skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, but the "short run" argument sort of sounds like saying "I hate people that wear green tshirts because they keep buying Teslas and people like me who wear red tshirts can't get one because of them!"
It's enabled by-default now.
>> No, these are universal human rights.

> A group of people, mostly men, got together and wrote some things down and declared that they are "universal" "rights".

That's false, as I pointed out; they've been endorsed and embraced worldwide for centuries. Generally speaking, almost any group given a choice has endorsed them, men and women.

Also, the supporters of oppression like to frame it as a matter of opinion, and then invoke some extreme relativism: Your opinion is X, mine is Y, therefore there's no real basis for X. We could say it about anything: You think murder is wrong, I think it's ok, therefore it's just a matter of opinion. It's not a meaningful argument and doesn't address the real and very strong basis for universal human rights.

Another consideration: Should you and others be allowed to debate this issue with me? Why?

...

The rest of the parent comment attributes things to me that I haven't said, so I'll pass commenting on it.
> The max takeoff weight of a Boeing 787 is 50 tons more than it's maximum landing weight

I honestly don't know, but could this be part of the design simply because the engineers know the plane will weigh less on landing? Seems like that design would change if so much mass from fuel was no longer lost/burnt.
Oh cool, I've also done a presentation on bandit methods for early-undergrads (see: https://gtagency.github.io/2016/experimentation-with-no-ragr..., its missing speaker notes so it looks a bit strange, but that outlines the structure fairly well). It was also sort of an intro to the beta distribution and why you should love it, hence the focus on Thompson Sampling.

Some critiques:

- I feel like your justification/explanation for why this is useful is a bit lacking. Personally I find framing it in terms of regret-minimzation better than gain-maximization, even though in practice they're the same. I think it frames the situation in such a way where you go in knowing that you will have to pick non-optimal things some, so your job is to learn the underlying distributions as quickly as possible, instead of trying to pick the best things. Interestingly, I think thinking of it as gain-maximization leads you down an epsilon greedy path, whereas regret-minimzation leads you toward UCB1/Thompson Sampling better. Since you pivot to RL instead of just bandits, I can kind of understand it, but see my last point.

- As a general rule, I try to minimize math in undergrad-focused talks/documents. Even as someone who spends a lot of time explaining statistical concepts to people, my eyes glaze over when I see `q*(a) = E[Rt|At = a]`. Obviously you need some and this is just a personal thing. For the most part I actually think you do a decent job of explaining the equations you use. At least until the gradient bandit part :P Then it just feels like a textbook proof excerpt.

- Nit: You don't fully explain that epsilon-greedy is greedy, except epsilon of the time. That caught me up for a second.

- The last thing is that I feel like the motivation and difference between stationary and nonstationary reward distributions isn't well explained. Nonstationary rewards don't really "fit" the mental model behind k-armed bandits a lot of the time. I'm actually curious for a better motivation there, as I can't articulate one myself.
Problem is that cheap and fast and good are all moving targets. Cheap and fast and good meant very different things 30 years ago for planes, 10 years ago for cars, and 2 years ago for technology.

There's a fourth variable: time. Want cheaper, faster, AND better? Wait for advancements in technology. I had a 90's truck with 190HP that got 18mpg. Today I drive the same model but 10 years newer with 270HP without trading anything on gas milage and selling for roughly the same price. And the interior of the truck was great in the 90s, but the newer ones are worlds beyond that.

All I had to do was wait 10 years for it to be invented. Many failed products are just ideas whose time has not come yet.
However, it is not (officially) supported[1]
I still can't understand what's wrong with Microsoft locking up users and developers to what I consider inferior ("consumer", as they call it) release of Windows, knowing LTSB is not that different from Enterprise

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/productinfo/vs...
> where economic gains and jobs are being automated away from the masses of low-skilled workers and up to the elite of high-skilled workers.

Just want to caveat that people tend to make an umbrella claim that automation is killing low-skilled jobs without considering:

a. the pervasive and increasingly evident effects of globalizing low-skilled jobs and the very real wage growth in poorer territories including but not limited to China

b. that the issue may well be solved by training people so that we have less low-skilled workers (which some argue to be impossible, despite there being no supporting evidence)
The government spent a lot of money to develop the Lyme bio-weapon (and probably also a vaccine). I doubt they would be super excited about a vaccine being made available to the public.
> Zolotaya Rybka

Hadn't heard that phrase before. This appears to be a decent explanation:

https://russiapedia.rt.com/of-russian-origin/zolotaya-rybka/

"If you’re too greedy, you’ll lose everything."
Not happiness - enjoyment. The two are closely linked, but you don't inherently have to be happy to get enjoyment out of something.

What I mean is that you don't always have to hit max to be satisfied. Don't get so bogged down in the details that you come up for air after you've hit 50.
As mentioned elsewhere, there needs to be some long term incentive to keep the system on at all that counters the short term financial disincentive.
I don't use an ad blocker. I have JS turned off, thus don't see ads. When I encounter a website that's interesting enough to browse even though it does not work w/o JS (rare), I open it up in Chromium (which I actually keep around to use a couple web apps that I have to use). And every time I do that I realise what a huge piece of shit online publishing has become. Almost all websites that publish professionally are just overengineered crapware, viable only because the bubble that's the ads business. Luckily there's a sane subset of the internet that I can use without thouching all this crap most of the time. If their business model is failing due to us not turning around and bending over, let it be so. Who cares, apart from them?
What does a reckless drivers' death mean for the future of automobiles?
Whoops, my apologies, didn't knew they were so many.
Do you have any references for this? I couldn't find any mention of this in my research. For example it's not mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...
SoftBank. Tencent. The world is increasingly being controlled by a handful of companies.
GitHub Checks API
Various combinations of allergies among members of my household preclude dogs, cats, and mammalian exotics.

The choice is therefore reptile, bird, or no pets at all.

A terrapin isn't any worse than a cat, really. They'll interact with you when they feel like it, and do their own thing when they don't. But they won't go around destroying things when they get bored. It's not a dog, but it won't be killing anyone with dander, either--salmonellosis, maybe, but not allergens.

Fish are mostly just decoration. If you're going to have an aquarium anyway, you might as well put an aquatic reptile in it. They'll at least acknowledge your existence as foodgiver.
> well-known fact that Al-Jabr took some mathematical aspects from India and spread them across the Arabic countries

Your “Al-Jabr” (Short for Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa’l-muqābala, or The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing) was a book, written by Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who was Persian. Like other scholars writing in Arabic at the time, he read translations of Greek and Indian sources, while also doing significant original work.

The book of his which explained and advocated Indian numerals was a different book (not “Al-Jabr”). We have this in Latin translation so the original title is unknown, but Wikipedia speculatively lists Kitāb al-Jam‘ wat-Tafrīq bi-Ḥisāb al-Hind (The Book of Addition and Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation).

[Edit: I just read the linked blog post which this discussion is ostensibly about, and noticed that the above was already described there. I assume you didn’t read it. You might want to start with that.]

If you want to play a game of “whose culture first invented everything”, we can trace a whole heck of a lot back to the Sumerians (and for what we can’t trace, who knows what still lies on some buried cuneiform tablet). But of course there were then crucial additional advancements made by Akkadians, Egyptians, Hellenes, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Persians, Italians, French, English, Russians, Germans, Hungarians, Canadians, Japanese, .....

Mathematics is international and spreads easily. No culture can uniquely claim to have “invented” something as massive as “algebra”, even if we limit ourselves to topics taught in secondary school.
This is tangentially related: I came across this Reddit post a while back that I found very insightful. In the area of submarine design, the Soviets/Russians are actually much more innovative than Americans. They seem much more willing to try new ideas whereas Americans stuck to a more conservative try and true design.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bzekv/what_...
> Windows 95 main objective was to allow you to use a computer easily.

>And it did just that.

That's true. Nowadays, if an OS only gave you the ability to use a computer easily, would people like it or hate it?

I don't know. What does Windows 10 provide beyond the ability to use a computer?
I think this conflates monetary inflation with cost inflation. A universal one time increase in income will likely be absorbed by an increase in the cost of housing unless there is a mass migration from urban to rural areas.
Here are some links to the CDC's statistics and maps on Lyme disease for those interested:

https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/graphs.html

https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/maps.html

https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/tables.html

As an aside, it's tricky interpreting certain stats regarding epidemiology. The incidence is the number of new cases in the population in a given time frame, and prevalence is the total number of people known to have the disease in the population. Sometime a disease can appear to be "on the rise" because there is increased surveillance and screening for the disease, or because diagnostic methods have improved, which naturally lead to an increased incidence and prevalence.

Disclaimer: I'm not arguing that Lyme Disease isn't real, isn't serious, or anything along those lines. But from a medical perspective, we deal with fear of Lyme way more often than the actual disease. Some parents will bring their child into the clinic every time they think they may have seen a tick within arm's reach of them. And when someone presents with an attached tick, it's more often than not an adult wood tick (which can transmit RMSF and tularemia but are not B. Burgdorfi vectors).

When you are bitten by a tick, or any insect, some inflammatory response is expected, i.e. your skin will probably turn red. It doesn't automatically mean it's erythema migrans (bull's eye rash). But to muddy the waters even further, as little as 50-80% of confirmed LD cases had the EM sign, and many don't recall a tick bite whatsoever.

But if you are in an endemic area, clinical suspicion for LD is high, we should be able to prove you have the disease with lab tests, right? Well, unfortunately Borrelia are notoriously difficult to culture, so that's out. The CDC recommends a two-step testing process.

Step 1 is the Enzyme Immunoassay (EIA). If your EIA is negative, LD is ruled out. If it is positive or "indeterminate" (2nd most common outcome after negative in my experience), you move on to the Western blot which looks for antigenic proteins associated with the disease. It is considered positive if 2 specific bands are visualized or if at least 5 of a list of 10 other bands are seen. The problem is that these bands can take up to 6 weeks after exposure to become detectable. If you have no idea when/if you were actually exposed, this test is a shot in the dark. To top it all off, it can also come back "mildly" to "moderately" positive for LD.

So if your EIA is negative, or if your WB is 2/2 or 5+/10 positive, we can give you a definitive answer. Otherwise, it comes down to clinical judgment and weighing the risks and benefits of treatment. If you were bitten by a tick, got a rash, had no drug allergies, the safer play is to assume LD, give antibiotics, and forgo the serologic testing that may or may not give an answer.

TLDR - Lyme Disease is complicated.
How to choose a flight
The Ice Is Melting: South Korea to Ease Regulations on Cryptocurrency
At the same time, when Concorde stopped flying after the accident in 2000, people who used to fly on her, flew on other things, so these passengers weren't lost revenue wise.
That New Memory Smell: Tech Can Tell If Your Flash Is New or Recycled
My stance is that GPs ingenuity of the poor is really the fact that some poor are clever. This makes it look like survivorship bias, (some poor succeed) but actually it's explained by the stronger causal relationship that it's better to be born smart than born wealthy. But of course, as ur link suggests, its even better to be born wealthy and smart as they are both positively correlated with success. But I think in this discussion it's worth highlighting that intelligence is a an important factor that applies to both sides of economic status, and perhaps it's more important.
Monthly would be a better cadence for me, but that may be because I've mostly worked in jobs where I talk to my manager frequently on a daily basis.
Why must every post on HN have a (surprisingly) high ranking post just crapping all over some aspect of a project?
Which is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17012329 jacquesm may comment more than once in the thread, no? :)
Scientists warn against losing a crucial research ship
You could easily find out if you’re right. Most airlines offer the same routes direct both with and without stops. The non-stop flights usually cost more (sometimes a lot more) and are often full. At least some of those people are optimizing for time. So clearly there is a demand to pay more for shorter flights.
Only if its annoying enough for someone to write adblock rule for that particular website and push it into popular lists (EasyList, Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list, etc).

Personally I only do it when my Mum asks me ;-) and never block native (siglent banner on eevblog)/regional relevant (small town website with static ads for local businesses) ones.
> he absence of means- and behavior-testing is what the “U” (either “unconditional” or “universal”) refers to.

Surely you can't expect the effect of UBI to be the same between, say, cardiologists and minimum-wage workers. The parent's point was that it might subsidize behavior of certain groups more than others, and making UBI universal isn't going to solve that because this isn't a very homogeneous universe.
> The newest model had been built in 78 (G-BOAF, Aircrat 216). Think about it, how many airlines back in 2000 were flying planes that were between 22 and 25 years old? Not that many. Just looking right now, AF and BA are around 12 to 13 years for their average fleet age.

By way of comparison, the last BA 747-100 flight was late 1999, on G-AWNO, which had been delivered to BOAC in 1973. The last 747-200 flight was not much later (2001, G-BDXO), despite being a far, far newer airframe (delivered 1987).
Vision is an important part of my navigational ability, but I can (very rarely) sense location with eyes closed - eg. with eyes closed on a train/airplane being able to guess where I am on the journey (hard to explain, sorry).
PyDev of the Week: Elizabeth Sander
I don't think it means anything really. Judging from that article, the scope of his biohacking was nothing more than getting treatments injected into people before they went through the many years of tediously long testing and approval. He didn't accomplish much, much of his fame was from hype and reckless stunts. He established a company, touted a bunch of unfounded achievements and breakthroughs, and ultimately came up empty. It even says at the end that he was shunned from the biohacking scene after his herpes stunt, so it's not like the biohacking scene took off in popularity. For as long of an article as that was, it said very little. I think his view of getting people treated without the lengthy process of following regulations, laws, and approval was noble in a sense, but too few people feel the same as him for any meaningful progress to be made. If you have a company that is offering experimental treatments to human test subjects who agree to be tested on, more power to them. I wouldn't call that biohacking, just using experimental treatment.

I was surprised at first to learn that biohacking in this sense was about medical treatments, I've always looked at it as becoming one with technoloy, such as putting chips in your hands that serve specific functions(unlocking doors, logging in, etc).
The other side of the coin (having grown up dirt poor, nearly starved to death as a child) is that by the time I hit 45 about half my high school class was already dead. Mostly alcohol and the sorts of accidents that come from working dangerous jobs.

Only a couple really made it out and thrived, of the ones that remain many are broken and on barbiturates or meth, still just trying to make it through the day somehow.

I work with a lot of people now who grew up wealthy on the east coast or in Orange County, and they often just don't believe me that people starved to death a couple states over while they were summering at the Hamptons. These venn diagrams just don't mix, ever.
The curse of capitalism in software (and to a large extent, hardware) businesses. It provides great leaps every once in a while. If you want to call Win95 such a leap, okay, or maybe the better versions of OSX or MacOS were great leaps. You can find great leaps on the hardware side, HP's early printers, the iPhone, etc. But businesses can't sustain themselves with incremental improvements between those great leaps, so a pathology develops.

Companies tend to resort to a release schedule that packages a bunch of necessary and useful refinements with more flash, changed UI, and added partially-broken features. That ends up making the products worse by removing functionality some users depend on, making the products slower or less efficient in some cases, and requiring users to re-learn interfaces.
I've made desktop apps with electron and you can definitely make a decent one but it isn't going to be as fast. If it's a simple program it's not bad but if you're going to do any complicated computation you'll wish you had gone native. On the other hand, if it's not a complicated app, some people are going to wonder why this simple app is taking so many resources.

How about a compromise. Instead of c++ why not learn Python instead and use pyside QT. This was actually what I ended up doing coming from webdev. You don't get the steep learning curve and can get a lot of the benefits from native apps. It won't be as fast as C++ but you won't have the overhead of electron. And besides most apps probably aren't going to need to brute performance of C++.
Ticks were bad last year in NH, but not 5 ticks on a stick bad: https://imgur.com/a/bGdAvLD

Photo taken yesterday. I bought some old farmland and it has been a completely insane year so far for ticks. I wish I could do a prescribed burn of the field but it's not well set up for that.
That's a big part of the continuing appeal of Apple in spite of some of their mis-steps. My Mac mostly just gives me a working system that keeps working and is mostly devoid of crap. The crap it does have can generally be disabled.
Automatic classification of trees using a UAV and deep learning
The problem with UBI is not the idea itself. It's the unintended consequences and edge cases.

For example, it might be that UBI causes people to work MORE and die sooner at riskier jobs (like working oil fields). What is the net effect of that?

Also, what if it doesn't do much more than inflate prices to the point that people still have to work just as much? Could it just reset the sort of "zero point" higher?

What if people have an in-built need to work to have value in life? Would paying them not to work cause their life to lose its value and increase suicides or other negative behavior?

Also, will people start having more kids to somehow get more UBI benefits?

Large system changes mean serious consequences that go beyond the obvious. Anyone who has ever worked on a large software system surely have experienced this.

I don't expect failure, but I do expect some seriously weird and unintended outcomes that are non-obvious.
I really wish they would figure out of cross platform solution for desktop applications. I know their are libraries out there now, but Microsoft should really help with the effort. Maybe Xamarin.Forms? Idk.

Regardless, I'm working on a way to build Qt/Qmp apps with .NET Core.

https://github.com/pauldotknopf/net-core-qml
Color Contrast for Better Readability
SoftBank is the one selling though, no?
> These people have money to buy alcohol and cigarettes, and yet their kids go hungry and rely on school lunch programs, etc.

Ah yes, let's blame people for their dependence on mind alterning chemicals that if abused build negative feedback loops. While at the same time, those chemicals are touted and lauded in mainstream culture. From rap's "popping bottles" to country's "whiskey makes my girl a little bit frisky".

> For all of them, their personal issues overwhelm their ability to be functional adults.

Doesn't this happen to EVERYONE at some point, temporarily? Where something overwhelms our ability to function. Can you imagine a structure where repeated incidents lead to patterns, and the societal structures we build are not helping to correct those patterns for individuals. Yes, some people will just always make bad choices, but also, some people have never had an opportunity to actually flourish and understand how their choices are not helping. Or even, maybe they are addicted to mind altering chemicals that have literally changed the way they think.

> Let people face death, then see how they act.

If we are sharing anecdotes, my partner works as a therapist with teens with substance abuse problems in the Bronx. I'll never forget the day she called me crying, because one of her 17 year old patients was scared he was going to be attacked leaving the office because he didn't want to join a gang.

He was held up at gun point, had is phone stolen, and his life threatened. You better believe he wants to escape.

Sure, his personal issues are overwhelming his ability to function, but we have to acknowledge that society is not trying to really help him in a serious way because therapy helps, but also economic opportunity as well.

I am an extremely selfish person, and have had great success due to opportunities granted to me through privilege and access. It took a long hard look at myself, to look at someone else, even in the face of addiction, abusive behaviors and acknowledge their personhood and their struggle and say, you are a not able to function, but you are human, and we should try and help.