skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should see how they abused the dotcom bubble to push up their bogus projections:

"Davis, who was elected in 1998 with more than $5 million in campaign contributions from public employee unions, says that if he had it to do over, he would not support the pension improvements."

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pension-crisis-davis-d...

"... how in 1999 the California Public Employees’ Retirement System orchestrated the approval of a 50 percent retroactive pension increase for state employees amounts to an autopsy of a public-policy crime. It is literally incredible that CalPERS told the Legislature that such a huge gift of money would have little or no long-term cost to state taxpayers because the dot-com boom then driving the stock market sky-high would never end."

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/sd-calpers-menda...

[2009] Californians questioning why their state budget is in perpetual red ink need look no further than the California Public Employees’ Retirement System’s (CalPERS) implicit forecast in 1999 that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would reach 25,000 by 2009, 595,000 by 2049 and 28 million by 2099 and that its investment earnings would rise alongside.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-pensions-and-partyi...
A state that lets a potentially large employer go elsewhere also misses out on the revenue. So there's no reason not to compete for them, since most states will get income tax revenue from the employees if nothing else, along with general economic benefits of lower unemployment.
the real issue is where to mine the names and pictures from. Facebook? LinkedIn? The tighter the pool of people the best the face recognition will be. Asking people to enter everyone in by hand is probably unreasonable, though I'm not sure
Yeah it is pretty bad. For a long time they were even projecting an 8.25% return according to the LA Times article I linked above. They used this number to justify the large benefit increases enacted when the stock market was doing well in the late 90s.

They made nowhere close to that and now state and local governments in California contribute over $50bn annually to CalPERS alone.
U.S. and European foreign policy has hurt Latin America. But that has nothing to do with Venezuela's present condition. Hugo Chavez was popularly elected in internationally-recognised elections. Through his and his successor's mismanagement, a formerly-wealthy oil nation--better off than others in the region--has fallen. This is a story of failed institutions and the destructiveness of populism, not of foreign interference.
That was my fault as well. Pensions are almost a form of a Ponzi scheme. They all will eventually collapse. Corruption in pension administration is also rampant.
it will offer that to everyone, including blockchain companies
It is not unacceptable to say we don't know with certainty -- it's faithful to science. You are correct we have a mathematical "casual" model, but that model is entirely observational. We know what happens with certainty in virtually any gravitational situation, but we remain very uncertain about the underlying mechanism of action. It is faithful and mature to recognize this.
To me, that round edge bubble font is a total turnoff. I don't want to read the wall of text in any case. But, it is even more of a non-starter with that font.
Is there a good test for this I could take (preferably online)? I suspect I have a mild case and would like an objective test.
Art Bell's show was a bizarrely formative experience for me in my early teens. I lived in rural NC where we got very poor FM reception, but one AM station carried Coast to Coast AM, rebroadcasting the previous night before moving on to the live one (due to the time zone difference). Some nights I would listen through until dawn. There was such a striking sense of place he invoked in the show, and I would fall asleep dreaming of those roads I'd never seen.

I've still never been to the high desert, but one of my favorite things to do recently has been to play American Truck Simulator in Nevada or California while streaming his archives.

I know Art left and returned to radio several times over his career, and I held out hope he might do so yet again. I'm not one to really mourn the loss of celebrities, but the world is a little less mysterious and interesting without Art Bell.
Head's up. Depending on the circumstances, multiple updates are vulnerable to a race condition known as "read skew". If a user's status changes while the multiple update transaction is executing, their status can wind up in a bad state. Here's a demonstration:

> CREATE TABLE reward_members (id bigint, member_status text);
> INSERT INTO reward_members (values (0, 'silver'));

> BEGIN;
> UPDATE reward_members SET member_status = 'gold_group' WHERE member_status = 'gold';
> UPDATE reward_members SET member_status = 'bronze_group' WHERE member_status = 'bronze';

-- Concurrently: > UPDATE reward_members SET member_status = 'gold' WHERE id = 0 AND member_status = 'silver';

> UPDATE reward_members SET member_status = 'platinum_group' WHERE member_status = 'platinum';
> UPDATE reward_members SET member_status = 'silver_group' WHERE member_status = 'silver';
> COMMIT;

> SELECT * FROM reward_members;

id | member_status
----+---------------
0 | gold

If the transactions executed atomically (in the instantaneous sense, not the ACID sense), the member_status of the user should be either silver_group or gold_group depending on the order the transactions executed in. Due to the race condition, the user winds up with the member_status of gold instead.

If you want to avoid this you either have to use the case statement version or use a stricter isolation level. Either repeatable read or serializable would prevent this. I've written about read skew, other related race conditions, and how to prevent them in a series of blog posts you can find here[0][1][2].

On a related note, efficiently batching disjoint updates is an interesting problem. One of my coworkers wrote about how he solved this exact problem in Redshift[3]. He found the most efficient way was to create a staging table with what old values corresponded to what new values. Then you can join the staging table with the table you are updating.

[0] http://malisper.me/postgres-transactions-arent-fully-isolate...

[1] http://malisper.me/postgres-row-level-locks/

[2] http://malisper.me/postgres-transaction-isolation-levels/

[3] https://heapanalytics.com/blog/engineering/redshift-pitfalls...
Please note: facial recognition is learned, not innate.

https://www.leafscience.org/visual-recognition/

Thanks.
Only one has to. Floating may not be a bad theory. Can they root after being in salt water for months though?
> I like to think democracy and a relatively good economy

You mean, not a centralized, planned economy.
Why would it change soon as long as:

1) those who teach them are paid anyway (state-funded “education” system)
2) socialist welfare state generously rewards diversity and other nonsense metrics instead of the ability to produce profit
3) unemployment benefits are more than generous and there’s even talk about “basic income”
This already happens a lot, most VFX heavy productions will have digital doubles of the main cast, and they can be used for as simple a reason as reframing a shot.
Starbucks Apologizes After Boycott Erupts
This is spot-on:

"Membership in an open source community is like membership in the community of science. There is a straightforward process for finding a true answer to any question. People disagree in public conversations. They must explain clearly and listen to those who response with equal clarity. Members of the community pay more attention to those who have been right in the past, and to those who enhance their reputation for integrity by admitting in public when they are wrong. They shun those who mislead. There is no court of final appeal. The only recourse is to the facts.

It’s a messy process but it works, the only one in all of human history that ever has. No other has ever achieved consensus at scale without recourse to coercion.

In science, anyone can experiment. In open source, anyone can access the facts of the code. Linus Torvalds may supervise a hierarchy that decides what goes into the Linux kernel, but anyone can see what’s there. Because the communities of science and open source accept facts as the ultimate source of truth and use the same public system for resolving disagreements about the facts, they foster the same norms of trust grounded in individual integrity."

The entire blog post is worth a read.
Yes, and the lathe was also Prince Bolkonsky's hobby.

I wasn't talking about hobbies, I was talking about necessities of ordinary people.
> All that Fossil offers is some extra porcelain over its storage layer...

Well... the tickets are things that live in the repository like a commit[0], so can reference other entries, and are referenceable by other entries, in a first class way. So “just porcelain“ or a “simple matter of programming” for git, in the dismissive sense.

[0] https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/tickets.wiki
If you assume the average for those over $100k is $17 billion, capping it at $100k would save the entire budget many times over!

$200k is a completely arbitrary assumption. And if your cost savings are off by an order of magnitude, it is basically insignificant, at <1% of the budget.

If you can wave a wand and reduce benefits, targeting only the top 2000 is probably not the most effective use of your magic.
"Voter turnout [at Venezuela's 1998 election] was 63%, and Chávez won the election with 56% of the vote. Academic analysis of the election showed that Chávez's support had come primarily from the country's poor and 'disenchanted middle class', whose standard of living had decreased rapidly over the previous decade, while much of the middle and upper class vote went to Römer.

Chávez's presidential inauguration took place 2 February 1999. He deviated from the usual words of the presidential oath when he took it, proclaiming: 'I swear before God and my people that upon this moribund constitution I will drive forth the necessary democratic transformations so that the new republic will have a Magna Carta befitting these new times.' Freedom in Venezuela suffered following 'the decision of President Hugo Chávez, ratified in a national referendum, to abolish congress and the judiciary, and by his creation of a parallel government of military cronies'. Soon after being established into office, Chávez spent much of his time attempting to abolish existing checks and balances in Venezuela. He appointed new figures to government posts, adding leftist allies to key positions and 'army colleagues were given a far bigger say in the day-to-day running of the country'."

TL; DR Institutions which should have fought back didn't and populism usurped the democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Chávez#First_presidential...
I've been contacted and interviews a few times with AWS and threat Intel team but never got ANY followup after the second interview. It's disheartening. At this point I'm ready to give up. Why do their recruiters keep reaching out If they never even give a Yay /nay after six months and two interviews?
All that context isn't needed. The relevant meddling in Central and Latin American has had two majors flavors:

1) the US manipulated, deposed, and built governments there for the last century, often triggering or at least backing civil wars. Much of this was done to further corporate interests, like The United Fruit Company.

2) During the Cold War, the US convinced the governments of the regions to retool their militaries as counter-insurgency forces to counter communist rebels.

Those set the stage for any number of oppressive regimes and wars.

The rise of Chavez could be seen as obvious, given the above, but Venezuela's specific problems today are due to Chavez' party and his successor.
At least in the United States, I had my fair share of issues with my late 2016 MacBook Pro.

First issue was dead pixels on the screen. It was replaced in warranty for free with superb turnaround. Dropped it on a Thursday night and had it back Tuesday by lunch time.

About nine months later, the backlight on the screen died and I had just a black screen. Rather than wait for an Apple Store appointment, I got a box to send it in. The box was overnighted to me and the shipping to the repair depot was also overnight. I shipped it out Wednesday after work, it arrived and was serviced on Thursday, and back in my hands by Friday at 10:30am.

When I got it back, however, the keyboard had an issue that only could have been caused by the repair. I did a walk-in on Saturday morning at my local Apple Store and they started by looking into replacing the computer without me asking.

All of these repairs and replacements were done in warranty or under Apple Care free of charge. The replacement was amazing, too, because it was processed as a return and repurchase. So, I got a brand new Apple Care policy on an upgraded (better CPU, GPU, 1TB SSD) mid 2017 MacBook Pro that lasts the full three years as part of the return and repurchase.

They've more than made me whole and made me better off than before by replacing the computer. I'm definitely impressed with their customer support compared to any other computer vendor.
As long as you overlook that whole slavery thing....
(self plug) I made https://pgexercises.com/ a while back to help people learn SQL in a learn-by-doing exercise format. You can run the queries in the browser, so it's easy to just to an exercise when you have a spare few minutes.
That's one perspective. Another (perhaps broader) perspective is that there's been a generations long civil war throughout South and Central America between elites and oppressed populations, and throughout this conflict, the US state has sided with and supported elite rule, oftentimes including gross violations of human dignity. This goes back to the Monroe Doctrine.
Whenever this comes up i wonder what the outcome would have been had Gorbachev been allowed to complete his reforms.
These features are possible right now on the backend of git to be implemented. There's nothing blocking git to add these things. What git would need is a front-end (remember, the cli is a frontend) to implement these.

Don't get me wrong, I do agree fossil is adding some new cards to the table. I just think it would be better implemented as extensions to git than a new system made from scratch.
I think it would be harder than that. Bear in mind that this will use images of moving targets from strange angles in poor lighting. Is there any system that works that well, even out of something like Facebook or Google? Plus this has to be portable and battery-operated.

I know nothing about computer vision.
> but some experts say Polynesian explorers beat him to it. There’s little evidence to support this fringe theory...

Aaaaaaaargh. There's evidence to support many theories besides the orthodox one ... like that >100Ka site in SoCal ....

J Harlen Bretz's Missoula-floods theory was a 'fringe-theory', until decades later. Alfred-Wegener's plate-tectonics theory was 'fringe' for decades. The Antikythera Mechanism was an out-of-place-object until history found a place for it. Gobekli Tepe pre-dates the pyramids by thousands of years.

Science is not religion, and defending against heresy is a job for dogmatism.
But there would only be, say 2000 sites of them. Each 10x10 meters in size, buried deep underground. Good luck finding them.
I just download the forms from the IRS and fill them out. File on paper. It's not very hard and that way nobody but the IRS has my data.
Are you saying Venezuela is a democracy? Cause I have bad news for you...
He should look into Sage.

http://www.sagemath.org/
It was only a good economy, in as much as government revenue was good, and in turn government services were good.

As soon as oil prices slumped, the economy started falling apart, and measures taken to mitigate the effect just made things worse.
Thank you for that, I was just about to say. It hasn't been a democracy for quite a while.

Source: I have relatives who were born and raised in Venezuela.
> The idea that these trillions are going to be paid back one day is preposterous

Our debt is around 1x GDP and 1/5th American households' and non-profits nominal wealth [1]. (This excludes public sector assets, corporate assets, and foreigners' assets in the United States.) All of that is subject to future taxation.

I don't like big deficits. (They imply future taxation, service cuts or inflation.) But our debt burden is easily manageable, particularly considering our suboptimal inflation attainment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States
I would always advise filing the full 1040 even if the EZ would work for you. If your tax situation is simple you leave most of the lines blank, but it will prompt you to check out a lot of stuff that you would never see if you filed an EZ, including the American Opportunity tax credit.
A somewhat ironic outcome given that his boosters in the 2014 were extremely cocky and thought his deal making skills and business acumen would have him making quick work of the dopey machine politicians in the state house.

He was going to be the next Chris Christie/Scott Walker and then would be a presidential contender for 2020-2024.

Fast forward 4 years and he's achieved none of his goals, further entrenched his opposition, almost lost the Republican primary to a far-right flank, and is now ranked the 2nd least popular governor in America.

Oh and he left the state without a budget for half of his first term because of a failed grudge match with the speaker of the house, which increased our cost of debt and messed up the financials for many colleges in the state... among other things.
Or not.

Maybe the apparition of multicellular life is super rare, but once it has happened hi-tech societies are common.
Mentioning federal employees in a discussion of state/local employees is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Please provide sources to counter the assertion that state/local employees often get large pensions in lieu of salary.
In my local farm town, long since swallowed by suburbia, a local "farm style" diner continues to chug along.

Very early breakfast through lunch. Closed Sundays. Despite the latter, and the proliferation of "weekend dining" with the change to suburbia, they're doing just fine.

There is definitely a community of locals. Including many people in the trades and whatnot, who still grow up and live around here while the surrounding suburbia is much more "fluid" in its population.

I've also watched other "farm diners" close, such as the one out in the farm town where I went to school. Changing economics and demographics.

They are definitely their own sub-type of diner.
It's seems like there should be a cap on state pensions of $20,000 a month. $20k a month should be plenty to support a family even in ridiculous California and New York.
And the worse state - Kentucky - is Republican
FYI there is a not as complete open source implementation of Mathematica called mathics[1][2]. In fact it is also Python based just like Jupyter(I don't think this is a coincidence).

[1]: http://mathics.org

[2]: http://mathics.net
The trick is to create a twitter account, tweet a link, then click the link, and the referrer header for twitter.com in the twitter link unlocks the article.

That's how you can read WSJ for free. Delete the tweet when you get to the article, if you're not super pumped about playing into they're coerced promotion game.
Well they should. If you don't even need to itemize you should just fill out the forms from the IRS. If you can do some simple addition and subtraction it's not difficult. Probably just as fast if not faster than being interviewed by your tax program.
On a related note, you can find lots of Soviet era (as well as modern) things and curious facts on this wonderful site

http://englishrussia.com/
It's impossible to reform pensions without paying private-sector market rate to state and local employees.

"Unsustainable" pensions are a politician's way of punting the issue -- rather than hit the budget today by paying market rate, they promise far above market rate later on when some other sucker is in office. And everybody -- including the people whose taxes will end up paying for it -- falls for this over and over and over.
You aren’t alone. My face recognition is spotty: I had two students in different classes; both same height, white hair, mustaches -- and it took me six weeks to tell them apart. I have a decent memory for student names. However, the face recognition and name memory parts of my brain don’t talk to one another.
CO, now a tax and spend blue state, has a $32B shortfall? First I heard of it.

Now one state over in KS, a red state, has 1/100th that shortfall, and the news goes apeshit criticizing the republican tax cuts.

Now tell me the media is not biased?
Some lisp files there too. Interesting.
That assertion makes sense if quality of candidates drops when pension is removed. We don't know exactly why ppl are choosing govt jobs. My wife choose it because it offers 9-5, no overtime.
I actually wonder about this a bit. Wisconsin gave huge tax breaks to get that company in. So now in order to buy the land, they have to evict the land owners by marking the property as "blighted", because apparently they can't afford the actual market price of the land.
Jayson E. Street: Steal Everything, Kill Everyone, Cause Total Financial Ruin! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsVtHqICeKE

Van Albert and Banks: Looping Surveillance Cameras through Live Editing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoOqznZUClI

Ken Thompson: Reflections on Trusting Trust https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...

And of course, Simple Made Easy, Wat, etc.
A possible alternative might be The Fifth Discipline.

I found it a bit easier to process.
Lots of people are in tough financial circumstances. Preserving public pensions means keeping formerly middle class people from facing hardship at the expense of the people who were always impoverished.
It takes big onions to admit something like that. I admire him.
It's an excellent strategy (when executed correctly) in times of unparalleled stability and economic predictability like those of 1948 to ~1976 and ~1982-2008 but it's a terrible strategy when returns on pension fund investments are virtually guaranteed. Even in those times it didn't make logical sense to assume everything over the next 30 years would play out exactly how everyone assumed it would. That and the "stickiness" problem of new pensions being based off the terms of old pensions (negotiated when retirees didn't live into their mid 80's on average) is what will doom most state governments over the next 10-15 years,
TurboTax UX is solid! I spent a couple of years recommending the product to everyone I knew because I was so delighted by the experience. The $60 was a no-brainer.

But instead of doubling-down on this delightful product experience, they're investing in disingenuous conversion hacks like the "PLUS Help & Tools" upgrade funnel. Designed to feel like it is part of the actual filing process, users are converted more effectively when they're led to believe this is just another step toward completing their task, similar to how users respond to native ads.

In the UX teardown, I take a more critical look at the design decisions behind the freemium funnel. I wish they were more transparent about their pricing structure up front so users could compare the benefits of products and add-ons against their needs and budget.

--

That's frustrating about the emails you're receiving even after filing. Let's hope they build out smarter email campaigns next year that are more aware of user actions across all TurboTax systems.
If your wife was a sole earner without a spouse's income to supplement her household, would she be as willing to accept low wages now in exchange for a high pension later?

Or would she look for a job that pays enough to cover her cost of living today, since that's a prerequisite to reaching the pension age?