skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fascinating article.

The obvious research question: Is there an assignment system where the best strategy is to list your true preferences, and is Pareto efficient (no win/win trading of assignment is possible)?

What's wrong with simply randomizing the list of students, then walking the randomized list and giving each student his/her highest-ranked school that hasn't yet been filled by the assignment of students higher on the list?

Does some variant of Arrow's impossibility theorem [1] apply to this situation?

It might also shed light on the causes and dynamics of poverty to figure out the exact causal mechanism by which "students from poorer neighborhoods make more strategic mistakes."

Is poor strategic decision-making ability a cause of poverty (the poor are poor because they don't make smart strategic decisions about money and life choices)? Or is it an effect of poverty (having a single parent or parents working multiple jobs means less intellectual stimulation and help with homework, not being able to afford nutritious food or have time to cook it causes poor nutrition which affects brain development, etc., which leads to lower general intelligence and strategic thinking ability)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
Or, Russian spies and other foreign entities listening to the conversations of U.S. Congressional staffers.
That's laughable considering peak times are... uh... peak. Transport is primarily for commutes, which happen at the same time everyday. I don't have the option of off-peak. And if you have a simplified, non-free market system, tickets are cheaper, and there's no need for choice. The only reason we have choice is because successive governments have believed it's possible to allow multiple companies to deliver the same service over the same infrastructure.
It's probably unfair to refer to Netflix as ad-free, but (as I mention elsewhere), from a creator perspective, I'm referring more to the 'break-free' experience than 'ad-free'.

I do agree that impositions on the creative team to write in product placement are a hurdle, but I disagree on how difficult that hurdle is relative to literally stopping the show for a few minutes at a time, and from a consumer's perspective, product placement (when not overdone) is far less disruptive to the narrative than a commercial.

Of course, people discuss products in real life all the time, so it can be made to feel natural. Four Roses bourbon, TV shows like "Legion" and "Fargo", or Seagull Guitars could be product-placed into a TV show about my life and would look like just any other day in my life, for example.
Inside the 76477 Space Invaders sound effect chip
> any pair of students can be swapped if they both get a more preferred school.

This is the meaning of stable in the stable marriage problem. And the Gale-Shapley algorithm does this.
I believe we will see the democratization of content creation with AI.
Lamenting documentation requirements is as old as Medicaid itself. With more and more oversight by governing bodies and the burdens of "quality-metrics", the personal connection with carers will be increasingly distant.

I love electronic records because I don't have to handwrite anymore, and all the data I need is just a few clicks away. The problem isn't the electronic nature of the records, but rather the reporting and documentation requirements that come with it. Why are there increased amounts of documentation required? Because it is a form of rationing: make patient care so time consuming that fewer patients can be seen, and less can be billed long term. It really is a pernicious way to decrease healthcare expenses, but it comes at the cost of depersonalizing patients, physicians, and nurses.

That, and also legal protections because lawyers exploit any "bad outcome" as negligence, even though no negligence occurred.
Our country was built on genocide and slave labor, there was never a moral high ground.
Call me a buzzkill but I'm not impressed with this, things are misheard all the time, especially when you feed them through rough PCM sampling and then make a recording of it.
Aren't things like NumPy, etc. also possible through a FFI?

That is, I can understand that there's such a big installed based that people are loath to get rid of the Python/C extension API, but I think that's different than saying those projects are impossible without that extension API.
Do they offer support for it? I am really asking, I have no idea. I would assume they don't
For all the gloss of "prestige TV", a lot of the big story arc shows are basically just modern soap operas.

I think that'll slowly change though, because the current trend seems primarily motivated by culture rather than structure or economics. Like, procedural shows are still big, but they were everything for a few years after CSI. These things come and go.
A much earlier example (showing the phenomenon isn't so new) is the famous "Cranberry Sauce"/"I buried Paul" vocal at the end of The Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" (1967). It became one of the key ingredients in the fun "Paul is Dead" conspiracy/joke.
> but I honestly don't know anyone whose favorite TV show is a Netflix original.

I remember a year or two ago Stranger Things was a massive super hit. I mean that's all reddit could talk about that year - it overshadowed almost every other show at the time.
We have this in the UK, at least for trains. Companies just end up bidding the lowest, knowing there's no way they can provide a reasonable service at that price. They then cut back on trains and quality, and eventually the contracts are cancelled.
Apple facing class action lawsuit over defective MacBook Pro keyboards
How do the majority lose out?

> Also, people want to get from A to B the quickest

Clearly that's not right. Some people want to travel the quickest. Some want to travel the cheapest. Some want to travel in the most comfortable way.

(OK everyone wants to travel at 125mph non stop from their local station to their destination, with a service every 5 minutes, for free. These changes aren't going to do that, they'll simply remove the choices that people have, and removing choice gives no benefit to the traveling public.)
One big advantage is that you get much more use out of public transport. I'm well served by trams where I live but there are many times when it would be convenient to travel just one or two stops. It is too expensive to even consider it for short journeys.

From the article. it looks like Tallinn requires residence permits or something. So perhaps they still need a fare system. I'd make all local public transport free for anyone.

May even avoid the need for the diesel car bans being mooted in my city (and some other German cities).
I’m probably going to get crucified for this, but what the heck - open discussion on this topic is needed...

I like what you’re saying, but wonder if we made small incompatible changes over time, would that solve the problem? For example (and please forgive me on this), but there are so many similarities between Python and different languages. Objects are obviously everywhere - C++, Java, .Net, etc; and syntax’s are similar at a cursory glance to things like Fortran. All of the above are much faster.

We took a decade to go from Python 2 to 3, but that had some pretty big changes. Going from 3 to 4 and getting a 50% speedup while making some (hopefully small) incompatible changes would probably be a good motivator for people to migrate faster.

There are obviously pros and cons to this discussion, but i really believe that stagnation is the worst choice. (Ok, Perl made a worse choice, but I’m presuming we learned that the level of change from 2-3 is as far as we can go in a generational update (x.0) ).
Yeah, it doesn't surprise me that people who watch massive amounts of television or have extremely narrow tastes are not satisfied with Netflix.

Though I think it's more like when people say "ugh, nothing to do!" after checking Facebook and Reddit.
Fans have edited every mythbuster episode into “streamline” edits that get rid of all the recapping and precapping. They tend to be about 30-35 minutes long.
If physics removes itself even further from philosophy... it will slowly become a cesspool of rigid dogma, becoming blind to reality. Physics, as it is, is already lost in a jungle of abstractions, becoming more and more divorced from the real world.

That’s a strong and sweeping claim about a varied field, much of which is only concerned with experiments. Do you have anything like support for your claim? Remember that most of physics isn’t the highly popularized version of theoretical physics you may be familiar with.

Mathematical models are simply not equal to real world, even if we use models in an attempt to approximate, so that we can do useful things. Mathematics can never truly model reality.

No... shit? That’s why physics is dependent on observation and experiments, and why there is a division between physics and mathematics. We’re talking over the internet because of the concrete, useful things brought to us by physics.

The best it can do is a caricature, and not the real thing.
Without solid philosophy to guide the scientists who drive the scientific institutions, the sciences fall stagnant, because it is philosophy that is the very bedrock and lifeblood of the scientific endeavour, in all fields. Without philosophy, that endless hunt and search for meaning and understanding, we lose our way.

How is philosophy in any way a cure for this imagined loss of rigor? The problem with physics according to you is a divorce from reality, and your solution is something even more abstract, less amenable to rigor, and famously fluid?

Huh?!
With all due respect, that sounds a bit like whataboutism. Or the false logic behind "I won't vote because I don't want to choose the lesser of two evils."

It seems to me that once we reach adulthood we spend most days choosing the lesser the of two or more evils.

While no country is perfect, the USA is still leaps and bounds ahead of China on human rights. As an example, what does the USA do that compares to this linked story?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/former-inm...

edit: as an immigrant to the USA, I sometimes feel like I am much more appreciative of the relative freedoms in the USA than folks born here.
Otommod/browser-mpris2: Implements the MPRIS2 Interface for Chrome and Firefox
just checked all of these out. thanks for sharing
Why would bus drivers "clock out". And why is competition necessary? You're running a bus, not building cars or selling clothes. Public transport doesn't have major room to inovate, so there's not really a need, and more companies confuses what should be a simple situation. One route, one bus service.

The government here runs the tube (TfL) and it's fairly good, a lot better than the privately run stuff elsewhere in the country. I come from Yorkshire, where we have "Northern Rail" which is usually the butt of most jokes about our country's infrastructure...
Iran and Russia to start using cryptocurrencies to circumvent sanctions
i have a zero fee, zero minimum account with schwab that also gives me access to their ETFs with no trade commissions or monthly limits, and the ETFs themselves have extremely low expense ratios. also they reimburse any ATM fees in full every month. what advantages does Usaa have over this setup?
Everybody I know having Macbook Pros, have told about having this problem at some point, most of them several times. Sometimes they started working after some days but mostly they had to take them to the service.
Sweden cancels Elsevier contract as open-access dispute spreads
> There is a difference between design decisions based on "striving to achieve presence" and design decisions based on "not make people vomit". And high fps with good tracking is closer to "not make people vomit" group.

A goal of avoiding visible lag, requires a mechanism of predictive tracking, which has an undesired side-effect of judder, which can be far more sickening than the original lag, which motivates a mitigation of higher fps and lower variance, which requires a stronger GPU.

A goal of wide fov (absence of tunnel-vision "comfort mode"), increases user sensitivity, especially during rapid head and spatial motion, increasing needed performance and user discomfort risk.

A goal of avoiding visual artifacts, discourages introducing visual artifacts which increase user comfort. A goal of visual seamlessness, discourages segmenting the display to permit separately optimizing for task and comfort, compromising both, motivating mitigation.

With current hardware, "presence" and comfort are conflicting objectives. Optimizing for presence, is why we're pushing the envelope on comfort. But there's been a lack of community awareness of just what tradeoffs are being made, and why, and of alternatives and opportunities. In part because of the niche economics you mentioned - if SteamVR doesn't support it, why think about it? But happily, improving hardware will make the issue mostly go away.
And the difficulty can rise exponentially if you have a giant stack that wasn't designed with GDPR in mind (though it may be totally benign in its risk towards data subjects) and which cannot be easily disentangled to comply with some of these requirements.
While no country is perfect, the USA is still leaps and bounds ahead of China on human rights. As an example, what does the USA do that compares to this linked story?

I don’t know how convinced I am by this any more. Between the many wars, the torture, and slavery in the largest prison system on Earth it’s harder to argue. I still don’t want to live in a China, but I don’t want to live in the US either.
> mastering an arbitrary test

If the test is based on the standard middle/high school curriculum (if there is one), then it can be a fairly good predictor.

Otherwise, even if it is an arbitrary test, it takes study skills and discipline to be able to master it. I imagine that both of those traits correlate with performance at school.
things that immediately come to mind:
- GVR founder, involved and opinionated.. argues against the TONE of the communication ! during a fairly ordinary technical discussion of language implementation. Certainly a trained compiler implementor can carefully measure and then show becnhmarks on function dispatch.. but the concern raised has to do with maintainability of the code, more than raw performance. Dont you see? GVR is a humanist and social leader here. Ecosystem participation does matter, as well as raw tech specs. Hardcore math or performance languages are zillions of times faster, and how many users are there.. how many libraries..

* The fashionable inner-circle of the current economic winners, making the academic who "works for so-and-so" an immediate authority. Think for yourself! Wealth-makes-leadership leads to some sick outcomes, frankly. Sure, some academic compiler writer knows his function call stats, but that doesnt suddenly make the years and years of participatory work by many hands, less relevent. This is not populist, but rather pragmatic.

* Comparison to yet-another Python 3.x development. Great! Python evolves.. but lets not throw out a stable binary system with well-understood characteristics.. and that is.. Python 2.7

very interesting peek into the phenomenon of this language
It's unlikely you will need to scrub backup archives:

http://www.gdprarticles.com/gdpr-articles/data-subject-right...
Sure. Though I'm questioning the logic of the parent post, by providing counterexample that makes his request somewhat hard to realize.
The article did mention that Instagram's code wasn't much faster on PyPy.

I agree with you though; one of the interesting and good things about Python is that it's a standard not an implementation. Although CPython is the the most popular by usage, PyPy and Cython are mainstream alternatives (or superset in the case of cython). There's also Jython, IronPython, Unladen Swallow, Grumpy, and others that I can't think of now. Some of those are defunct and others only are Python 2. But the point is, competition is good.
They deal with that nicely for railways, where if you want to operate some profitable lines, you're obliged to operate some infrequent lines too. Wonder why they did not do the same with the buses too.
Diversification probably.
I don’t agree with any of those things.

However, I still hold a position that when a system fails, I’d rather it fail in the direction of Nazis.

But perhaps you are saying is that in a system with 1/100 failure, I might be less incentivized to fix the problem if the 1% end up being people I don’t like — that seems to be an incentive to be aware of.

I don’t think someone should go to jail for accessing public data (or for being stupid and having “neoNazi” beliefs). I’d vote for laws to correct such problems in the system.

However, as a human, when the system fails, I’d prefer it fail in the direction of Nazis.

Perhaps I have room to mature or grow in this area, I’m open to it.
Fairness is absolutely a subjective concept. E.g. in the context of school choice, which is fair? Let's say there are 20 students applying to a school, and there are 10 spots available.

a) All students applying to the school have the same chance to get a spot: 50%

b) The best 10 students (by some definition of 'best', e.g. grades or an entry exam) get in.

c) The 10 students with the richest parents get in.

d) The 10 students that live closest to the school get in.

We could go further: when 15 of the applicants are boys and 5 are girls (or vice versa), wouldn't it be more fair when 5 of each are chosen? How about racial distributions?

Ultimately how you define fairness is subjective. Obviously once you have defined fairness you can attempt to measure it using mathematics / statistics.
It is not clear any longer that in the near future most new software technology will still originate in the US.

It appears that the first author of about 50% or more of accepted long papers at ACL 2018, a top NLP conference, is a Chinese. (I didn't count comprehensively as there are > 200 papers, but I counted from a substantial sample.)

http://acl2018.org/programme/papers/

Added:

Yes, an NLP conference is far from a comprehensive sample of software technology. That is why my first sentence was quite tentative. Nevertheless, the data could be a harbinger for a more widespread phenomenon to come (US researchers used to dominate many, perhaps most, top AI conferences).

The point is not mainland China will dominate software technology. It is that the US may no longer be dominant.

Feel free to add other data to contribute to substantive discussion.
Very unconvinced with the notion that the parents of kids are unable to make school choices, and that removing the choice altogether gives better results. I believe it gives a high level of heterogeneity that the Dutch might not want to tolerate, but it does not give superior school choices. Removing choices sometimes do help to choose better, but generally the more choices the better.

Lets not put Dutch policy in a pedestal: they have a retirement system that is so pervasive, that once you are 60, you earn more money by retiring than by continuing to work, and thus literally push the entire population to retire at the same age.
Or you use Ethereum, get confirmation in seconds, using far less electricity.

The only complaint valid in that case is the changing price, but it has been stable for months, and it has grown a lot more during the last year than the same investment in a savings account.

So what you say is essentially correct about Bitcoin, but if you add cost of opportunity to the equation, you have lost a lot more than people using criptocurrencies.

And the criptocurrency of the future can be different to Bitcoin. All bets are off.
I don't get the appeal of streaming and find Netflix shows mediocre at best. It could very well be just my personal preference but I find HBO shows much better.
it does seem shameful that payers so frequently rely on denying care / making billing hard to cut costs when there are so many other things they could do that are harder but higher impact

Also, I'm only recently learning how pernicious the fear of malpractice suits is, and how this fear makes doctors reluctant to collaborate informally -- if you can't see a patient yourself or get their full chart, the perceived liability risk is high enough to prevent informal collaboration
I've spent some time around Tim, my impression is that he's a nerd, who got very lucky with a side project. You are correct that he has not avoided getting wealthy off that, but high level meetings with Tim tended to get distracted by fixing whatever is not working on Tim's laptop or playing with some demo he's built that (Newsflash) doesn't change the world and is soon forgotten. He's now simply a wealthier nerd.
I sent an email and got a reply in two days confirming cancellation. Not very difficult.
If you take this as an example of adoctrination, you are absolutely right. Who are the future workers to make choices on their own behalf, they should learn submission.
There was a lot of narrative at first around data-driven decisions etc. As far as I can tell Netflix and Amazon have realized it’s mostly a game of darts, data it not. They don’t have to cater to mainstream tastes as much as the networks. But picking hit shows still seems like a crapshoot.
thanks for sharing.

I wish designernews was more active, really like the site though.

for webdesignernews, I don’t really think it qualifies since a central entity decides what is news and what is not. It’s more like a news blog. It also doesn’t seem as though users can comment on the links, but I could be wrong about that. I’d put it in the same category as a site like sidebar.io. What makes sites like HN interesting is that the users publish and the users decide what’s newsworthy... for better or worse.
It's true that the show's creators typically receive the cash for the product placement. (I also would guess that Netflix is getting a cut of some kind.)

Consider what it means that a service would optimize for this form of monetization. Brands that are placing products on Netflix shows are unencumbered by the brands/deals supported by other shows, since the product placement happens on the content level, instead of the distribution/broadcast level. Netflix can basically offer much more "robust" monetization options because its content choices don't narrow the scope and breadth of its list of supported brands.

One positive externality caused by the more limited advertising strategies employed by traditional broadcasters was that advertising was not a free-for-all. Ads were shown in predictable ways, on consistent (contractually-obligated) schedules. Now, Netflix can enable more and more next-generation advertising options within its content offerings, which is certain to lead to some disturbing changes. These changes would definitely catch its customers by surprise, if Netflix chose to roll out these strategies all at once. But they appear to be doing it slowly, so that most of their users will probably not notice it.
>"You choose heap by using an object for the stack, and rewriting recursion using (superficially) iterative code.

You can choose stack allocation instead by using regular recursion: native function calls with local variables."

I'm not following you.

I believe these would both result in the same thing in Python. Python gives you a reference to an object. That object is stored in a private heap "somewhere." That reference to the object that Python gave you is stored on the stack. The object that it points to lives in the heap. This should be the same for both of your examples. I'm not sure what you mean by "native function calls." I am not familiar this this term.
Your comment proves my point, not disproves it. To remind you, here's the quote we're talking about:

> not every service requires market forces to operate effectively

private companies = market forces, even if they're government contracts.
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