skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Classical Roman Empire had a surprisingly ineffective and inefficient administrative system, even at its height. It was strongly centralized, and the Empire, even by the second century, was simply too large to manage by one person. After the Crisis of the Third Century, Diocletian essentially solved the issue by installing multiple co-emperors to divvy up the work, although this did have massive issues (turns out that having two theoretically co-equal rulers in an absolute monarchy doesn't bode well for stability).

What essentially happened from the third century through the seventh century is that the internal instability caused more and more power to be (intentionally or not) devolved to more local elites. After Christianity became the state religion, the administrative backbone of Roman Europe became the Church and not the Empire itself, which also helped to hasten the devolution. At some point, the local rulers and population would realize that they're not getting anything from Rome and they owe nothing to Rome, so why call themselves Roman? The Western Roman Empire effectively dissolved itself into nothingness, and its passing went more or less unnoticed by contemporaneous observers.

Portraying this gradual process as a concrete "fall" is somewhat problematic. There is a striking continuity on many levels. Even the polities end up being fairly stable: the Frankish kingdom eventually ended up inheriting the Western Roman Empire de facto and arguably de jure following the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Empire, while the Eastern Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire. In both cases, the administrative systems had been transformed dramatically from the traditional Roman model. That's not to say that there wasn't a severe shock, but the biggest shock would have been the loss of North Africa (the key granary supplying Rome) that created a vicious cycle of economic decline. The actual date commonly given for the fall (476) was more or less contemporaneously ignored by everybody as yet another change in the local ruler.
I've seen this sentiment many times before, and I usually respond with a variation of the following point:

If I took a book and stripped it down to the bare information, as you'd like, and then read this new information-pure skeleton, I wouldn't remember it as I would if I just read the book. I might only remember a few facts about Thomas Jefferson after reading a bio about him, but I wouldn't remember any facts if I just read the facts.

My hypothesis as to why this is true (disclaimer: this comes almost entirely from introspection):
My mind doesn't store memories like a hard drive, you have to tell it a story (so to speak) to get it to remember what you said. My mind doesn't integrate purely relational data, it integrates narrative data. Yes, an important part of a narrative is context and relational information, but another key part of it is the cadence, the spaces interleaved between the stuff we remember. Unless your point was that we actually need a new architecture for our brains, I strongly disagree, albeit on a purely anecdotal basis.
Here’s some information you might find useful.

https://tsyrklevich.net/2015/07/22/hacking-team-0day-market/
Haven't tried in production, but Janus Graph[0] supposed to be able to scale to the sizes you're describing. The another one I looked at is ArangoDB[1] but again, never used in production.

[0] http://janusgraph.org

[1] https://www.arangodb.com
It's ID cards, so it's going to have a chip or sensor that isn't powered: it'll simply grab current geolocation on swipe. It also wouldn't be usable off campus for anything the school wasn't providing.

Also since it's ID cards: when swiped the machine would be communicating back to a central server to get balance (and thus tracking) OR they're pulling it off of the card's state at the machines directly, then writing to the card where it was used and then pulling all that data when they recharge the cards. 3rd potential option being reading each machine that interacted with the cards and collating but I see that as less likely, given the wording of the article.

Any way you look at it: it's something credit card companies already do.
From a write-only perspective. If you imagine mutating operations that square might have (for example setSideLength) rectangles can satisfy them perfectly well.
Hi guys, thanks for the response. I think I will use this book for self-study and learn part that looks interesting for me.
I have used Gusto since it was Zen Payroll (for myself and my clients) and love it. In looking at this product release, I am not sure how this is different than their current product offering. Isn't this already on their Core plan, which has been available for quite a while now. What am I missing here?
Being Julian Assange
Most of the discussion I have seen focus on the evacuation of people in an hospital who predictably suffered from it with some of them dying IIRC.

Thing is, can we ask medical personal to stay? It causes a cascade of hard questions.
One of the rationalizations I use for collecting books is that, by organizing them in a certain way, I can constantly reinforce my model of the structure of certain topics. On top of that, the physical presence of certain books is intermingled with what they contain in such a way that I think it_might help retention.

That said, I've given away a ton of books lately, and plan on keeping the books I own to a minimum until I have the means to construct a really strong library, which I do think is a positive endeavor.

Also, tangentially related, does anyone have any suggestions on a good org to donate books to? I've seen one too many awesome sets of books mangled in Goodwill bins, and am looking for a new option.
I thought it was interesting the same technique (convolution) was used in two different applications: photoshop/gimp for image filters and in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). What is the purpose of convolution in CNNs?

the setosa interactive says convolution is "a technique for determining the most important portions of an image"

the hubel and wiesel experiment showed "there is a topographical map in the visual cortex that represents the visual field, where nearby cells process information from nearby visual fields. Moreover, their work determined that neurons in the visual cortex are arranged in a precise architecture. Cells with similar functions are organized into columns, tiny computational machines that relay information to a higher region of the brain, where a visual image is formed"

I'm interested in David Marr's work, about to order Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information, his level of analysis approach is interesting. I think he did work on edge detection, which must of been involved some kind of convolution/filter

This setosa interactive is great, and actually references the gimp documentation

http://setosa.io/ev/image-kernels/

An image kernel is a small matrix used to apply effects like the ones you might find in Photoshop or Gimp, such as blurring, sharpening, outlining or embossing. They're also used in machine learning for 'feature extraction', a technique for determining the most important portions of an image. In this context the process is referred to more generally as "convolution"

https://knowingneurons.com/2014/10/29/hubel-and-wiesel-the-n...

The classic experiments by Hubel and Wiesel are fundamental to our understanding of how neurons along the visual pathway extract increasingly complex information from the pattern of light cast on the retina to construct an image. For one, they showed that there is a topographical map in the visual cortex that represents the visual field, where nearby cells process information from nearby visual fields. Moreover, their work determined that neurons in the visual cortex are arranged in a precise architecture. Cells with similar functions are organized into columns, tiny computational machines that relay information to a higher region of the brain, where a visual image is formed.

https://ps.is.tuebingen.mpg.de/research_fields/inverse-graph...

Computer vision as analysis by synthesis has a long tradition and remains central to a wide class of generative methods. In this top-down approach, vision is formulated as the search for parameters of a model that is rendered to produce an image (or features of an image), which is then compared with image pixels (or features). The model can take many forms of varying realism but, when the model and rendering process are designed to produce realistic images, this process is often called inverse graphics. In a sense, the approach tries to reverse-engineer the physical process that produced an image of the world.
There is a joke inthere about economics but i cant think of it right now
Why is this hard to understand? The same technology can be used for both good and bad.

Obama used it to inform people about his polcies and get the out to vote. Trump used it to spread lies, falsehoods and half-truths. Essentially any media that was outlandish enough to become viral was promoted and promoted to hapless people who probably might have wondered why they were seeing so many distressing articles about America in "Carnage" (as Trump puts it).
I'm not sure about a lot of these suggestions. They always sound like they're aimed at a specific group of people who only collect things, and never use them. What about people who collect things, and then use them just fine?

And me reading an article is not too useful if I can't find it later.
>At the height of the peak oil panic it kind of made sense, in a “contrarian thinking” way.

I think you are underestimating how good of an option nuclear was. Going full nuclear [0] would have mitigated the single greatest environmental crisis in human history. Now we will be stuck with the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere while we were waiting for renewables to become practical.

But, its too late to fix that now. For purely economic reasons, nuclear doesn't make sense anymore; let alone the environmental and NIMBY reasons.

[0] To the extent practical. A 100% nuclear grid was likely never practical because nuclear isn't good for peaker plants.
Why Cities Boom While Towns Struggle
What matters is the host OS, not the guest.
Exactly it's confusing how they're using the word data breach like something wrong happened.
It is a brand of sea salt. Table salt is almost entirely sodium chloride, plus things like additives that help it not clump so it pours easier. If I recall correctly, the salt in question is 84 percent sodium chloride and 16 percent micronutrients and other minerals found naturally in ocean water.

My body misprocesses salt. A high salt diet is standard medical prescription. I concluded that the additives in table salt are problematic for me, in part because I misprocess some molecules and in part because I consume more salt than average, which means I consume more of the additives as well. I also concluded that misprocessing salt has various knock on effects. When the body sweats out sodium chloride at high rates, it drags other minerals with it. Those micronutrients made a big difference to me.

I no longer need that brand of salt, in part because I live near the coast and get it in the air, in part because I spent years remedying my various deficiencies and I am no longer severely deficient.

There is research that people with my condition who surf have a better prognosis. So my conclusions aren't entirely unsupported by existing research. The medical world used that research to develop a nebulized treatment. Their theory is that surfing helps because you breath salty sea air and it helps the lungs. I used it to conclude that sea salt with a variety of micronutrients made sense for me. I think it is rather silly to conclude that surfing is solely or primarily beneficial because of the air you are breathing. The condition is famous for negatively impacting lung function, but it is genetic and there is a lot more going on than lung issues.

In a nutshell, the medical world recognizes that salt is significant for my condition, but they only think quantity matters. I decided quality mattered more.
I found the site quite offputting at first. To newcomers it appears to be a typical forum, but it operates quite differently and the process of finding out is unpleasant.

I eventually started using SO daily circa 2010-2011. Now my account is idle, but 2-3 answers continuously garner reputation. Since I was last active in 2011, my rep has gone from 12k to 20. Some of my older answers are out of date (“is there an ORM for PHP like the entity framework?” from 2010 for example), and on some, people have left comments complaining about that. It’s not clear if I should update those answers, delete them, or just leave them, according to the philosophy of the site. As a casual user I have no time to keep up with or understand the way the site works and the constant changes.
Past discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5586889

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1426211
A couple videos (1st one shows "real-world" meaning of both):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQm6ZP1F6ms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3EEy8adxvc

If you look at the kernel differences, for symmetric kernels they are the same, for non-symmetric they are flipped.
Navigating on a sphere can be counterintuitive[0] (not a problem street to street in practice, but the coordinates given by GP were far enough apart to possibly exhibit the issue).

[0]: https://www.greatcirclemapper.net/en/great-circle-mapper.htm...
I don't disagree with you very much. I think Manning's heart was in the right place, and some of the material she leaked was very important. I just wish she had released the material through journalists, as Snowden did later, rather than dumping it on WikiLeaks.
> That said, do put electrical tape over the webcam and microphone

For the camera, I can see it (pun intended) as electrical tape is usually opaque to visible light. But the microphone? All electrical tape should do over the microphone is lower the input level slightly.
Zerodium is a company that tries to make things as straightforward and above-the-table as possible, but there are other publicly known companies that are willing to play ball (or roll in the mud, if you see it that way), even though they keep a low profile. Believe it or not, selling such information actually isn't illegal, even if it leaves a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.

If you're ready to cross the bridge from "providing info to companies that will likely sell it to repressive governments and surveillance agencies" to "I don't care where this goes, I just want the money under any circumstance", my understanding is that you'll end up having to do a lot of finagling, networking, and negotiating to get the information to the people who want it. I couldn't tell you much about this myself, but having known people who did some small-time floating around in the field, opportunities of the under-the-table type are pretty transient.
Perhaps corn syrup/sugar is cheaper than low-calorie alternatives, with the assumption people won't eliminate sodas, only whether they pick diet/non-diet
Casey Neistat, Asim Arshad and Peter McKinnon NEW VIDEOS
> Let's say that I live in Thailand, have US citizenship, sell products on Amazon in England, ship to France, and then advertise on Google. Who do I pay taxes to and at what rate?

You know there's a technical answer to this question. But the answer is pretty predictable : everyone.

Taxes on income in Thailand.

Taxes on income in US.

Taxes on shipping, though pretty much only in the arriving port and several places your shipment might pass (e.g. the Suez Canal)

Taxes on selling in England and France.

VAT France and England.

There are plenty of companies that can help you with this. For an extra fee, of course. And don't think for a second states will help you figure out taxes for free, or even mention/warn you that you need to do it.

Is it financially and logistically realistic for any normal sized company to do anything other than ignore the situation and fraudulently forget about taxes ? No.

What will European states do about that ? Nothing. Well, unless you count utterly destroying a few unlucky token merchants.
Maybe browsers should just understand Markdown. Cut out the middleman.
This seems to me to be a major revelation: police in North Carolina have successfully requested Google account information on all phones near a crime scene. While Google routinely responds to search warrants, this is a much broader type of data request.
> end up addicts for life

This is an archaic idea, you sound like an older individual. Am I right on that?

> reddit-tier pseudoscience... downvoted to hell

We can test for ADHD just like we do breast cancer.

> medication is often a crime... ADHD [is an] evolutionary trait... What a load of bullshit

Impulsivity is a sin, right? I'm not some puppet for your chuch, pal.
CF I presume? (none of my business of course, but me too)
Review of Data and Reality 3rd Edition (2012)
I can’t wait for the cult of alcohol to go the way of the cult of tobacco. Away.

The ads of yore about “most doctors prefer Camel” look alien today, yet the “moderate drinking is helpful” stuff is still with us.
https://pics.me.me/our-blessed-homeland-their-barbarous-wast...
Why is that not a proper address?
It wasn't a breach as we know it.

Basically FB gave the data away. Apps have access to the data but they're not allowed to give/sell it to third parties. In this case the rules were ignored. Probably many other companies with API access have also ignored the rules. In this case FB didn't make much of an effort at all to prevent it from happening so it's reasonable to assume the practice is rampant. There's likely many copies of large parts of FB data out there (left on laptops on trains or on unprotected FTP/HTTP servers, etc.).

It's a 'breach' from the users' perspective.
WhatsApp group description feature available for Android and iOS
Yes. My official dx is atypical CF. My condition is relatively mild in comparison to classical CF, but otherwise follows the same pattern of issues.
Whatsapp Chat Watch Monitoring
The company hardly shut its doors after Jobs died. They're pulling in over $200 billion a year, after all.
Surely life expectancy is an average across a population. So that some people may die much earlier whilst the majority live to an old age. I would rather know the specifics of what may kill me, and decide from that.
This ignores evidence that ADHD is not a rigorous diagnosis. Even the CDC map shows that educational institutions that are more authoritarian report far higher cases.

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/prevalence.html

Attention is earned from students, not allocated by adults.
Then you will love blinkist.com, they summarize nonfiction book so that you can read or listen to them in 15 minutes.

But you might find that as other commentators point out, without the original packaging, although the summarized book contains all of the insights of the original, it is hard to retain the information.
When the glass starts resonating, it should start prouducing sound too, so you should be able to hear two frequencies as you get close to the right frequency — I think. (Not a sound expert either)
The author says we shouldn't keep books, we should assimilate books into our model of the world, and then dispense with the book. To an approximation, I agree. I also agree with the idea that sometimes collecting books and bookmarks can lead to a false sense of satiety with our intellectual progress.

I disagree with his point that notes actually do represent assimilated information in a way that the books themselves don't. Notes might guarantee a certain level of assimilation, but they don't qualify as "knowledge" in the way the author maintains. There's other good reasons to keep notes, but not because they're more a part of your knowledge base than the book itself.
I agree with you, my intent was getting some knowledge before talking to finance and legal people, so we can prepare and ask them right questions.
> The thing that ends up breaking in the squares and rectangles examples is mutability.

Mutability isn't sufficient.

Breakage requires more than mutability. In dynamic languages, a mutated object can retract its squareness (smalltalk `become`; javascript __proto__ assignment; python object self-mutation). And predicate types (it's a Square iff its sides are the same length) are even graceful.

So I'd rephrase that as "if a specific implementation can mutate in ways that invalidate the laws expected of it, and you can't mutate the laws expected of it to match, your implementation might not match expectations". "Might not", because relaxed and pruned expectations may be locally sufficient.
> It’s not clear if I should update those answers, delete them, or just leave them, according to the philosophy of the site.

Ideally SO would like you to keep the context of an answer up-to-date, such that they aren't actively misleading, for example by giving dates or version numbers and pointing out if things have changed. If you want to recommend an entirely different approach, I believe there's a mild preference to writing a new answer.
And taxing revenue punishes economic activity per se. For small firms, it will force them out of business, and only high margin ones will remain (as explained).

In other words, for the 2/3rds or so of the economy that is small and medium businesses this will be a tax on having economic activity at all. That's why it'll never fly (or should I say never be enforced).

And don't worry, as usual, for large businesses there's an easy way out : simply don't transact in money. Then negotiate what the value is of the transaction with the tax department. For instance, buy Disney Club 33 access for all executives and their family in trade for 10% cheaper plumbing for the park. Do huge transactions for suspiciously low monetary value, and they won't get counted in revenue, or only partially. Problem solved.

In case people doubt that such negotiation works, I would like to point out that the most powerful man in Europe, the president of the European commission, Jean Claude Juncker, got where he is by negotiating preferential tax deals with large international corporations. I'd say for years, but the guy is no spring chicken. For decades.

All taxes that are less than 100% enforced (all of them, but these revenue taxes are a particularly bad example. Utterly unrealistic to do this for small businesses) are a tax on honesty. Thing is, you can't have global supply chains without "taxing honesty". And without global supply chains, you won't get an iPad.
It's pretty much the same reason why databases use B-trees and not binary trees --- when you have to consider the nonuniform latency of storage access, traditional algorithmic analysis that assumes every memory address is accessible in the same time as any other becomes extremely misleading.
The EU will block your service's access into the EU market. That's their only possible next recourse if you simply ignore them and stay out of their jurisdiction physically (in a scenario where you continue to sell to EU customers, but refuse to abide by their policies such as this tax). They'll also go after the payments side, they'll try to shut off your ability to get the payments from EU customers.

Going down the roads that the EU is toward further centralized bureaucratic control over the Internet, they have to build their own version of the Chinese firewall to control EU Internet access eventually. There can be no other possibility if they plan to see this path through to its logical conclusion.