skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's my suggestion for Google Maps: how about handling toll roads better? It's all-or-nothing. Why not put a little gray box saying "20 minutes shorter, $1.50", or "1 minute shorter, $29.50"? If you turn on toll roads, it'll happily always route you on a toll road or toll lane, even if it isn't any faster. And here in DC, toll roads can easily cost you $30-50 per trip.

Maps already gives you route options to choose from, both when you first start, and during your drive; why can't they do this with toll roads? Are they secretly working with EZ-Pass?
I wouldn't say they're "targeted at coders", but Macbooks seem to be very popular with them these days.

Seemingly less and less so as time goes on.

In fact, I don't exactly see coders being very discriminating on keyboard quality overall.

There's a reason why some coders are Thinkpad fans. You don't have to be very discriminating for coding, but a modicum of ergonomics does make a difference.

The main people who seem to care a lot about keyboards (and who keep the high-end mechanical keyboard makers in business) are gamers, not coders.

Interesting idea. I wonder what the percentages are of clicky keyboards versus switches like Cherry blacks?
Google started playing this game with the tpuv2, wherein they define a "TPU" as whatever they want to make it sound suitably impressive (I.e. Cloud TPU is four chips). This in turn led to nvidia calling the DGX-2 "the world's largest GPU
A bot calling for you and a bot answering for salons/restaurant. Both pretending to be human. It’s like having a client/server application speaking English with an accent, without versioning, schema nor content type. What could go wrong.
> What's the difference here between modifying and violating?

The difference is between broad consensus and divided opinion. A Constitutional amendment requires a 2/3 vote of Congress to propose, and ratification by 3/4 of states (which means any Constitutional amendment would require support from both red and blue states). Ordinary legislation only requires a 50% + 1 majority.
Truth is a defense in defamation cases. If that defense is presented, then a jury most certainly will attempt to determine if the defamatory statement is true.

And in almost any case, the jury is tasked with determining the credibility of witnesses.
This is cool! I won't be stuck with hterm and the bugs that have always been present in it any more :)
And you think this is the end of innovation, this is it, no improvements from here?

Duplex is interacting with a human and that person has no idea its a computer on the other end. Yes, Duplex is limited as it stands, but what is there to make you think something as described in grandparent post won't exist in ten years?
Maybe a general AI is just a very big collection of many smaller abilities.
Nano has syntax highlighting, auto-indent, spellcheck, regex search/replace, and overwrite prevention. It's clearly in a class beyond Notepad.
That's about as useful as saying that Wikipedia may contain nonsense and therefore you shouldn't believe anything in Wikipedia. If you have examples of things on Snopes that are wrong then please supply them.
> Also I'm astounded the Koch brothers are involved in this, and I'm curious what their profit motive is as I don't believe they have a single bit of altruism in them.

This speaks more about what flavor of marketing you've bought into than any sort of real understanding.

Nobody thinks they themselves is a villain. The Koch brothers have become political figures because they believe what they're doing is morally right.
They also have, or had, a circa $25 corded drill kit for sale (going by memory of briefly seeing, a year or two ago).

If someone doesn't have a drill and is contemplating purchasing and constructing a substantial piece of IKEA furniture, such as my parent's TV stand -- lots of bits to screw together. Under those circumstances, I suggest maybe they want to buy one of the drill kits.

I expect you can get a better corded drill elsewhere, and buy the relevant bits, for not much more. But, KISS, with regard to the amount of shopping to be done.

P.S. Well, what do you know. US $20, now, and cordless.

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00196101/
What kind of stress test do you have in mind? I've had a yubikey 4 for almost two years on my keyring that I use daily and despite not taking very good care of it it still works fine. It's been wet, it's been scratched, it's supported the weight of my keys while hanging from a USB port, it's been plugged and unplugged thousands of times...

They're pretty sturdy. Of course if you take some pliers to them I have no doubt that you'll be able to break them in half but for normal use you won't have a problem IMO. The size doesn't bother me either, it's like a very flat USB key.

I also have a nitrokey that's a bit shorter and bulkier and it comes with a cap which might be better to protect the connector, but on the other hand I'm sure I'd lose it sooner or later. A retractable port or something similar would probably be a better idea. Also the nitrokey is significantly slower which is the main reason I only have it as a backup for my yubikey currently.
> People who answer phones to take bookings perform an extremely limited set of questions and responses,

But that in itself is not even true across the industry, some(most) phone bookings are very complex, otherwise they would just use a web interface.
Google Maps (and in fact just about every nav program) has an option for "no highways". That'll probably be better for your objective than just plotting the shortest route, which may very well follow a highway at some point since highways frequently are more direct.
While we're at it, I hate when you click on a search result hoping to see the location, but instead it covers up your entire screen with pictures of food.
Curiosity. The desire to create. The will to have agency and interact with the universe. Interacting with other ppls ideas too.
Prof. Jack Balkin on Facebook and the Risks of ‘Data Capitalism’ – Yale Insights
"Google’s PM director for Chrome OS Kan Liu told me the company was obviously aware that people were using Crouton to do this before. But doing this also meant doing away with all of the security features that come with Google’s operating system."

I don't know if I am the only one, but this one made me laugh.
Just FYI the 3 year mark when you're in University is notoriously the place where you get bored. Just push through for another year... you'll thank yourself later
Is just an example of how unprobable things can still happen

Think about winning the spermatozoan race 2 millions of times in a row, as member of the most intelligent species known in the universe, one among millions of different forms of life, after surviving five consecutive massive extinctions that wipped the 90% of the life in the planet each time.

Statistically speaking, we can't be real.
Social media has become a social health problem and should be treated as such. YouTube still has the annoying auto play next set to on, and in my suggested viewing, I still see tones of shitty click-bait videos, for some reason.

They’re creating distraction, not helping to solve it. They’re driven by profit, why would they vaulanterly make they’re products less addictive or vaunarable people?

Regadles, “Social Corporate Responsibility” has already proven itself to be a sham.
Absolutely! That's actually in the hacker news commenting guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So to answer you question, yes, it would be more acceptable if you were saying that to me in person. In fact, I agree with you about the flow of the lectures, and I was looking for someone to bring that up and I'm glad that it's getting discussed here.

However, Jeremy and Rachel are both reading these comments and we should strive to provide thoughtful, fleshed out feedback. The work they've done on Fast.ai is a tremendous lift, and deserves more than a drive-by comment.
Aesthetics of the Chromebook Pixel
Android P Beta is available today
For the uninitiated: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html
I'll second that. A tool being simple and easy to reason about will beat one that tries to be fancy and do things for me any day.

Sadly, the tendency in tech people seems to be to make things as god-awful complicated as possible.

DOS: Install applications by copying a folder of files to your disk. They include their dependencies, and they can't really conflict. Can be "installed" to removable media.

Modern OSs: Install applications using a package manager that will automatically detect conflicts and grab dependencies for you, except when it screws up and hoses itself then it is time for a reinstall. Can only install applications from managed repositories. Can only install applications to hardcoded paths. Has no concept of installing applications to removable media so you can use them from any computer. Most don't even have the concept of downloading packages and their dependencies for installation on a different computer.

The modern tech solution to the problems caused by package managers? Containerization.

Sometimes I feel like it's a sport to see who can come up with the most convoluted pile of abstractions to solve the simplest problems.
The history of how train travel changed the whole world’s relationship with time
Here’s how self-driving cars could catch on
> Sure, and given that they haven't violated the rules, they can honestly say they're complying with them

Given that they don't know which rule they supposedly have violated the most they can honestly say is that they believe they are complying with them. It's not as if it's impossible that they have violated some rule in the eyes of Amazon, no matter how they read the ToS, and no matter how carefully they checked their own publications.

> Send a follow-up to a human afterwards, rather than trying to debate a bot.

This assumes that they know a human to contact, but strangely enough it also assumes that they aren't able to contact that human without first interacting with the bot.
How uncertainty could help a machine hold a more eloquent conversation
It depends on the kind of book.

For something like "measure what matters", the basic idea comes through in the title. I would expect that a summary would capture things pretty well - it will omit some detail, but it will be just detail. The big idea is the point, and that comes through even in the title. I suspect that most business books are in this category, but I am not sure.

For some things, though, the details really matter. Take "The C++ Programming Language", for example. You could, maybe, write a summary of that book. Do you know anything from reading it? Not really. Too much of the content is details. The whole point is the details.
Disappointing to see that it relies on Snopes for "fact checking". Also disappointing to see that what constitutes "quality journalism" is decided by a giant technology company. This is a big step backwards.
Many of the fonts mentioned seem to be commercial. There are plenty of free/floss fonts that have similar features. Montserrat, Roboto, Noto and Open Sans are particularly good.
Here are methods that store and retrieve … something, probably. The author had to make up method names because map[string]interface{} doesn't have an interface we could satisfy.

func (ctx *Context) SetObject(object interface{}, key string) { … }
func (ctx *Context) Object(key string) interface{} { … }

Here a caller has to provide a method that takes an arbitrary number of … whatever.

type rowScanner interface {
Scan(...interface{}) error
}
Google Assistant's 'Pretty Please' will encourage kids to be polite
Yes, my point is that we still don't know, so it's early to use them as evidence one way or the other. And with a lack of evidence, Chesterton's Fence implies we shouldn't touch it.
We are more than our brains, on neuroscience and being human
installed it about 3 hours ago and it definitely feels good enough to use as a daily driver
I read that as Saloon at first and now I am so disappointed.
People that are excited by this are being way too naive here.
It is not the computers I enjoy, it is solving real world problems. I really get a kick out of that, computer or not.
To me, it feels like Apple is trying to figure out how GreyKey and Cellebrite are getting in - and patching every vector they can think of in the meantime. I suspect that if law enforcement agencies are suddenly told they have to unlock new Apple devices within 7 days of acquisition, Apple will find out and can infer that the exploits have (e.g.) something to do with USB accessory access.
Has Messenger caught up to (or aiming to catch up to) wechat in terms of functionality and scope yet? I remember a lot of hubub about bots and conversational commerce.
Why do you describe the calls as "unsolicited"?
If I had to guess its because they want to move to their own proprietary systems and don't want to support backwards compatibility with "native" linux applications.
I have been using a Chromebook as my daily driver for nearly 2 years now.

Most of the time, I'm either at home or at work, so I just remote log into my development systems. I, personally, don't really need to lug around my entire development environment, though I used to be in that school of thought.

So, given that I really just need SSH, a decent Chromebook is cheap (as others mentioned), and can have a decent keyboard with long battery life. The one I have is around 1kg, so it is very "handy", and I carry it everywhere, as I would have a notepad in earlier days.
I wouldn't call $999 cheap
Why You Should Never Use Pure Black for Text or Backgrounds
It was never "marketed" except to devs and status signalers. The only one I ever saw in the wild was from a PHB with no use for it.
Cooling via oil insulation isn't something new - it is used for years inside high voltage transformers to keep temperature stable.

What kind of oil are you using?
How to boost your LinkedIn Profile in 2018
Funny coincidence: Stewart Brand was actually the camera man filming Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

Evidently he helped advise the team on how to present the demo.
I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that Google would have one backend service or set of services for all speech to text translation, and that all related products would be powered by it. They've been iterating on speech to text interfaces for at least 15 years now.
Don’t Eat Before Reading This (1999)
Yes. I've tried Waze, and the only advantage it has is showing where cops are (which isn't very reliable, the data is frequently out of date and it shows cops where there aren't any, or doesn't show ones that set up their speed trap recently or are on a rural road).

Google Maps will show you alternative routes as you drive, telling you how much extra time they'll take (or save). Waze does not do this, it only shows you one route. I frequently want to take a slightly different route than the one shown, perhaps because I'm coming to a stoplight and it shows the alternate route of turning right to be "similar ETA", and by turning right I can avoid spending 1-3 minutes at the light.

Basically, Waze is just too minimalist. I want more information, not less.
Maybe.. but voice is a common data format, like piping text streams in UNIX. Don't need gatekeepers like OpenTable...
It's comparable to using an RBL that excludes dynamic IP clients. The difference is one of culpability IMO, where the dynamic IP clients are likely to be innocents with compromised boxes but these cloud instance spammers are actively hostile (insofar as spammers are hostile)
I thought Project Treble was supposed to make the updating process easier from an OEM point of view. If so I wish they supported the Nexus 5X and 6P for one more version.
I don't think so. People have also tried to domesticate hippos for meat. Also motivated. Also not successful.
My bigger concern would be social engineering attacks. Once you have something that can reliably imitate a human, the potential to do social engineering at scale really takes off.
For work I am doing, most of the "automated tools" are things I wrote myself and I know what they do. It is up to the engineers working on the engagement to exercise care and avoid causing disruptions to the target or doing things they can't reverse easily.

I like to remind people that having someone on retainer that breaks your stuff with an automated tool is better than having some random guy on the internet break your site with the same tool. Either way it is eventually going to happen, but at least I will immediately notice and contact the right folks to help get it fixed.
Microsoft offers developers 95% of app revenue to compete with Apple, Google
Talking with humans is often a poor experience too. I can imagine employees of small businesses preferring to talk to Google rather than customers directly, as unlike real customers Google should be predictable, and never frustrated or angry.
Loads of love and take the time to listen to them when they speak to you even if you don't understand just nod and continue engaging they get used to you paying them attention in this way and eventually you'll understand them.
Even simpler. Apple doesn't have "enterprise" products that it sells to governments. Therefore, they can't be forced to comply through any wallet-based incentive.

Having said all that. . . I'm not sure that the rights of criminals' privacy outweigh the rights of citizens to be protected by law enforcement. I wish there was a clear way for law enforcement to act on behalf of citizens without such risk of corruption/abuse.
> The concept of digital wellbeing is a paradox.

No not really. Physical and mental wellbeing is linked to financial wellbeing. It makes sense for Google to want their customers to feel happier and healthier because they can be more productive, earn more money and ultimately spend that money on products that Google advertises.
I'm not against parenting advice in general--sometimes it's invaluable, like when you have a specific problem that's impacting you/your child's life, and you need to find a solution.

In terms of long-term parenting philosophies, though, I'd strongly suggest reading Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids by Bryan Caplan: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OA64Q6/

It's a book length treatment of the fact that twin studies have demonstrated extremely convincingly that as long as you meet a pretty low bar for decent parenting (you aren't such an obviously bad parent that you would get rejected by adoption agencies) the impact of your parenting on your kids' lives is minimal at best. You won't make them smarter, you won't change their personality to be more adventurous or cautious, you won't succeed in molding them with all the life lessons you've learned, and you won't put them on a path to happiness (or unhappiness) when they grow up.

This may sound somewhat bleak if you're hoping to tiger-mom your children to Harvard. But it's also freeing--you can stop worrying, enjoy the ride more, and maybe most importantly, give your kids a fun childhood they'll look back on with pleasure.
This sounds strangely like the arguments for reinterpreting the 2nd amendment.
You're being pretty uncharitable in assuming that there would need to be exactly one protection mechanism and that every source would necessarily have that same protection applied to it.

There are a spectrum of solutions to creating anonymity. If your source is just a faceless worker who happened to overhear something about their boss, then all they need from you is a burner phone, an email address on a public server, and GPG keys—all of which you can give out the public halves of.

If your source is Edward Snowden, and his information is about the state, then I would suggest that there's really no way to do things other than full-on "witness protection" in the sense Snowden achieved: the state is going to figure out who leaked the information, so even without giving other journalists access to your source, anonymity for them (where they currently live) is no longer possible. You may as well fly them to Russia; at which point they're safe enough that you can just give them the a public email address, tell them to access it from an Internet cafe over Tor, and now they've once again got a contact point that anyone else could interact with them through without "blowing their cover." So why not give it out?
The square root plays a role in the distribution of primes as well as in the area of a circle. The former is involved in an upper bound for the numbers to be checked performing Sieve of Eratosthenes.
I needed a machine to ssh from and have a browser. $250 acer chromebook with crouton mostly works.

This is not my primary machine however. I only use it at home to ssh into my desktop once in a while.
CS pays. Luckily it's also mildly interesting and sometimes very interesting. I don't love my job, but I work for a company that does good things and pays me pretty well.

None of my goals have ANYTHING to do with my career and most of them have EVERYTHING to do with motorcycles and offroad racing.

Software engineering funds my (very amateur) racing "career".

Loving your job such that you want to wake up every day and commit yourself to it is a fantasy for almost everyone and a reality for the few. Some people even on my team love what we do and think it's the coolest shit. For me, I'm happy here because it allows me the freedom to do the things in my life that are actually important to me.
Well, that's the most hostile possible interpretation.
So it's ok to force someone to talk to a human, but not a computer?
> 1. Making automated, unsolicited robocalls is unethical.

I'd say that any restaurant or salon that treats a customer booking a table or an appointment as 'unsolicited' might not stay in business for very long.
I have requested and gotten added several bike paths (all paved) to Google Maps so it would route properly through a park, so it might be someone with an mountain bike who requested Google to add it?
This question itself shows a little bit of privilege.

What keeps me going is having to pay the bills. And even after you pay bills you have to worry about retirement, and if you have enough for that you can worry about your family and friends.

Don't get me wrong I actually REALLY like my job right now but I didn't always like what I was doing. And probably one day I will also dislike what I am doing, but in the end you have to keep working so long as you need money.
maybe what's being rejoiced is the demise of a white-dominated monoculture.
pretty much the only reason the fax machine was still around was for restaurant ordering

The fax machine is still around now, and heavily used in the medical context: https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american...
I get that the grandmother side of thing is “old school” because of the printed photos, but why is the “modern” input side of this also using antiquated tech like sms?
Cheap and lightweight, but of reasonable quality. You'll get Linux out of the box. Effortless updates. Lots of battery life - my Chromebook came with 13 hours of battery and it is a few years old machine at this point.