skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Each of these bullet points is either false or meaningless, which is frustrating because I sort of want to agree with your main point, but I just can't when it's phrased like this.

China obviously utilizes currency and a (very) limited free market. There has never been an alignment between wealth and social value, nor should there be. Yes, wealth creates inequality in the United States (in particular) and other more free-market oriented countries. Some of those countries (particularly Scandinavian ones) have taken great pains to see that actual suffering due to wealth inequality is minimized. The United States is culturally behind in this regard, but equating wealth with an explicit citizenship score is absurd.

Intelligence agencies do not keep security risk scores for every citizen (what country are you talking about, anyway?). I would wager at 10:1 odds that I don't have a profile at the FBI, CIA, or NSA in the United States (to be concrete). Even if they did (they don't) there are no legal uses of such a score, and any attempt to institutionalize something like that would have people rioting in the streets (literally). If I wanted to discover whether or not I had a "score" I would file a FOIA claim for each of those institutions.

Credit ratings are heavily regulated in the United States. Not as well as they could be, but see the Fair Credit Reporting Act from 1970 for a start. Credit reporting agencies are required to be transparent about the sources of their decisions, and hopefully we'll continue to make the system more predictable and humane. The uses of credit ratings are generally limited to situations where having a history of default is important information to a lender or renter. The colleges you applied to didn't, and won't, use your credit score.

Please try to communicate using specifics.
In addition to what direfungasaur said about helping cut through political issues in a company, bringing in outside analysis can help for a couple of additional reasons. One is that individuals employees can be wrong. A change that engineers have been asking for might seem ok, but in actuality would destroy margins or otherwise be detrimental to the company as a whole if you look at broader information that might not be available to the engineers. Another reason is that if a company gets to the point where it's even considering bringing in outside help, it likely has a large number of issues that need to be prioritized. The one that a few employees have been making noise about might already be well-acknowledged, but is way down the list of Big Problems.

That's the "good case" anyway. In actuality, management consultants (the kind you're referring to) are usually brought in so someone can cover their ass and say "look, the smart, expensive people said we should do X!" regardless of whether or not X was a difficult solution to figure out.
> one would think that today we would be making enormous progress every day

Actually, we are. Back in the day, I would have given long odds against seeing autonomous cars on the road in my lifetime. Notwithstanding the odd mishap, today's autonomous vehicles actually work much better than I would have thought possible.

> And what do i use my phone for? check email and read HN.

What's wrong with that? Add wikipedia to that list and put a slightly different spin on it: today you can carry around the equivalent of an entire library in your pocket. That seems like progress to me. When I was a kid, you had to actually (imagine this) PHYSICALLY GO TO A LIBRARY in order to do any kind of research. If you didn't live close to a good library you were SOL. Today anyone can access more high-quality information than they can possibly consume from anywhere for a few hundred bucks. It's a revolution bigger than the invention of the printing press.

It's true that society doesn't seem to be making very effective use of this new super power. But that doesn't make it any less of a super power.
I really liked the tile aspect of the Windows Phone home screen. Being able to resize the tiles and then get various levels of contextual information based on the size of the tile was pretty rad, and I haven't seen anything like it since.
I never owned one and regret it: the couple of times I played around with those Lumias etc I was pretty impressed, for reasons metnioned in the article, and the article mentions even more things I didn't know. The whole thing felt 'fresh'. Not unlike the competition, but doing certain things different and actually better. Also I don't care about many apps, so WP would probably have been perfect for me.
Not just less food - they produced less heat. A mammal the size of a dinosaur would not have enough surface area to get rid of the internally-produced heat.
No. At least not yet. Rolling aggregations are broken in InfluxDB aswell.
As somebody who writes code for games for a living, I found this article fascinating. Something that was coming up in my mind again and again as I was reading through it is the question of who has the power to affect the necessary changes. That seems to be the crux of a lot of the issues; is the studio leadership wrongminded, or have they put the wrong people at the gate?

The parable of the producer ignoring engineering specialities when assigning tickets seemed especially gregarious. Why was that person unable to learn, even after the engineers raised the issue? Why were they still there? Were they friendly with the higher-ups, or what? Why was there no will to improve the process until external help had to be brought on?

It also reminds me of stories I had heard from inside Microsoft in the pre-Nadella era. Tales of power brokers and entrenched lifers who could make things easy or impossible on a whim. What is the nature of the organisations that allow people like these to take root?

It's funny how small scale engineering problems are rooted in code and large scale engineering problems are rooted in people.
Did nobody read the article? There was an experiment done in 2003 that showed that no, newly-sighted individuals cannot distinguish objects based on existing tactile knowledge.
Show HN: Validation Framework for .NET Framework
"Above one's pay grade" is a colloquialism

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/colloquialism
My Lumia 925 is still the best phone I’ve ever owned. But MS killed itnfor themselves.

Windows Phones were kinda big in Asia. Used to see lots of people in Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand, with them all the time. But the high end phones never came to these markets. People I worked with wanted all the new phones but MS didn’t release them in Singapore for over 12 months. People gave up and went android and iOS.

I went Android then iOS. There’s a lot I miss about windows phone. And Poki is still hands down the best pocket reader app.
> The problem isn’t that the content exists- it’s that google surfaces it.

Removing it at the source removes it from google.

It's like saying the problem isn't that there is a negative story about you in The New York Times from 2007, the problem is that ISPs allow their customers to read that story in The New York Times. Obviously the "problem" is the story -- which you may have no legitimate right to prevent people from reading -- and if you have a legitimate complaint (i.e. libel) then you should have to take it up with The New York Times and not Comcast or Google.

The reason people want to go to Google instead is that they know Google doesn't have a strong enough incentive to stand up for the victim of the censorship. If you go to the source they may refuse to take it down and force you to adjudicate the matter in court where they can argue their side in front of a judge. If you go to Google, economically they have to take it down because nobody is paying them to hire lawyers to spend the hours it takes to make accurate legal determinations and they would go out of business taking on that role without compensation for seven billion people.
The only things i liked about Windows Phone were the menu/launcher and the keyboard. Firstly the keyboard was the most accurate swiping input keyboard i have ever used, to this this day. The second is that the Windows tiles and list just make so much sense, surprisingly especially on a 7-8" tablet. Have even put the MS Launcher onto my Blackberry DTEK60 and thoroughly enjoyed that experience.
A great list of science books written by women
Facebook suspends AIQ data firm used by Vote Leave in Brexit campaign
Jumped on Windows phone back when Microsoft started throwing in the towel (some of those sales were just too hard to resist). I know at some point I'll need to leave (probably back to Android), but for now my Win 10m idol 4s is holding up.
Saying a feature of database that validates the data inside a database is dangerous is very much like saying seatbelts are dangerous because you can drawn. Anything can be misused, but there is a clear use case, because an ACID database provides a whole transactional, reliable and coherent application that can enforce rules no other layer in the system can, unless it reimplements the entire DB with sql validation and type checking.
I feel like Microsoft has a string of devices which could have been good to great, and they keep just missing the mark somehow - windows phone, ms band, surface hub, heck even zune was as good as an ipod at a lower price point.

Not sure why they keep dropping the ball, lack of focus? Not willing to stay the course? I get dropping zune as the market had moved on, but band was getting good reviews when they dropped it and wearables are still growing. And for the life of me I don't understand why they don't have a motto of a hub in every college class - that device is so perfect for facilitating remote class attendance.
While Musks companies do impressive things, there also is a lot of polarizing stuff that seems overdone: overconfident marketing for the "Autopilot", bashing the car industry as being incompetent while failing to get their own production up, Musk bubbling on Twitter about "direct democracy on Mars" while fighting organization among his own employees, ...

It's pushing the hype with often little basis, which is guaranteed to create dislike from people disagreeing. It's very different from bashing mistakes IMHO.
> I would never let a job get in the way of family and social experiences, in the way of my life.

For some people there is little choice. I have a limited mental budget for social experiences. Spending 40hr/week at the office already over-extends this budget, resulting in no social life whatsoever.
As long as there are marginal gains to be made from working an extra hour I don't see this changing. Imagine if one country decided to change from a 40 hour work week to a 20 hour work week. If this decreases their GDP from producing less output, then they become economically weaker, their standard of living in terms of purchasing power is diminished, and the tax base is decreased. I think the biggest reason we don't see more leisure time is the same reason wild animals don't see much leisure time: competition. At the international level, countries which produce more are more powerful, and at the domestic level other things being equal an individual who produces more will command a higher income, which translates to gaining a bigger slice of the economic pie and the additional power that confers. I suspect many of the people on hacker news could easily live on half the income they make, but we choose not to, because we prefer the extra affordances of working full time or more.
It's borderline, but still makes perfect sense. In academia, more seasoned professors generally fall into a higher pay grade. Hence he's argued with people that in theory have more experience than he (or she).
Just visit a football (soccer) game and join the local fan block and "Ultras" of a team. It's really powerful if everybody around you is chanting or into some kind of choreography.
Is it dehumanizing when I decline a ride with an Uber driver that has 3 stars?
I purchased a $30 Windows Phone well after the platform was dead, I just wanted to experience it before it was gone.

For a $30 phone, it was incredibly fast and smooth. The tile interface worked well (particularly information dense relative to notification dots/counts on icons we're seeing now), the onscreen keyboard is the best I've ever used (even to this day), and the way updates were delivered (direct from Microsoft, not the network operator or OEM) was a breath of fresh air from Android.

As anyone and everyone will tell you, lack of apps killed it. In no small part because Google was using their market position to squish it (yes, I appreciate the irony). Google didn't produce Windows Phone apps, which they're entitled to not do, but then Microsoft tried to make apps for Google's services[0] which Google also shut down.

Makes you wonder what would happen if Google pulled all of their iOS apps tomorrow, and then blocked third parties/diminished the mobile browser experience on purpose.

[0] https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/google-to-microsoft-kill-...
Feynman about the difference between knowing the name and knowing something
The difference is that you can criticize the government and not be thrown in jail. You have a lot more autonomy in your opinions on how you are governed. You can have his conversation at all!
Yeah, I use nonsensical and offensive strings like: YourMothersD1rtyPu55yColored

Lol, well not that exactly, but you get the idea O|-) </Cylon Angel>
Ah, Palm. I had a few of their Treo series and loved them. In 2002 I had the Internet on my phone! I had email! I had apps! The user experience was clunky compared to what came later, but it was amazing for its day.

WebOS was a good try, but too little and too late. They had a 6-year lead on Apple and they blew it. I happened to run across some former Palm people years later and I was told that PalmOS had stacked up so much technical debt that innovation was very slow.

It's funny how much people today believe that the iPhone was the first smartphone.
Vscode-snippets: Maintain your version-controlled snippet library for VSCode
A video of her full talk is available here: https://www.facebook.com/harvardmuseumsofscienceandculture/v...
Lebron held off by 76ers with Cavs 132 – 130 for 13th straight win
Flipping through a paper note book takes seconds.

Given the timeframes, suspended laptops will have flat batteries. Timeframe is now several minutes just to find the charger, plug in and power on.

One of these can occur simply by accident depending on how you pick it up. The other requires wilful actions.

Levels of effort / concern for privacy are exponentially different.
Native vs. Web in China
They can apply this same system to outsiders too as long as they can buy or gather the data.

They could then use this inside of countries other than China, where they own increasing numbers of business interests including employers.

So this will start affecting behaviors even of non-Chinese people as people anticipate their behavior getting put into the system at some date in the future. Even if the system isn’t in place here yet.

It’s like a preview version of the immortal dictator Elon Musk talks about in the new “Do You Trust This Computer” movie.
I'm of the opinion that the root of the problem is inflation (but I'm open to correction).

My thinking is that we're constantly being pushed to work harder because no business today can reach a successful steady-state -- it must keep growing. The reason businesses must keep growing is that investors demand it. Investors demand it because they believe that wealth sitting around not making more wealth is a waste. Inflation, I believe, is a big component of this view. What would happen if we keep inflation near-zero? Is slow growth really a bad thing?
My office recently moved across town so I started going in early to beat traffic. I also started leaving early. Leaving early felt strange until I made a conscious decision to embrace it as a sort of healthy difference between me and the others that stay until 5 or 6. Recently I've been slipping and staying longer for "work reasons". The negative impact on my drive and home life is obvious enough to get me back on track and out the door by 3 or 3:30.
China is emphatically not stable. The PRC was started in 1949. The US civil war ended in 1865. Revolution is a living memory for some in China and that does a great deal to help the population think that suppression at all costs is reasonable. While the US was having its civil war, China was suffering through the tail end of [1]. Historically (in the modern era), China may best be seen as a very violent place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Xiuquan

(Edit: I didn't notice the word superficial at first, it may have been inserted later as a correction.)
Keep in mind that "acidic" should be kept in perspective. Carbonated beverages:

More acidic than:
water
milk
tea
ice tea
beer

About that same as:
coffee (coffee with milk, however, is essentially not acidic)
wine (depends a bit on the kind of wine, sweet wine is less acidic)
orange juice (from sweet oranges, the sour ones are usually less acidic)

Less acidic than:
lemon juice (coke is a LOT less acidic than lemon juice)*
grape juice (esp. when adding lemon juice for more sweetener)
lime juice
things like "lemon ice tea" (and of course actual tea with lemon in it. It depends on how much lemon. If you add enough lemon to allow for much additional sweetness, it will be a lot more acidic than carbonated beverages)

With fruit things can vary. Apparently the rule is, the sweeter, the more acidic (the opposite of what your tastebuds will tell you, although it's really more a case of if you taste sweetness you ignore sourness. Sweet taste doesn't necessarily mean something is acidic, obviously, but (from a certain level) it does mean you won't notice at all whether something is acidic or not, or how much).

If you're worried about this, even a small sip of milk will eliminate any acidity in your mouth in seconds (milliseconds actually).

* I've heard of medical cases where people managed to dissolve their stomach lining by drinking pure lemon juice (about 1.5 liter), and died due to the stomach juices coming into the abdominal cavity. Yes, that's right, your stomach lining, specifically designed to be able to handle strong acidity, cannot deal with lemon juice.
I still use mine, I'm not a big user of apps generally so I can just about squeak by, the tiled UI is still far and away the best available for phones.

I hope the Windows everywhere initiative eventually works out, they got a lot of things right about the touch experience but they couldn't follow through on a lot of it.
The Surface Hub is still around and for sale, we have several of them. They're really good if you're a AD/Skype/O365 shop, if a little pricey ($5K+).
On the other hand, if it actually has enough customers because it can run non-native apps that's an incentive for developers to make better native apps. I don't think it's so clear cut which one would have happened.
This is a really common technique in the UK, especially with online banking. “Enter the 1st, 4th, and 7th characters of your password.” Apparently the point is to prevent replay attacks.

The problem with telecom companies is they have customers from a wide spectrum of technical capabilities. Their systems need to be able to support the baby boomer who calls support because they can’t remember their password, pin, or something...

I’m not defending these practices by any means, but these society-spanning institutions are facing challenges of balancing usability and security that many companies do not need to worry about.

If a company wants to implement a system like this, fine. But please tell me before I enter my password so I know not to reuse another password of mine.
You should travel to China and see it for yourself. Americans are so incredibly naive. I’m not saying you’re American but you definitely should get out more.
> Am I late for the T-Mobile party? @c_pellegrino, @tmobileat

https://twitter.com/fabricio_giglio/status/98236273592413798...
Zune HD really was a good player. I switched to it after 3 Ipod Nanos in a row had trouble holding a charge about five minutes after the warranty period expired. Cheaper price, longer battery life, better (imo) interface, just poor marketing and hard to beat the Itunes Juggernaut. If you subscribed to the $9.99 a month music service then downloading new music and syncing it to the device was smooth and fast and easy in a way that Itunes still hasn't managed. Like you said, no idea why Microsoft keep creating great products but then suck at selling and marketing them.
You just need a few anchor apps to keep people in the windows side. MS had the ability to do so. Then add some tie ins to encourage 3rd party developers.
I bought an early EEG interface from MyndPlay. It still sits fairly unused in my wall-mounted cabinet. For shame.

I was pretty interested in this stuff a little while back. Daily work needs kind of steamrolled it.

I recently interviewed with another company working on these kinds of devices, however their application appears to be limited to wave tracking for meditation. They failed me for not being able to answer some vaguely-worded multithreading questions when the job was to work in web and embedded software...

I'm still intrigued. Like @winterismute said, I wonder if ML can help — maybe with pattern detection/seeing through the ..."junk".
The Moments in Time at MIT-IBM Laboratory
The Moments In Time is an ongoing project at the MIT-IBM laboratory by Dan Gutfreund - a principal investigator at MIT-IBM Watson AI laboratory and Aude Olivia - a principal research scientist at MIT computer science and AI laboratory.

Understanding The Moments In Time dataset, it is built on a compilation of 1 million annotated video streams of rapidly transforming events unrolling within three short seconds. The fact backing up this research is a well-known trait of humans.

For humans, understanding an event depicted in various forms is a pretty straightforward capability. Machines are literally a failure in this case. The final outcome of this research initiative is to teach machines to recognize different actions. Teaching the deep-learning algorithms to recognize actions by providing them with a vast coverage of dynamic visual and auditory moments.

For example, cooking, opening, running actions are fed to the deep-learning algorithm with the minimum of 2000 videos to understand those actions without having to be compulsorily taught under supervision.

IBM #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #AI #ML
It's a question. How can it be false?

And also Locke (who was being asked the question) was right in his answer.
It's a fallacy to think of global affairs as a competition for some funny vague rank or doing good or bad, and of figures that represent power as tragedies characters that aim certain things and act in accordance with their stereotypes. It's a game of economics. Rest is rhetoric.
Given the amount that Google pays to Apple to remain the default search engine on the iPhone, I really doubt they would be willing to take that risk.
On implementing k Nearest Neighbor for regression in Python
I had imagined this would be for neovim only... not so. This looks great!
More communist nonsense...

They created a dysfunctional society and despite lagging behind all non-communist neighbors, they won’t give up, and now came up with new annoying rules and measures in an attempt to fix the mess they created.
The Social Co-op: A social network where members split the advertising profits
This one was a page turner for me, if you want to go back in time for audio or radio here's a representative page of RDH4 from 1957:

https://archive.org/stream/RadioDesignersHandbook/LangfordSm...

Wouldn't have been possible without a slide rule.

Then after basic magnetic circuit theory & transformers, there's a whole chapter of math reference, ends up where they wish they had computers:

https://archive.org/stream/RadioDesignersHandbook/LangfordSm...

Which you are expected to be fluent in before you go forward from there.

Through the remainder of this handy little 1540-page guide, enjoy 'em all.