the beginning of humanity.
Do you have to do anything special to load it all into the cache or is that just something that would happen by default?
Enterprise Sales Guide: Hiring playbook to source, onboard and interview
> Their incentives mesh with mine

If that were the case Chrome's disruptive ad blocker would have been released shortly after the rise of flash ads

If that were the case I would be able to completely opt out of tracking and accept slightly less targeted ads

We could go on and on here. Suffice to say I do not believe Google's incentives align with most on the web any more.
Because you might want to see some emails, but not the selection that FB deems important.
This is what Chinese lottery winners do :)

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%BD%A9%E7%A5%A8%E9%A2%86%...
Self-Hacking a Permanent Treatment for Lactose Intolerance Using Gene Therapy
Not exactly, it is advised by the lottery office to immediately sign your ticket. Otherwise it may create a lot of unnecessary troubles, like your ticket is lost, robbed, or some friend claims you had verbal agreement on splitting the rewards, etc.
It’s “fixed” in that the PM decided to gaslight everyone on that thread by claiming pointer events are what people are asking for.

It’s not. People want working scroll/wheel/touch events. They think the entire web dev world is going to rewrite stuff to support like < 5% of 3.86% of web users. Good luck with that.

Funny how Chrome supports the exact functionality they keep claiming is impossible to support.

Note also that there’s no way to detect Edge with working events vs Edge with a precision trackpad where events aren’t dispatched to the DOM.

God this bug makes me angry.