skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> China doesn't believe in free trade. They never have. The trade that exists today between the EU and China, or the US and China, is very far away from being free trade.

No country in the world actually believes in free trade. If they did, open, tarrif-free markets would be the default, as opposed to a patchwerk of five thousand different exemptions carved out in dozens of different treaties.

What the West (And the United States in particular) believes in is 'Free' trade - which looks an awful lot like colonialism, by another name. Developing countries are free to sell their resources, or low-value-add, high-labour, low-IP goods, and and are free to import high-value-add, low labour, high-IP goods. 'Free' trade is a moat that protects this sort of arrangement.

For some reason, when China adopts this same model, everyone gets into a panic.
How do you know what makes sense if you don't know the statistics? Any action could be more harm than help.
It sounds like you're agreeing with the original comment, but I think you might be paraphrasing it to highlight the absurdity.

And it does seem absurd, but it's true: almost everyone has been conditioned to accept news footage as 'pure' truth, something at the other end of a reality-scale from, say, movies.

I think it's hard to remember is that the majority of video is tailored with intent to evoke specific a response: To some degree, your reaction and emotions are at the mercy of the video producer - just like in a movie. Except in a movie, you have the safety switch of remembering it's "not real" - I think the lack of a corresponding mental failsafe with news causes subtle hysteria, confusion, and frustration.

Contrary to a lot of conspiracy, I don't think it's malicious (mostly), and I believe fundamentally journalism has noble goals - but I don't see it as deniable that "news" as a whole is under pressure to be compelling, and that, albeit subtly, twists what we're exposed to.

Crying "be more sceptical" isn't very helpful - it certainly wouldn't have helped me. I think more knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes of newsmaking might be more along the lines of what would help people, but I don't really know.

"Fake" almost isn't the right word. "Disconnected from reality" - subtly - that's the phenomenon causing trouble, in my view. But anything that's disconnected from reality, taken as truth, is open to manipulation; scepticism is appropriate.
The various analogies used in this thread lead to contradictory conclusions because they start from different places:

Should browsing the Sears website be more like reading a Sears catalog in your own home, or more like physically walking into a Sears store? It's clearly got some aspects of both.

You can't just assume one is the "right" view and then use that to argue your point, because once you boil it down that's precisely the thing you disagree about.

EDIT: I see thaumaturgy made essentially the same point in a sibling comment.
7 works of interactive fiction that every developer should study
That says they earned revenue, not a profit. They did not earn a profit.
> But after collecting fees from Toys R Us, Bain and KKR each took home at least $15 million

With all due respect to you, the author of that article doesn't understand how PE funds work. (Most people don't. But one shouldn't write an article if that badly misinformed.)

Private equity funds are structured assuming portfolio companies won't vanish. They may lose some money. But between 1998 and 2010 only 4.9% of PE-backed companies defaulted, and of those, 72% did a Chapter 11 or pre-packaged bankruptcy [1]. As a result, when funds get fees or interests, the general partners are allowed to pay themselves a little something up front. If it turns out they overpaid themselves in year 1, they can make up for it by underpaying themselves in year 7.

Which makes a liquidation, like this one, nasty for the managers. First, their high water mark is toast. Second, most of that $15 million will find its way to the fund's limited partners. If the fund paid out its managers, clawback terms could be triggered. That means fuck year 7, you return the overpayment now.

Private equity managers are smart. But their limited partners aren't dunces. We've gone through cycles, up and down, with PE. The terms have "learned". Liquidations of PE-backed companies are rare. Nobody is walking away from this happy or whole.

[1] http://portal.idc.ac.il/en/schools/economics/about/documents...
nice thanks for the assist Zach!
That is almost the entire reason that I like owning. The kitchen looks like I want it to look, the walls are the color I want them to be, the doorbell is wifi, I have a Nest thermostat, and if I don't like that there's a peach tree in the front yard I have it removed (true story!).
I believe the distinction is this: primitive influences on behavior through culturization happen because you experience and do things with other people. Being programmed by Facebook is different: you are posting things and getting feedback in the form of likes which boosts dopamine and you end up in a vortex of false gratification and false relationships and false experiences. It's about attention and the need for hormonal drugs, not about the actual experience or person.

How can I put this into better words? Maybe an analogy from the inventor of Twitter and Medium:

Social media/the internet is like a simple AI that gives you more of what you like. Now, imagine you see a car crash and you look, along with everyone else--you all stop to look. It's natural, it's inescapable. The internet notices this behavior and decides that humans want more car crashes--so it tries to supply more car crashes.

That's the kind of programming we're talking about. Humans are vulnerable and have psychological weaknesses. Social media is tailored to attack certain weaknesses because it's lucrative in an attention economy where advertisements = $$.
Using a USB 3.0 to VGA adapter for transmit-only SDR
Would you mind explaining what you mean by 'commented sections' in DNA? I have a very basic understanding of DNA.
How are deer related to trucks?
Apparently[1] it was the July 1, 1978 edition: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/01/iss... (NYT subscription reqd)

1. https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewe...
I can't believe no one mentioned Queensryche's "Silent Lucidity" 'till now.
Latest Technology Trends in Nepal (2018 Edition) – Webpreneurs Hub
Same in Canada (where I live). We have a few higher-crime neighborhoods in my city, mostly occupied by non-white people, and the police don't really patrol around those areas. They come out if you call them.

The police in my city mostly target native americans, which commit the most crime here. But the cops aren't violent or forceful from what I've seen. Most of the time they just come out because someone is drunk and being a nuisance, so they come out and talk to the person/people and get them to move on from the area.

I'm not sure what happens with reserve police. You have to get a warrant to enter reserve property if you are city police or mounted. I think mostly they don't even bother.
Calling Elixir from Erlang (2017)
https://github.com/paulknysh/blackbox - a tool for optimization of expensive black-box functions (numerical simulations etc)
I have a 3 year old and a 3 month old and we go to babies r us 1-2 times per month.

Our local Target has some choice of baby stuff but nothing like babies r us has. And with the problems of fakes I've ran into on Amazon, I would NEVER trust them with something like a carseat.
I think they recognize that, which is why they said code in quotes.

It's still related to the topic, as that's one of the first places people go when trying to take the code out of programming.
Closer to the 20k end, I'm afraid. More options are opening up now with GPU processing power on less expensive desktops ( ~ $13k ).
Honestly, that's what I remember of Toy R Us.. the immensity of it. To the roof shelves, packed with fantasies(fetishes) I could barely see so high were the boxes. And I left mind numbed by this (positively so, if you can call this pornographic level of toy need positive).
Blu-ray interactive graphics stream editor, because paying thousands of dollars to change an image is kinda dumb
How to make an efficient payment system in Erlang (2016)
Don't worry, you are not grumpy. But you are worrying a little too much since this is just a very small (and hence negligible) problem. If too many young / healthy / smart / educated people were to start doing this, society will adjust and pass new laws and regulations, which will force such folks to work or at least ensure that they don't mooch off the system (esp. free healthcare).
Schraubendreher-Set austauschbare Torx Pinzette
RemoteML – Remote Machine Learning Jobs
Show HN: Oops, commit typo
You can do it today for the price of a reduced-gravity aircraft ticket (~$5,000, https://www.gozerog.com)
The paper says they only ran it on a single V100, I was expecting multiple GPUs as well.
Also even on the learning side, perhaps the raw task of making things faster isn't really that hard

https://eng.uber.com/accelerated-neuroevolution/
I don't think he was shouting.

What words do you use to categorize/describe your lazy conformist friends?
Another often unacknowledged reality about that - I suffered for three years in the "Salesforce" environment which bills itself as the be-all end-all "no more programmers" solution. In reality, it's clunky and limited, and even when non-programmers are able to get something that approximates what they want, it ends up being slower than molasses. That's when they call in a programmer to figure out what went wrong and it's usually something like re-running a complex DB query a thousand times to satisfy a simple request. And you can hardly blame the business users - they have no visibility into what they're doing, so it's completely understandable that they come up with an inefficient mess. If user-created software is ever going to be feasible, the back-end is not only going to have to translate their drag-and-drops into usable code, but it's also going to have to intelligently optimize: that is, infer what their goal is and find the most efficient way to achieve that goal. That alone should tell you how far we are away from a programmer-less future.
Perhaps it would be best to avoid the more popular answers to this question in one's own career, depending on your goals.

My own strategy is to intentionally target areas that have been neglected for no good reason. While there are plenty of smart people in my field (fluid dynamics), I feel that if the field had a wider reputation, even more smart people would join, and the number of opportunities I have would shrink. Marketing folks seem to call this the "blue ocean strategy".

So what can you learn from how smart people behave? It would be better to try to distill rational principles from their behavior rather than saying choice X is optimal. For example, ask why choice X is optimal rather than just believing choice X is optimal.
Yep. They also need regular "exercise" and lubrication if you want them to be worth anything in a WROL situation.
Maybe said underfunded pension funds should buy large leveraged short positions in their parent companies and cash out after announcing an impending pension shortfall.

This probably violates a bunch of SEC regulations.
A company is bound by the laws of every country it does business in under threat of not being able to continue doing business there.
Without a rigorous attempt at justifying each of these rules, I don't find this article particularly useful. For example, can someone link to or provide a formal explanation for why table names should be singular? I actually really wanted to read the full relational algebra rational for that one.
This is the experience IMO. Someone talked about this about old video games. Atari boxes were so pretty, yet the games had nothing to do with the box art (8 bit graphics can only get you so far). But the imagination bootstrap it gives made the game pleasurable. It's all fake anyway.. make believe.

I feel this era is going way too much into sound/engineered decision making for mundane human life, and I say it's detrimental.
GDPR is the new cookie notice hell on the web?
Examples without names, personal friends of mine:

1. Alcoholism, watched this man crawl from prodigal son to non-productive leech.

2. Weed. I have no problems with recreational weed on some occasions, and have enjoyed it myself, this person has their mind constantly fried. Kid went from a 16 year old CS stunner to a 22 year old, reaction shot, deep-fried potato. Maybe not the 'smartest,' but he had major future in his field.

3. Xanax. Friend of mine, beautiful content producer, amazing aspirations. While being majorly depressed he moved from SSRIs which weren't helping him, to taking Xanax he'd buy illegally. Slowly got out of hand while abandoning his aspirations, classes, and more. He's no longer working. He committed suicide a few weeks ago.

4. Xanax, again. Dear friend of mine. Closest person I've ever known. Instead of long-term medications to deal with her issues, she turns to Xanax as a short-term fix. The immense pain caused by whatever is bothering her at the time turns her to Xanax, which in turn normally ends in her becoming unproductive for the rest of the day and sleeping for 12-16 hours. She's never been able to find anything else that helps, and in turn without Xanax she cannot handle problems well. Breakdowns, endless crying, hyper-focuses on topics. I fear things will not change for the better, although I still try.

Mental illness / mental differences are other slow disasters that my friends have much experience with. Many of us have one of many things, most commonly autism or ASPD.

There are others, too many to name that I feel have been lost for a reason or another. Sad shit.
The problem is the marginal cost of transporting is very low. The train industry is there to extract the maximum amount of money from those willing to pay, while allowing those not willing to pay the chance to travel.

A walk up simple London to Manchester ticket is £86 return, unless you're travelling before 9:30am. Those willing to buy from https://trainsplit.com/ can get a return for £47, or buy the tickets manually and it drops to £39. That's just like those who know going to Aldi will be cheaper than shopping at harrods.

That "slow train" which costs £20 each way, in the peak, and is still quicker than a car.

The money made from open tickets is pumped back into the rail industry to subsidise rural branches in Cornwall. It also subsdises the frequency, where trains are running with say 20 people per carriage (with 80 seats), but are running every 20 minutes. Some people are willing to pay a lot for that frequency - hence the reason they sell £500 returns.

I would like to see thetrainline shut down, but they advertise their inferior product heavily and people use it.
Interesting approach. I hadn't thought of using a single notebook to adjust the scope and enter into functions. I my tool I take a one-function one-notebook approach because that's how I did it by hand for a long time.
Brave, huh? I guess I will give him some credit for owning up to this, sure. But his only repercussion from helping create this is 'guilt'. And from the looks of his wealth and new ventures, I don't think he wastes any time with his guilt.

Meanwhile, the world burns..
This is what foreign spies see when they read President Trump’s tweets
Spoofing numbers is extremely easy. You can even download mobile apps and do it from your phone.

I'm not sure why telcos don't restrict this to at least verified numbers. But it probably has something to do with interoperability of the world's myriad of different telcos that have to be interoperable.
A typical American birth costs as much as delivering a royal baby
Well that was a beautiful and inspiring piece. Wasn't expecting that from hackernews today.
Isn't actual experience with real person about attention and need for hormonal drugs? And for that matter, isn't it about gratification too? Isn't a friend smiling at you and treating you nicer when you say things he likes similar to him hitting like button?

The dopamine hit after you see upvoted post is kinda like dopamine hit when you are popular in real life - except less powerful.
And the deals on "plus" items. I spent a few hours once to find other items to buy in order to reach the required 25$ to get that first item rebate.. madness.
The major point that the author misses is that by being obsessed with upcoming catastrophe, you lower your quality of life now (not only with prep expenses, but also with stress and paranoia) in exchange for surviving a low-probability disaster in the future, where even surviving would be a pretty miserable existence.

There's a surprisingly solid mathematical case for living in the present and near future, and accepting the risk of catastrophe that you'd only have a marginal chance of surviving and thriving in. In WWII Austria and Poland, a huge catastrophe, the people who escaped suffering weren't the preppers, they were the people who saw writing on the wall and moved away.
I don't think there is any reason for a home use to install a battery pack without solar power, and with solar power they already need an inverter.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/25kwh-48v-LiFePo4-bat...

Now this is Alibaba so we are talking about dubious quality still it's showing 2,000$ for 25kwh battery pack when buying 2 or more. 50kwh is 2 so that's 4,000$. That's for Lithium iron phosphate battery which should give ~2,000 cycles though they say 3,500.

PS: Grid scale you would want to install the batteries at the solar power plant so again no need for an extra inverter.
I love parcel, I seem to personally have constant issues with my typescript react project related to breakpoints just completely not working, or when being triggered, mapping to completely other files.

I imagine it's a sourcemap issue I may post on the tracker, has anyone seen this themselves?
Does anyone know if a similar method would work with NTSC?
These comments are garbage. Pseudo scientific nonsense permeates even the smartest of groups it seems.
Who was Ayn Rand?
Spaceflight from Super-Earths is difficult
My Dream Phone – the iPhone-Lite
That was very pleasant.
Who is "we"? I'm curious how you propose to do the math right so that you, as an employer, can offer a plan that resembles a pension, and if it ends up being any different in practice than contributing to a 401k (which does transfer with jobs so is independent of your company).
What is this WideVine Plugin provided by Google?
Assume that there aren't commercial scheduled airline flights going straight through a warzone?
So either the interest amount of $435M per year (which is roughly 15% interest on 6.6B) is incorrect from the original article or they receives less than 20% of that interest? Strange.

$270M over 13 years from $1.1B in loans? ($270M = $470M - the $200M in fees.) That seems incredibly low interest. I am suspicious. LBO firms do not give low interest loans to their targets.

If we assume an interest rate of 5%, you get 50M in interest a year on 1B. 13 years will yeild $750M in interest.

Did these LBO firms really offer loads at something like 1.5%?

Something isn't adding up.
Slightly related to the article: Does anyone else feel like the general public's inability to extract information from statistics is a huge problem?

I think that any sort of "standardized" education should include at least a class worth of teaching on how to interpret statistics.
What does enthusiasm for guns have to do with this discussion?
Hacking All the Cars – Part 1
I think so and that's the goal of my tool (do a Ctrl-f for pynt on this page - I don't want to spam the link too many times).

This functionality is also present (somewhat) in pycharm where you can attach a jupyter console to any region of code. Though, that's just a console and not a notebook.
I've suffered from it myself. Extremely rough period of depression followed by me being kicked from school (which was a major contributor to my depression due to abuse of my nature,) leaving my apartment, moving back in with my parents, and abusing anything I could get my hands on that wasn't a street drug.

Glad to say I've overcome it, but I still take Methylphenidate as it helps with my severe depression.
Scheme R5RS implementation in Kotlin: https://github.com/kovrik/scheme-in-kotlin

But the development has stalled recently: can't figure out (read as 'too lazy') how to implement macros and how to fix some issues with lazy sequences.

But overall, really love this hobby project, very enlightening.
"He finishes this up by warning the audience not to think they're too smart to fall for the implications of social media, and stated that those who are best-and-brightest are the most likely to fall for it, "because you are fucking check-boxing your whole Goddamn life.""

What does he mean when he says "check-boxing" and how does that relate to the "implications of social media"?

Does he mean "approval-seeking" and the idea that this is what Facebook uses (e.g. "Like" buttons) to "engage" visitors (while gathering data about their lives, personalities, etc.)?

Anyone have a different read?
By definition, you can't solve a political problem with technical means.
you're not alone.
"Putting words in other people's mouths and manipulating voices is fake speech, and is the direct opposite of free speech."

Another example of where a sufficiently large quantitative change becomes a qualitative change. Historically speaking there's nothing new about false attributing speech to some authority, but people had built-in instincts to deal with people simply saying that X said Y and could treat it with some salt. But easy fake videos reverses the situation; we have built-in instincts that say we should trust the video as a reliable representation of the putative speaker, even if we in intellectually know better.

Even if you flashed a warning "THIS IS A FAKE VIDEO" constantly, I bet you'd still be able to run studies that show disproportionate effects on people as a result of a sufficiently good fake video.
I don't watch cable news or even have cable to begin with, nor do I like FOX. And these are fucking hilarious. But they're not quite as bad as a completely fabricated video or quote of somebody like Obama.
Does that mean no food, no snacks during the flight? That sucks.
Palihapitiya and Parker seem to disagree about something important. Parker says that the psychological programming was deliberate:

“It’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology,” he said. “The inventors, creators [...] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

But Palihapitiya says,

“Because your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you’re willing to give up”.

Does Palihapitiya not realize that the programming he decries was built in to the system deliberately by its designers? Or is Parker wrong?
Where do you propose low- and middle-income people move to from the U.S., and when? And what country is it that will take in refugees from the U.S., if you wait too long to move?
The Era of Hackers Is Over
Maybe Google's strategy is: get nice messaging into the market first as a fallback. Then we'll push Allo again and we can fall back to RCS...

The carriers shouldn't be involved in messaging at all, sigh. SMS was a downgrade from AIM and ICQ.