skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This account seems to exists simply to say nasty one liners about politics and race, with a few "normal" posts mixed in that add very little to the conversation
As a trained risk assessor, I call BS on Penn. I would love to get a copy of the official risk analysis but, alas, I doubt one was ever performed.
I think it’s good to have all these different approaches at your disposal. I like having the powerful features of an IDE like PyCharm (including the debugger) but sometimes hop over to Jupyter to try stuff out in a different space.
Mine fails over to my hot standby
This may be the minority opinion here.

But Facebook, Google, and all these other shady companies that collects massive personal data, in ways that were never envisioned of being collected. They need to be reigned in. They have overstepped their boundaries of what is socially acceptable.

Facebook should just call themselves the FBIbook, because they have amassed such huge amounts of private data on us. And they have also done unethical things like creating fake dark profiles of you, or your children, and tracked them on their usage of the internet. This is egregious.

The creepiest thing by far, is their usage of facial scanning, to create a facial biometric of you. Their technology is probably something that the FBI has wet dreams of having. And they use this to identify you in any and all pictures on the internet.

Their next move, might be to actually partner up with brick-and-mortar stores, or CCTV surveillance cameras, to get a real time biometric identification on people. All the CCTV cameras at Walmart, Target, and in the malls, will get fed into the Facebook brain, and Facebook can build a real time tracking system as you wander through their digital surveillance system.

I just want to go to the mall and enjoy an ice cream with my loved ones. I'm not interested in getting tracked by Facebook's creepy surveillance system. This is akin to walking around in a digital virtual prison, that we can never escape from. And once this technology is built, then it will get expanded everywhere. To every single street corner camera, and combined with your smartphone's GPS, it's the perfect thing to track you everywhere. Just to sell you an ad, for something that you don't want to buy.

If you thought they make a lot of money now, by selling ads on their platform. Just imagine when they decide to go down this route. Their revenue and profit potential will explode! And they will be unstoppable.
Absolutely agree. He should’ve downsized and cut expenditures, but for whatever reason (maybe hubris? Pride?) he allowed things to get out of control. For me, I know that I can get a job at Home Depot and make the mortgage payments, and that’s why I stuck with something small and affordable.
Or perhaps they are all just blinded by greed and have invested far more than they had to lose... probably much simpler explanation
Always find it interesting how sophisticated they can be with such scant cognitive hardware.
Your swap() method violates the liskov substitution principle.

If Java had pass-by-reference, you could write one that doesn't.
yea I did that program. I'll check it out again at some point and see if they added more description on that part of it.
The "market self-healing" here is the development of multifamily residential near jobs and transit, which is already close to legal limits.

What's not available "almost anywhere" is your industry's center of gravity.
As per the HN guidelines, on topic posts = "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Maybe it doesn't qualify as news but the writing is fantastic & it certainly satisfied my intellect! I'm happy to see this here.
Subclasses and final fields make this impossible in the general case.
I think a lot of people miss this point. A home isn't an investment. It's a place to live. There are studies I have seen that show that your children do better in school if you have a house vs an apartment. There could be other variables there sure. But the main reason I hear to buy a home is to 'invest in your future'.

Personally, I live in an apartment. I don't want the upkeep costs and time associated with a house. Even if I were to find a place to buy with a mortgage similar to my rent, I would then have upkeep costs on top of that. No thanks. I'll let someone else do all my maintenance, mowing, and snow removal, thank you very much.
IMO, the biggest mistake he made was not keeping in touch with the final consumers of the product, as he was building the rest of the process. If he’d done regular posts on social media about what he was trying to do, he could have gotten good feedback and contacts with like-minded people much earlier.

And then he wouldn’t have had to shoulder that burden himself all by his lonesome.
This is one of the most frustrating issues I've had with the requests/urllib3 libraries. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with half of an HTML page or a PDF or a PNG. And even if it did, I certainly don't know how I'm supposed to handle those things when I don't get an indication that I'm likely dealing with an incomplete response. I can construct a use case where I might want this behavior (maybe a FLIF image), but it feels like such a huge outlier to me, that this being the default behavior of requests, which caters to making the common cases easy, has always felt a bit odd.

I don't begrudge the authors for this at all. After all, these are people donating their time to work on libraries solving hard problems for free that I can then use as part of my job. There is nothing that has stopped me from forking these libraries and changing the behavior myself, other than a lack of time and that, while I dislike this behavior, its only is a problem somewhat infrequently. All that being said, I really wish the response to this issue has been something other than what feels like a language-lawerly reading of the spec (requests isn't an "agent" and so that sentence in the spec doesn't apply) and the theory that someone _might_ be able to do something with an incomplete response _some_ of the time and as such, the vastly more common case should be made much more complicated.

But, anyway, I'm glad to hear that this issue is being addressed and I thank the authors for their work!
One example I did many years ago: I want to make this download page vary what it serves by user agent, providing instructions for any things they’ll need to install first (because .NET stuff used to go in the user agent string), and providing the appropriate download link for their platform. Most of this could be done in JavaScript, but there was at least one part of the mix that couldn’t be, but could still be detected from the server.

Now which is easier—make a new module to serve this page or filter the output of that page, or just enable PHP code for this page, and write it directly in PHP on this page only?
Capacity, speed, power and cost become critical factors in memory for AI/ML
In the old adage "there are two difficult problems in programming: caching, naming things, and off by one errors" edit and continue drastically helps with the last one (even for "professional programmers"). I loved that feature in C# while I was working at MS, it saved me so much time from checking that all my indexing was correct.
> the Outing Club is very popular, and also run by amateurs.

This is true of hundreds, maybe thousands of colleges and universities in the U.S. It's not unusual to have a college outing club that is led by students.

> No insurance company would cover a high-risk activity group without demanding conditions like being able to call 911 or medevac.

This is just incorrect. Backcountry activities are not necessarily higher risk than other activities, and insurance companies will certainly cover such activities. Again: many, many colleges and universities already have coverage for their outing clubs.
This is why I find movements like HBD so disgusting, despite their "scientific" origins. They start with a conclusion, the justification of race, and seek evidence to prove it. Of course, they find such evidence. Anyone looking to prove any conclusion can find evidence - even scientifically strong evidence. Heck, even psychics and supernaturalists have scientific evidence on their side! [1]

No matter the evidence though -- Categories aren't facts.

> “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” And the answer: “Four – because a tail isn’t a leg regardless of what you call it.”

Categories are useful _caches_ of information. We define "limbs involved in the movement of the center of mass of a body" as _legs_ because the concept is useful as a cached "leg". If the concept stops being valuable, we will eventually purge it from the cache. The danger lies in mistaking the cached concept for the original value. [2] Race doesn't predict anything; nowadays, the cached value, crime/success/happiness, is substituted for race, and the results are a reinforcing cycle. [3]

More relevant to HN, categories are why "adversarial" effects on many neural networks are so strong. NNs are training to categorize to exacting strategies - strategies not at all in mind by their creators. The apocryphal tank NN meme - that dataset bias led algorithms to detecting sunny skies instead of tanks -- comes to mind. [4] The story is made up, the moral somewhat muddled in the telling, but the surprise survives. What we reward and what we desire are separate things, and in the difference, the whole world lies.

[1]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...

[2]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/02/causal-models-at-work/

[3]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/s...

[4]: https://www.gwern.net/Tanks
How to Tell a Story
Unlike you, I found that the author discussed many instances of hacking in the article. He hacked social conventions in order to walk freely in places where otherwise it could be dangerous for him to walk. Social engineering is a very appropriate topic for Hacker News.
A friend of mine who worked at one of Elon's companies for a number of years was often flabbergasted by the hubris involved in a culture that seemed to insist on repeating almost every single mistake of the past in search of solutions known to those skilled in the art. Valuable time and very large amounts of money are being wasted on engaging in a constant game of reinventing the wheel.

I was told many people brought this up to Elon internally, often with materially negative effect for them. My friend never did, BTW, because he saw what happened and didn't want any part of it. He kept his mouth shut and moved-on on to a competitor where engineers don't waste time and money reinventing every last thing.

He said that Elon is a very smart and truly remarkable guy, but one who lives in an echo chamber within which nobody has the balls to oppose him. Elon seems to be known for unleashing verbal hell in meetings at anyone who dares, insulting them and generally chopping them up in front of their colleagues. Very soon nobody wants to say anything more than necessary, if that. Everyone is in fear of going into a meeting with Elon and getting shredded.

The above is an account I heard from a third party. I have no clue as to the veracity of these statements. The reader is advised to assume them to be false and conduct their own research.
Sounds like one of the concepts that inspired the book Blindsight by Peter Watts. The subconscious 'reptile brain' is able to process certain old-school dangers, like an object moving quickly towards us, faster than our conscious brain, and can cause involuntary, potentially life-saving, reactions to the stimulus.

The conscious mind processing these things can often get in the way but, in the case of sports, alter the instinctive behaviour into something advantageous. An augmentation of the conscious and subconscious into better performance.

A converse example, being conflict between conscious and sub-conscious, is if you drop a mug of boiling water, the instinctive reaction is to try and catch 'thing you dropped', but the conscious reaction is 'don't burn yourself' so don't catch it and jump backwards to not get splashed.

Very interesting stuff.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Consc...

Beware (or since it's the HN crowd, Recommended!): hard sci-fi.
> data is stored in Arc Lisp closures in flat files.

Are you sure? What the word "closure" usually refers to isn't an externalizable object used for persistent storage.
That would be terrible if it was true, which it isn't.

Source: literally just tried it.
Use waze, it works better anyway and basically uses the same info backend as google maps
I skimmed a bit because this sounds just like how Eclipse debugger will jump back to the start of a function if you change the code in it, mixed with the Display tab that lets you write code using all the variables in the current scope. I don't use it while writing my own code, but it's invaluable for figuring out surprises in other people's.
Who put you in charge?
Please go read the selfish mining paper.
I wouldn't mind them using aggregate anonymous information, but they don't need to know my every move, so I turn off google everything and use alternatives.
great article. Very happy to see this on Hacker news even though it isn't the typical story found here.
As someone who sells both of these services, I can only add that it depends, and if you have a good dataset, it's trivial to write either one.

But once you start having to account for noise or seasonality or autoregression or dynamic weights or non linear kernel spaces, pure SQL really starts to fall down on the job.
Are they? An application leveraging email for its transport layer could easily use standard email libraries, and social networks are little more than mailing lists with a different interface.
use startpage.com google search without the tracking
> It's impossible to be proud of a nation that is only a land of opportunity for those who are white and middle class.

I had a conversation with a black man who pointed out that North America was in fact the ideal that Hitler had aspired to. North America, Australia, New Zealand is the realization of Anglo Saxon lebensraum. South Africa and India was also supposed to be turned into similar places but the natives fought back and survived. Churchill even wanted to turn China into a lebensraum to be divided between Slavic people in the North East and Anglo Saxons in the South West. Quite shocking when you realize what designs they had on the world.
No. It is possible for miners to collude and get unfair advantages, without even close to 1/3 the hashpower, and without being easily detectable.
> Social engineering is a very appropriate topic for Hacker News.

Certainly, if you take "hacker" to be the mainstream definition corresponding to "cracker".
Actually, we have repeated the mistakes of India. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/04/tw...
“An alcohol”

Is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Ethanol is an alcohol, enjoy a lovely drink. Methanol is an alcohol, try not to to drink it. Alcohol is an incredibly broad family and the scheduled substance (Pinacolyl alcohol: 3,3-Dimethylbutan-2-ol) is not isopropyl alcohol. It’s not even close. It’s also not a precursor to sarin, but soman.

Notice that isopropanol isn’t scheduled at all, so I feel justified in asking if you were just confused or trying to be sneaky?

Oh and by the way, most alcohol hand sanitizers are 70% isopropyl alcohol, not ethanol.
checkout startpage and searx as well. better results than DDG
I haven't thought of WiFi as a available infrastructure until this year, the development was so slow to arrive I missed it actually coming.

And this is the City Of London, I live close enough to consider the city home.

Ironically, I only noticed the ubiquity of WiFi in the city as a result of testing the lowest end phone and prepaid options possible. This is in reaction to the most ridiculous dispute with my contract network provider, over the fate of the premium number I've used for a long long time being held hostage. I only wanted it to move to another account..

I remember the Palms very well. At the time I carried a treasured HP 209LX, secretly wishing for a Psion 5 keyboard but not their systems environment. (I had the HP a while if you note the overlap)

I wish I could find the story again, but I think the sadness was just the classical combination of blunt management and silicon valley egos.

This is the canonical answer for every technological near miss, isn't it?

I mean cost driven aggressive B School management plus idealistic impatient but always sufficiently talented to change the world software and hardware Engineers, Always Always Always the same, WHY DO YOU GUYS KEEP DOING IT??!!!

I honestly care about the answer, because I thought this was the past and not the normal, when I learned to program, oh, thirty five years ago...

As for the infrastructure WiFi...

The Result has been I learned that I am almost entirely independent of any cellular carrier network for my voice connectivity.

I haven't quite yet, but I actually could drop the Networks out of my life!

The UK is blessed with a ISP called Andrews and Arnold, www.aaisp.net who will port my (once freed) precious memorable number to a SIM card that resides on their MVNO. This cuts my recurring payment to merely £2.40pcm! And, as desired, I can have more lines on that number. I must avoid starting in how good AAISP really is. If you want to be recognised by voice when you call, and get enterprise grade services, please mention John owes Phil Boddy one, and hadn't forgotten...

Oh, and my Networks- free telephonic life?

I am seriously contemplating whether it's worth the hassle of applying to install a VHF/UHF D-STAR Repeater, which our building management seems happy to let us do, to cover the Bank / St. Paul's areas.

AAISP let you port your number (any number, cellular numbers are new) to their VOIP services. I can route them as I please, so apart from the slight lack of duplex, why not over HAM RADIO? I have figured out how to use a freephone number to call in and take over the call, from a payphone, and the idea amuses me greatly. But the fact is, I'd rather carry a dedicated WiFi access device that provides me with use of a headset and the radio /audio processing power possible in a shoulder strapped battery and module, than I would carry another$1000 phone obsolete the moment the manufacturer cares to not update it.

I guess I'd just love to be serious about putting my call sign on my business card!
Data Loss Prevention – It's All About Decentralization
Sure. And since this is an obvious fact, I figured most people would read that in. But just to be clear, I mean "solved more effectively some other way".

Blockchains in particular carry a business penalty for a few reasons. One is that they're novel. As Dan McKinley says, we should "choose boring technology" [1] unless we have a strong incentive not to. Blockchain expertise, to the extent that it exists, is bid up in the marketplace, giving another excellent reason to pick something else. A third is that the vigorous blockchain hype has created a fair bit of blockchain skepticism in reaction. I know people looking for work that won't even talk to blockchain companies. And then we have questions about security, efficiency, reliability, and all the other operational concerns that one mainly learns through hard lessons (hopefully other people's hard lessons written up for the rest of us to read).

[1] http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
I would argue that double-entry accounting is a technology that obviates the need for trust between humans (by delegating it to books and arithmetic), and therefore erodes civilization.
> they can charge you whatever they want as you are forced to pay.

You would pay damages, possibly with a statutory minimum.
Companies have a large problem of having their data tucked away or inaccessible to the stakeholders. When people talk about AI / ML what they actually need is their data cleaned to the point where they can communicate to their stakeholders. Also, all of the companies who sell AI / ML as consultants are really good already at cleaning data.

When companies actually hire data scientists what they typically do is clean data for a few months to a year . Then they interpret the data by probably being able to perform linear regression. At that point the data is in a state where it can be easily understood by those stakeholders and then they have created value. Whether or not the linear regression or whatever model has been learned may mean something. But, at the end of the day you need to tell stakeholders how they can create value and guess what SQL and Bash will do 90% of the job.
> Military installations are put in rural areas because nobody wants artillery practice to happen near their houses.

Reminds me of the cheeky MCAS Beaufort slogan, "The Noise You Hear, is the Sound of FREEDOM."
As far as soccer goes, fifa resists video playback so that the quality of available officiating tools are the same in first and third world countries. In other words, rich countries don't deserve better officiating enabled by video replay just because they're rich.
Parking in San Francisco is at least a second car payment. I'm not sure it actually matters that cars themselves are more affordable. And the rest is going to be trivial as a percentage of your income either way.
I'm sorry, I don't know of one. But that doesn't mean PoW blockchains are actually reliably doing this either.
This was my initial thought behind my reply to the original thread
> from facilitating scams and other illegal activity

The same was said over and over on the nascent days of the internet, about how it facilitated anonymity so easily and how it would be used by criminals.

> by stealing CPU cycles

Difficulty in bitcoin mining is raising all the time (because of the competition among miners). This is why nobody mines nowadays with CPUs or GPUs but with ASICs. The fact that some sites are trying to achieve some decent mining hashrate by pulling the amount of visitors of a website is a naive move that will soon be off-set by even more raising levels of difficulty. Soon this will not be profitable at all, even if your website was the 1st in Google's page rank.

> to the significant impact on climate change

I like that skeptics raise this point, because:

1) The cryptocurrency mining industry is the fastest one to chase energy-efficient solutions. As soon as a device consumes less electricity, it's adopted widely because of the huge incentives to do so (e.g. CPU->GPU->ASIC).

2) Compare the electricity spent by the entire banking industry with the electricity spent by the entire crypto-mining industry. Now guess what's more efficient.
Yup. The only fields where Bitcoin et al have an obvious advantages is scams, fraud, speculation, money laundering, and a little light drug crime and extortion. Bitcoin has many theoretical use cases, but possibly none that are legitimate, socially useful, and in practice better than alternatives. And we've had nearly 10 years for those uses to appear.
Re: Student Activities Fee, the current fee at PSU is $258, including $60.26 for student activities. Some of that is student organization insurance, the bulk of it is allocated to activities by UPAC, the University Park Allocation Committee. And IIRC a $50 default budget for any organization.

I used to be the treasurer for the Urban Gaming Club and got them UPAC funding for "Nerf capture the flag" events run on Friday/Saturday nights in the student union building. We had inflatable paintball bunkers and maybe 10 loaner blasters, most of the recurring attendees brought their own. Fun times.

EDIT: link for reference http://www.studentfee.psu.edu/university-park/up-how-the-fee...
On a semi-related note... I started a new instrument this year... I've been taking a video every week. My first video is absolutely hilarious. This method is really encouraging, it's really easy to see progress