skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think Kinder is a good comparison, because the Kinder toys, while they are collectables, largely do not interact with each other. Getting one Kinder toy does not really require you to get the others, the way some of these games hold themed events with limited-time lootbox content.

A better example would be if Barbie, with her thousands and thousands of iterations, completely stopped selling the prepackaged outfits. Instead, you now have to buy a mysterious box, that has one top piece of an outfit, one bottom piece of an outfit, and one accessory. The pieces you get don't necessarily match.

On top of that, there are bigger value packs that give you five random ones of each type, or ten, or a hundred, depending on how much cash you want to spend. And on top of that, let's say that these outfits are impossible to trade.

I basically just described Overwatch lootboxes. The problem is not necessarily the lootboxes, which are fine as an in-game reward earned by completing games or leveling or what have you. The problem is that the only way to purchase more cosmetics is by chance; as a new player, there's no way to get a specific cosmetic guaranteed unless you either grind every waking moment or spend untold amounts of money.
People talk about how they don't like Chic-Fil-A in casual conversation. I'm not sure the worlds are so separate.
Most physical things also has some amount of virtual value if you compare the production cost. Especially Pokemon cards et.al cost almost nothing to produce and has a high virtual value. Or some expensive brands.
If your society considers a particular transportation mode so antisocial that people who choose it are automatically guilty regardless of the specifics of the incident, no one should ever make that mode choice. It's tantamount to a ban. You aren't perfect, and other people sometimes behave far outside the bounds of what any reasonable person expects (and sometimes do so deliberately to commit insurance fraud). If there's no standard like "reasonable caution" or "due care" to save you, then it doesn't matter how cautious you are, making that mode choice is playing with fire.

Parent said that cyclists who hit pedestrians are automatically liable, then turned around and called bicycling "safe." That's a bizarre interpretation - with that law, Japan is messaging that Japanese people ought to stay far, far away from bicycling unless they have particularly extreme appetite for risk.

To answer your question, modern cities need some method of transportation faster than walking. At speed, injuring the pedestrians who get in your way is an inevitability. Either you have a tax on the unlucky (and unable to afford real estate in the pedestrian core), or you give at least one such method immunity. In Japan, that method is trains. Japan takes the pedestrian victim-blaming even further than necessary in this case, and bills their families for the cleanup costs.
News media post 10 times as many negative as positive stories so not sure what you base the idea that people like to see more positive than negative. In fact the climate change discussions is dominated by negative stories.
This is basically what Singapore is doing with their next-generation congestion charge. It will be GPS-based so that their existing congestion charge can be reconfigured freely based on traffic conditions. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/ncs-mhi-to-...
Some time ago I discovered my left eye is suffering from astigmatism and I needed glasses to correct it. I was suggested to order glasses with a blue-light filter and it's been a game changer for me ever since.
I notice a large amount of cultural bias in my own opinions around milk... Objectively, drinking cow excretions is kinda odd. And milk from a horse is highly comparable.

And, yet, my first reaction to this interesting historical info is "ewwwww, horse milk, gross".
if you read my other comments to nope96 in this branch, you will be able to understand my position better. i even linked the video bitcoinerrorlog cites as proof, which is probably the talk you are referring to. none of this proves he was the head of this company, it does not prove that he knew their qc was never going to work. it does not show him lying, in the video he talks about qc and the consequences for bitcoin.
Many laptop keyboards I have had, have had failed keys, or trouble with crumbs.
Did you actually read the article?

>Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of AI and Autopilot Vision, will have responsibility for Autopilot software.
I agree with your sentiment, its a shame to see Facebook displacing independent forums. But, just to offer another aspect to think about: I have a child with a rare and serious medical condition. There is a facebook group for that condition, and nearly every family in the UK who is affected is in that facebook group. Its very powerful to be able to share notes like that, between us we are able to zero in on best practice and then suggest things to doctors. I suspect that without Facebooks reach we would not have been able to get so many people in one virtual space. I notice there are facebook groups for practically every rare condition you can imagine.

tldr: Facebooks ability to reach beyond the sort of people that sign up for forums can be very useful in certain important scenarios.
> if we revamped the whole thing even to massive public benefit

But this doesn't answer the question: what is the revamping that would be done to solve the problem? I get that "We believe in the dysfunction of the public sphere as an article of faith" is true and the answer to my next question "okay cool, so why haven't we implemented that", but I'd first like to know what "that" is.

(not that you're on the hook for the time to educate me on a complex public policy issue)
The only advice I can give is from my perspective as an employer at a large SaaS company recently. As CTO I was responsible for building a large team covering various skills, including a large number of software engineers. My experience led me to a position where I would actually favor candidates who had significant experience over those with academic qualifications. I have often found, not always but often, that highly qualified engineers need to be "retrained", as software development in the commercial world is (IMHO) a very different discipline to that taught in academia.

I should stress, that my experience is in very specific fields, visual effects, games, retail intelligence, VR, and this may colour my advice. It is entirely possible, in fact likely, that academic qualifications are more valuable than experience in other sectors. I would advise researching the nature of the sector you want to work in, if possible speak to various companies and agencies who specialise in that area, and see what the general expectation is. You may find that a lack of formal qualification might hinder you even getting to interview.

Summary, I personally don't feel that academic qualifications hold any particular value over experience, and strongly believe that someone who is motivated to learn themselves brings value in a different way to a business. But that might not be the opinion of every business or sector, so be careful.
Indeed, it seems the Netherlands study separates whether or not you can then further trade the items to determine if it's gambling or not. Therefore, some games like Overwatch don't fall into this category.

Regarding trading card games, they are indeed awfully closed to gambling; and they are in fact the main defense of the game publishers, arguing that this is just a "collect and play" type of game, and isn't gambling.

But isn't the interactivity, the bells and wistles, animations of the lootbox openings closer to addictive reward patterns than just opening a plastic card booster pack ?
Conservative estimates put it at 2.8 degrees by 2100. Do you believe the temperature will stop rising in 2100? By what mechanism will it stop rising?
Macron: Europe Entering Age of ‘Unprecedented’ Mass Migration
Hi HN readers,
What do I need to learn to make text to speech in my own language?
I'm not sure why Eastern Europe shouldn't be a valid term for talking about the countries in the east of Europe, though? After all, your own comment seems to refer to Western Europe as a group, as well.

It seems to me indisputably true that there are large groups of related countries in Europe, and as a French citizen I do not have any problem with being grouped with Western Europe. Sometimes Southern Europe even, or Latin. "Eastern Europe" doesn't seem less relevant for the countries that are east of Western Europe.

I have travelled a bit around Europe, and I certainly do feel more "at home" once I am back to somewhere west of the German/Polish border, anyway. I'd expect it to be the same (reversed, of course) for those who come from Eastern Europe.
Wellness apps, but for news: a news reading experience that feels healthy?
As someone who was actually around in the industry and saw the massive efforts that were made to successfully fix things, it shits me to tears when people talk about the Millenium Bug as some kind of crying-wolf moment.

I saw some of the awful bugs that were fixed first hand. I have no reason to doubt that my experience wasn't replicated in important "legacy systems" right across the industry. Things only passed so smoothly because of that effort.
Ah, I thought you were referring to HWAsan with the 35%, hence the confusion.
JVM exceptions, I hated.
2 degrees over 200 years might be manageable. Alas, that's now at the very low end of what we're likely to see -- more probably, 2-4 degrees over 100 years.

One problem with a single headline number is that this is an average temperature rise. What we're actually seeing is a mixture of things: more energy accumulating in the hydrosphere and atmosphere means more energetic weather events (e.g. powerful hurricanes/typhoons). Some areas warming lead to other areas cooling (e.g. melting Arctic ice cap and meltwater outflow from the Greenland ice cap may lead to temporary shutdown of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation and a Gulf Stream stall, freezing the British Isles and Western Europe with a -5 to -10 celsius temperature drop in the short term -- meaning, decades to centuries). So there'll be a rise in the incidence of weather/climate related disasters.

Another problem is that we can't simply shift agriculture to new, thawed territories. The Canadian Shield and Siberian Tundra are pretty poor soil, unsuited to intensive wheat/corn growing: it might be possible to condition them, but it'd take decades to centuries of hard work, during which other agricultural territory (the US mid-west and south, much of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa) will be subject to lethal heat emergencies. Lethal not so much for humans -- we know how to build solar-powered air conditioning -- but for crops and livestock which will die in the fields.

Suggestions that we're one supermarket supply chain collapse away from the end of civilization are obviously bogus. But if we start having large-scale crop failures 3-5 times a decade, food prices will soar globally, leading eventually to civil unrest and war. (For example, the Arab Spring was to some extend a side-effect of the 2007-08 global financial crisis, as capital sought refuge in commodity futures and the price of bread throughout the Middle East doubled-to-tripled in twelve months: what will 2-4 consecutive wheat harvest failures accomplish?) Infrastructure damage (including agricultural infrastructure) due to strife and mass migration will in turn increase our dependence on surviving infrastructure, reducing our overall resilience. And there may eventually come a tipping point at which we end up in a positive-feedback loop of mutually reinforcing failures.
i started with 5 BTC in 2013.

learned on the go, but had access to friends in hedge fund business
I have found a serious AirBNB BUG
If you login with Facebook into AirBNB and you had a previous account, set up with AirBNB that was utilizing the same email address as your primary Facebook address, your account will be rested and all your personal info, including reservations made, will be lost!
I have goggles around a bit but I don't quite get it - what is a loot box, and what are they doing in what i would consider "safe for my kids" games like FIFA and Starwars ?
This was also discussed in a good book about sleep I read a few weeks ago: Why we sleep https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
That’s conspiracy bullshit.

Journalists allow unnamed sources to get the truth out. In doing so, they substitute their own reputation for that of the source.

You’d never heard about Watergate or Abu Grhaib without anonymous sources.
"...Instead, says Hillman, the world’s population must globally move to zero emissions across agriculture, air travel, shipping, heating homes – every aspect of our economy – and reduce our human population too..."

That's quite breathtaking. "Reducing human population" is a phrase that can only have so many meanings: controlling reproduction, removing access to healthcare, or killing people. There are no other options I'm aware of.

You can go to just about any physics site and see lists of things physicists still don't understand. Some of them are so far out in the woods that they're even debating the role of empiricism and the scientific method. (If the math looks good, and we could never perform an experiment, isn't that good enough?)

Yet here we have an expert in the social sciences suggesting we do something about having too many humans.

Hillman has had a fine career. I wish him the best in his continued efforts. Articles like this exist to praise people of note, also to poke at folks like me who might find some of their statement a bit over-the-top. Better to generate controversy and readership.

But we really need a more serious discussion on climate. Not pandering to the end-of-world folks, not pandering to the "nothing to see here, folks". Something substantive. There's a lot of religious and magical thinking in climate science, many times by people who would consider themselves uber rationalists. (They're the worst). The vast majority of the public has had about enough of the extremists and self-promoters. There may be an opportunity to start a reasoned discussion.
The "chirping" artifacts are quite distracting. I wonder if they can be avoided by randomizing the alignment of the final piecing together of the audio?

Post-processing by convolving with a short noise burst removes them pretty well, as that randomizes phase vs. frequency.
There are some parallels there to "gluten" sensitivity and fructans. "Gluten" complaints overshadow the amount of celiac disease by a wide margin.

https://newatlas.com/fructan-not-gluten-gastrointestinal-sen...
The first part of this comment is a blanket statement and it's needlessly dismissive and unfair.

But for the second part, can you link any of the research you're talking about or explain why it should make me feel better?
Yes, given the context that AmericanChopper was principally talking about roads (and advocating that cars should be prioritised). If you include non-carriageway provision then the Tube, bus and walking are and have long been dominant in London.

3.11 appears to cover the whole day rather than just the rush hour, and again, the context of AmericanChopper's comments was "commuters". 3.5 in the original report (search for 'Traffic in the City 2018') gives more context as to how modal share varies throughout the day.
Is direct mail marketing effective than email marketing?
The issue with lootboxes specifically is twofold; one, lootboxes generally hold much less content than a pack of cards or stickers. Overwatch, for example, has four items a pack.

The second issue is that a physical object, like cards or stickers, does at least feel like a physical object, in that it's very easy to tell if you start having an excessive amount of them. On the other hand, on a lootbox, there isn't really a innate difference in response to buying one vs buying one hundred. So it eases some of the friction as well.
Those really shouldn’t have been the biggest takeaways.

Cure vs prevention.
If you write a blog on behalf of a business, perhaps ask someone to read it over - preferably someone who holds the views you seek to attack.
In my childhood, trading cards were often banned in schools because they caused issues related to the gambling aspect.
I don't honestly know if lootboxes are gambling or not, but it's time to be honest with the mechanisms behind them, and follow Chinese and Japanese regulations: be transparent and open about the probabilities behind them. Yes, even if it includes pity counters, etc.

Apple has started mandating this:
https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/21/16805392/loot-box-odds-ru...

But Steam, Google Play, PlayStation, XBox, and smaller platforms all need to follow suite, very quickly. Or they'll face even harsher legislations around the world.
Big Data in the Hands of Business Users via Search Analytics
Some insightful comments from Matthew Green on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/98922218828795494...
Roosboard Announces Search-Driven Analytics for Intuitive Visualization of Data
Isn't this about bringing Kazakh closer to say, Turkish too? I wondered if part of the motivation wasn't to align themselves more with the Turks - both languages having a common language family/ancestor.
Flask Rest API, Python Program on GitHub, Amazing Program
Tiny camper pod expands to 3 times its size in seconds
That is in there. See p79/80 in 3e for example of impedance relationships. Also lots of practical examples in the companion book "Learning the Art of Electronics"

I've had all editions of this including the first and it's definitely in there!
ASP.NET MVC help?
2C is the popularized number. In reality it's a range (0.8-2.6 for 2050 and 1.4-1.4-5.8 for 2100) and it's not certain how much humans can do about it or have to do with it (we are probably affecting it but how much is still an open question)

We have been figthing to survive nature from the start. Ex. sea rise is not a problem that can't be solved just look at Holland.

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg2/index.php?idp=29
Have you checked the Pimax goggles on Kickstarter?
I use these: https://www.cbyge.com

I picked them up at Target on a super sale. Honestly, all the functionality sucks, but since the only thing I do is set it to 1850K and lowest dim level and then leave it, it doesn't matter that everything else sucks about it.

I also picked up so no name LED multicolor night lights at Costco, but one of the "colors" is a yellow that's really close to 1850K.
I was thinking exactly this - I'm not massively clear on where loot boxes and blind-pack card games/sticker collectables differ. Both are fixed price products where you don't know the contents, with the value of said contents varying massively from the invested cost, along with the ability to trade/sell the contents on secondary markets.

Trading Pokemon cards, I reckon I spent more on booster packs trying to get a Charizard than I've spent on all of the chests, loot boxes and packs in games, for nothing more than a piece of card that (sadly) eventually gets water damaged...
In the early days web sites would often be down, or you might need to copy pages or a whole site to disk for access offline, especially on laptops. Even in the early 2000s I used to take dumps of HTML documentation with me on disk or thumb drive, because even if I had internet access at a hotel or customer site I wouldn't have access back to the company network. It was an essential feature.
To find the purpose itself :-)
People keep trying to make it so you can build complex sites and applications without coding, and in the end, what you end up with is far more complicated, fragile and inflexible than if you had just stuck with a normal development pipeline. Drupal's insistence on being both a product and a platform out of the box is what got them into this mess in the first place. They overestimated how much different use cases have in common, so they had to bolt on late-binding and lazy evaluation all the way up into the presentation layer.

I don't know if this is solvable. A CMS is complex enough that each of its functionalities deserves the care of good product and technical designers. These pieces ought to then be integrated into a cohesive whole, a la carte. For desktop software, we were able to pull this off pretty well, with 2000s OS X as the most cohesive, successful attempt, dictated by strong design guidelines and solid enough tech... And note that they invisibly transitioned CPU architecture along the way! But when online collaboration and multi device access became a requirement, everyone flailed and forgot the lessons of the past.

I don't think the current software market is capable of something like that. Almost everyone is trying to make captive SaaS where compatibility only exists on a service-to-service basis, in a subordinate manner. Branding is more important than cohesion, and flexibility and interoperability has taken a back seat to dumbing down.
> Ecosystems and societies are pretty robust to that level of change over 200 years.

Not so much the sea level, as the effect in change in average temperature; many plants have their reproduction cycles triggered by particular temperatures. The boundaries between different types of ecosystem are determined by temperature range. It will also make a difference to which crops are viable in which areas.

It makes rather a lot more difference if you think of it not as "each day is 2C warmer than the corresponding day of the previous year" but instead "most days are the same temperature but some are warmer by enough to wipe out the local staple crop".
That’s a good indication that the company is trying too hard to blow smoke up peoples asses with their “autopilot” effort. When people of this caliber throw in the towel after such as short time, it usually means reality can’t cash the checks the PR department is writing.
Don't you find these sliders "Your continued use of this site acts as your consent to the use of these cookies pursuant to the Research Affiliates Cookie Policy. " annoying as hell? Am I going to read it and close the page before reading the article? Or will I read the article, memorize the domain name and then never come back because they use cookies? Is that what GDPR will be in practice: good intentions but absurd results?
well, i guess he gave a talk about quantum computing and bitcoin, you could see that as an ad for that company.
this looks to me like a motte-and-bailey argument.
if he gave a talk, grew suspicious of their plans, quit supporting them, then there is no wrongdoing here, no proof that he ran a scam company.
Or maybe it's not a hoax and you are misdiagnosed. You might have cow milk protein allergy/intolerance, which is an allergic reaction that happens only in the digestive tract.

Try eating some dried/cured meat that has lactose added as a conservative. No issues? Not lactose intolerant.

Try taking some medicine that has lactose added as a binding agent. No issues? Not lactose intolerant.

Try eating any cured cheese such as Cheddar or Edam (0.0 g lactose, but check the carbs/sugars label to be sure). Issues? Not lactose intolerant.

Try drinking normal milk and then the same thing with exogenous lactase (e.g. Lactaid). Issues without lactase, but no issues with it? Lactose intolerant. Issues with both or no issues with any? Not lactose intolerant.

It's fairly easy to self-diagnose as long as you know how the intolerance works (an enzyme is missing in your digestive tract) and the lactose content of things.