skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amongst other things I study Philosophy and find it fascinating. It can really open your mind to a variety of subjects, whether it is maths, physics, business or law. Doesn't matter. There is a whole area dedicated to technology [1]. I started studying it because I felt many important questions lingering in my head, but no satisfying answer.

And the truth is: philosophy does not give to satisfying answers. But what it does give you is a sharper mind, a mind that can formulate the right questions, which can give you so much more insight.

If you come from a technological side and have not wandered into philosophy yet, why not start with something analytical? Start with type theory by Bertrand Russell [2]. Then move onto his thoughts on religion and science [3].

In my eyes, philosophy is beauty and I would never want to miss it. It's very often a challenge, to challenge your own convictions, your thoughts, your way of living. If you let yourself "fall into" it, then there is a whole universe.

Currently I am reading Ludwig Wittgensteins "Philosophical Investigations" [4]. It's almost a complete opposite of what he wrote decades earlier about language, that it is much more than a logical system. What is language? Why does it work? How does it work? It's a fascinating journey into the mind of another brilliant person (who also happens to be a pupil of Russell).

So please, go ahead and enjoy philosophy :) I am all for it.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/type-theory/

[3] https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.52360

[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#PhilInve
"Guido van Rossum, who loudly objected to Shapiro's tone, which was condescending, he said" yes, appropriate -and- appreciated
The difference is that, generally, the US doesn't imprison people because of what they say.
This post might somewhat answer your question:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-understand-advanced...
Well, they're certainly not doing anything differently than traditional producers when it comes to taking the axe to shows after just 1 or 2 seasons. Whenever I see a new Netflix show released, which seems to be just about every week now, the first thing that comes to mind is "even if I like this, will there actually be a second season?". This degrades the time investment of immersing yourself in a show's characters and storytelling.
Yes, but - this is a highly regulated environment and barriers to entry are quite high. Very hard for new ideas to get a hearing.
"The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect."

Bertrand Russell
I see, I thought you were commenting on the implementation of the lottery in the first place vs. our North American system of rationing good schools using money (either directly through tuition or expensive nearby real estate).
To elaborate on the example in the article, the main reason that swapping is disallowed is that by necessity, there exists a third student which is screwed by the swap.

The deferred acceptance algorithm always creates a stable matching, which means that it does not contain any blocking pairs. A blocking pair is a pair <student, school> where the student is not assigned to the school, but prefers the school to their current assignment, and the school prefers the student above their worst ranked admitted student.

When executed as described in the article, the algorithm produces a student-optimal solution, which means that for all students, no other stable matching exists where the student is better off.

In the example, where student a preferred school A over B (their current assignment) and student b preferred school B over A (their current assignment), both students would become better off by swapping. Thus, the matching produced after swapping cannot be stable: there must exist some student x who now forms a blocking pair together with either school A or B.

To explain how this happens:

Say that student a is the first to select schools (the iteration order of the students does not matter for the end result, this just makes the steps a bit clearer). Then, at the start, we have this assignment:

A: a

Since a is not assigned to A in the final solution, at some point a has worse rank than all students assigned to A and is pushed out:

A: x, y, z (say that the capacity of A is three)

This means that A ranks x, y and z higher than a. If any subsequent students push out x, y or z, they too will have higher rank than a.

At some point b is then assigned to A. This means that b has higher rank than x, y and z. At least one of them, say x, has been pushed out by now.

If a and b were allowed to swap, then <x, A> would form a blocking pair since x prefers A to their current assignment, and A prefers x to their lowest ranked admitted student (a). Thus the solution would no longer be stable.
Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect helped inspire the QM revolution. But I had Relativity in mind, the thing he's most well known for. As for his later life, he was searching for the TOE, which is an ongoing thing. Problem is that harmonizing gravity with QM has proved very difficult.

As for debating QM, it's quite possible that will eventually lead to a new understanding. That's why shut and calculate is insufficient to advance the field. You need the theoretical side spinning out ideas for the shut and calculate types to carry out experiments and plug the data into equations. Some of these ideas range into the metaphysical side of things until they can be empirically tested.
I agree, but what if the ideal for EHR just hasn't been realized yet? Regulation or not, there must be ways to improve. We probably don't see those innovations because most hospitals stick to the juggernauts such as Epic for their software.
Ask HN: Why government does tax ISPs at higher rate in places?
The government should be taxed at a higher rate the places where ISPs are more profitable.

I see 10-20 ISPs serving major metros but the urban areas have slow internet and sometimes just 1 provider.
We're amazing at pattern matching. This has been known for ages visually, with optical illusions and art (^_—), but I guess technology has caught up enough to make auditory illusions much easier to create/capture/spread than ever before.
I often hear this argument on HN (usually to oppose regulations out of principle) but while it obviously happens at times it doesn't have to be.

Anti-trust regulations for instance are clearly about encouraging competition. Similarly many jurisdictions price dumping is illegal which is a way to prevent big players from destroying small ones by playing dirty. Regulation is whatever you want it to be. "Regulations are good/bad" makes almost as little sense as "GMOs are good/bad", to take an other usually divisive topic.
Hard to see it ever happening. Nor should it. I'm pretty sure that, if it ever got to that level, the US Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional.
It's exactly that.

The Python ecosystem in general is severely underfunded despite all big players using it extensively, which makes it really unfair if you compare it to the money poured into JS because of its monopoly on the web.

Remember Unladen shallow ? "Google" attempt to JIT Python ? It was just one guy during his internship (http://qinsb.blogspot.fr/2011/03/unladen-swallow-retrospecti...).

And look at the budget the PSF had in 2011 to help the community: http://pyfound.blogspot.fr/2012/01/psf-grants-over-37000-to-.... I mean, even today they have to go though so many shenanigans for barely 20k (https://www.python.org/psf/donations/2018-q2-drive/).

But at the same time you hear people complaining they yet can't migrate to Python 3 because they have millions of lines of Python. You hear of them when they want to extend the support for free, but never to support the community.

It's ridiculous.

Python needs a sugar daddy. It's used in Mac and Linux. It's used at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Nasa and so many more.
> Netflix never would’ve done all this

I sincerely doubt that.

They create content to increase the value of their platform. That is unrelated to copyright, except that copyright lets them compel other platforms to not show their content.

We don't have any legal platform without DRM or copyright to compare against. We also can't, because copyright is a monopoly.
Short introduction to VXLAN/Overlay Networks
It's an interesting question. There are some exceptions for lawful processing under GDPR[1]:

> Processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of the following applies:

> processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract;

> processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;

So in this case, it's probably the case that any athlete will have to sign a contract saying they are OK sharing their stats publicly in order to play. If an athlete sued Eredivisie to try to be forgotten from the league tables, how would that case be decided?

It's also worth noting that in the original "right to be forgotten" case that Google lost, the original newspaper articles reporting the criminal cases were not required to be expunged, so there is still a "public interest" defense for keeping information about people in public. It's certainly unclear exactly where the boundary is on that though.

I wonder also if there is an argument that a professional player's stats are not Personal Data; those stats are a record of events that occurred in public, while engaging in a performance. IANAL so interested in opinions of more knowledgable folks on this one.

[1]: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/
Not sure what it is about that quote that tells you that. It's still 100% owned by Swiss government, just split between regional and national governments.
While it is possible to view Datalog as a subset of Prolog, they are really very different languages. In particular Datalog implementations generally use forward rather than backwards chaining evaluation. As such, programs you might write in Datalog might diverge in naïve Prolog implementation. Depending on what variant and extensions of Datalog you are using, a program that you could write in the subset of Prolog that matches Datalog might similarly diverge in a Datalog engine.

So really linking to a text on Prolog is not really relevant to a discussion of the merits of Datalog.
This is so true. I took a proofs class the second year (maybe semester idk) of my college and it was really illuminating. Before that class, language was just something I used to talk to people or to read stories. I don't think I really grasped the fact that language can be used for analysis or arguments before that class. I never read philosophy before that class so that could be it too.
There seems a difference between philosophical thinking by physicists or at least people who understand the physics which can be useful and philosophising by people who don't which is often not.
Facebook, in a few months the perks are going to be even higher if you are at the senior level position.

Facebook is launching dating service.

Their senior employees will most likely get a blessed account which is gonna match with more ladies.

This is something Google can't provide you.
But yea, your cash compensation might go down a bit.
Reporter who exposed Theranos tells how to spot another Elizabeth Holmes
I realized the other day we find ourselves increasingly influenced by algorithms. Intentionally or not people are forming their lives around arbitrary algorithms. The YouTube guy who reacted outrageously in a Japanese suicide forest was forming his life decisions according to YouTube's algorithms to generate views. Now doctors are making medical choices based on algos, what's next?

At what point does the hivemind merge with algorithmic ML to form a sort of distributed AI?
I vaguely recall reading somewhere that all real estate ownership in China is limited to 70 years for residential buildings, and that is one reason why so many Chinese invest overseas - to build capital over generations.
That's a pretty good option if you already have a basement, but if not, seems way more over-engineered to me. Excavating, building walls, dealing with water leaks...
The basic problem is that it is "labeled" as a form of quote...
I'm curious, what examples did you see in the article that were indications we were "losing nothing"?
I don't see any mention of recursion. If it doesn't support recursion it is not really accurate to call it Datalog.

To clarify, if you don't have recursion, you've just got a slightly different skin over relational algebra.
They might be worse off if the two traders optimized for tradeability in their initial choices.
Even today, there's still an ongoing rot of most online content--especially that not connected to a True Name. It isn't truly lost or anonymized but it gets pretty hard to mine over time.

That said, I'm glad that nothing of mine pre-college is online and everything from school that is still public went through an editor. No photos of me doing anything remotely scandalous. Even everything from BBS days is likely gone though there was nothing too exciting even there.
My question is what's the purpose of physics outside of aiding technology if not an attempt at explaining reality, or at least our observation of whatever reality is?

It's "explaining reality". The assumption is that we do so by observing, and the explanation is by models (usually mathematical). That's the extent of any relationship to philosophy. Questions regarding whether "observed 'reality'" is really real reality or the like simply aren't pertinent.
You poor thing, it must be really hard having so much job security and such inflated salaries, due to artificial constraints on the supply of doctors by the medical mafia. You're not going to get a ton of sympathy here on HN, where your job or startup will get replaced in the bat of an eye whenever someone / something comes along that's better / cheaper.
I'm surprised no one has brought this up (yet). GDPR is super expensive to remain compliant, simply because of the broadness of the terms used, leading to undefined scope of liability.

As one other HNer previously mentioned, the cheapest way to stay compliant with GDPR is to completely block access to EU customers. In fact, this is what I did with my business. I redirect to a generic text file (not even a HTML that could trigger a GDPR clause by itself) explaining my stance.

Don't worry about false equivalence that many will raise "So, you don't care about our data HUH?". The intentions behind GDPR may be good. But, the roadmap seems completely stupid. Many think blocking EU customers is an arrogant move. No, it's not. Not everyone has the finance and time to comply with GDPR. A typical re-implementation of our web application will cost us weeks if not months, for example. That could be time spent building features customers want, not fighting some vague elitist law (comply with us or else you're doomed!). If enough business owners block access to EU customers, then, EU will lose a lot of business and that will trigger them to hopefully do something about the vagueness of GDPR. I don't even live in EU, for instance, yet this re-implementation will cost me tens of thousands of dollars (translating my time) that the EU isn't going to pay me for their vagueness.

I've had enough of GDPR. I know many EU HNers will not agree, but please consider putting yourself in a solo founder's shoes.
Walmart.com – Fake AirPods
I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at Amazon (2015)
One of the most difficult problems we have in Michigan and the Midwest in general is that a large percentage of our most talented developers leave the state upon graduating college to go to work for the Silicon Valley giants.

If you talk to them a few years later they long to return to the Midwest and they want to do a startup. What if Michigan had an accelerator in Silicon Valley, one where it's native VC's and angel investors had first crack at funding these companies with the provisio that they move back home?
> Science does have its answers about, say, what it means to know something about the world.

Those answers are probably different for every scientist you talk to. Or at least there are several major camps, which is where philosophy would be useful. Often their ideas are close enough it can be glossed over, but when they aren't it results in endless arguing because they aren't willing to admit they subscribe to different philosophies.

I do agree, however, that we should avoid philosophy as much as possible. But that means at least stating what you take for granted and what you think science is.
Great write-up! Your speedups look like they line up as expected. Would you happen to know why Aras's look a bit weird, is it the devices he's using? I'm referring to his Metal timings being more than 10x slower than D3D, and being almost comparable to C++.

> One of my goals was “use as much of the same code as possible on the CPU and GPU”.

Great idea, it's hard to debug GPU code, and super convenient to have something that you can run & debug on the CPU, then just flip a switch and get GPU speedups!

> Another obvious limitation is that GPU code cannot recurse.

Yep. I bet this changes relatively soon, since you can sometimes use recursion in OpenCL & CUDA.

It's a fun exercise in ShaderToy to write a recursive ray tracer. Here's mine: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XllBRf

And here's a much better one: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4scfz4
> I don't understand the assertion that the US Gov't can't do anything to prevent the foreign governments from doing this...

There has been zero evidence presented so far that it is in fact foreign governments doing any of this. More likely it's the vast cabal of Federal agencies in the greater DC area all disregarding the law because nobody in the US Congress has the will to rein them in. And of course for all we know, the espionage may be entirely legal courtesy of some clandestine national security FISA sign-off.

The US Government system is made up of dozens of extremely powerful agencies, and they are at war with each other at all times for power, information and budget. Sometimes that war is cold, sometimes it's warm.

Simply put, they're all spying on each other and all aspects of the system that is meant to control them (while they attempt to control the system instead).
I love playing historic based RTS games, so this game is my favorite one by far.
That's today's shows in general. Lots of build up to something the writers either haven't an idea how to resolve yet or just over hyped.

As photography and CGI improved, writing went down the toilet. Mainly because it's not necessary to make money. Most viewers are happy enough for bad plots, so-so acting, dubious congruency and limited dialogs as long as it's visually entertaining.

As usual, the wider your audience, the duller your product has to become to accommodate everyone.

The worst is definitely dubbing. In France you can clearly see that around 2000, producers gave up any effort on looking for decent translator and voice actors. The voices are always the same from one movie to another, the lips don't match, the jokes are lost.

When I watch the 5th element or the naked gun however, I'm amazed at the fantastic work they did to translate the spirit of the lines so beautifully.

Still, sometimes on netflix you got some very nice surprises, provided you watch it in orginal version only. "The good place" and "Dirk gently" really made my day.
Most of the points that the author has highlighted will hold true for a person who has a Ph.D. in any of the STEM disciplines other than math.
The op terminology must have been off.
I see, yes. It sounds like we are same thing then. Cheers.
You dont need to go that far. If you want to replace an algorithm in a regulated industry like insurance (say, premium calculation based on risk score), you need to show the audit trail of how you arrived at the result. You cant have a probabilistic model that builds bias without any explanation.

Only a few ML algorithms like decision tree can show the causal relationship today. It is very hard to that in neural network with multiple layers.
The Selfish Ledger: Google's vision of populace control by total data collection
The appeal of Java was the reduced (limited) design vocabulary. No meta programming. Just straightforward imperative programming. For data processing, parsing, CRUD, etc.

Java should have focused on being a better "business" language. Type inference, string intrinsics, built-in regex, intrinsic arrays and maps, lightweight objects.

I love functional programming. For my own projects. When I want to get my lambda on, I'll use Clojure. No way I want to wade into someone else's extravagantly tortured dynamically typed, meta tagged, lambda spaghetti code.

Annotations, optionals, generics, lambdas, and other cargo cult inspired additions have reduced Java's core value proposition.

Fortunately the tooling and JVM are awesome sauce.
I just don't see the judge's argument. By that logic we should only allow people who pass a rigorous certification to invest on the stock market. Casual investors should be banned because they will just lose money and that's (somehow) unfair.
The claims will be, at worst, useful bargaining chips in future negotiations. There's no point in forcing them to drop them.
So you are saying that lots of physicists don't do science the right way?

That's why they should learn some philosophy of science.
An Insurer Resists Paying for ‘Avoidable’ E.R. Visits
So great. In Memphis, TN, I have tried for years to convince our transit authority MATA and our downtown commission DMC to make our light rail (ahem, historic trolley) free, on the following basis: MATA covers 1/7th of its overall opex from fare boxes revenue. The trolleys bring in approximately $700k in a good year. Why even bother with funds control and ticketing services at that point? The direct benefit of increased visitor and resident mobility far exceed the cost and could _easily_ be made up for from hotel occupancy tax or myriad other sources. Instead, the city focuses on a convoluted and expensive parking garage scheme that is mainly an inhibitor, while still losing money on the mass transit.

My lobbying is always met with "heh, how are you planning to pay for that plan!" and all the mechanisms I point to will take some amount of work and political will to shift around, notwithstanding the same sources that currently pay for the remaining 6/7ths of opex. if anyone has constructive new ideas for me to sell the idea, I can be in the mayor's, MATA GM's, and DMC's Pres' office next week to pitch it. end rant.