skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I missing something, or isn't this (at least while between the plates) just the same phenomenon as the electric fields that are used to deflect electron beams in some CRTs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_deflection

Obviously CRTs don't contain perpetual motion machines. So there must be some way in which energy is lost in the plates.

(Note that when I say it's the same phenomenon, I'm talking about a force acting on charged particles. The initial direction of the particles is different, though. In this dipole drive, the charged particles are initially moving roughly perpendicular to the plates, while in a CRT the particles are moving parallel to the plates. But that shouldn't be relevant to the energy needed to accelerate them.)
> And authoritarianism with proper consideration for harmony

The evidence is overwhelming: The only path to freedom and prosperity for the people (i.e., not the ones in government) is democracy and freedom. Name a first world country without freedom and democracy.
Every time I see these absurd city government efforts to strangle human-sized personal vehicles, I think of "Wow. Look at These Astounding Photos of Abandoned Dockless Vehicles in America." https://slate.com/business/2018/04/astounding-photos-capture...
I like ligatures when they're used well, but that one is just incredibly distracting.

Shame the advice is to turn them off completely...
It's really cool he's been doing this for 45 years.
I stumbled on The Straight Dope book in the 80s, and it's hard to describe how cool this was to read, pre-Internet. So much cool info in clever and hilarious format, I read it for hours and over and over. A big salute to Cecil Adams.
I recently read this book-- it is nothing short of revolutionary.
Well, I don't really care about the precious internet points disappearing. I'd much rather hear from someone what their reasoning is since I might actually learn something.

But it is telling that there have been at least 5 downvotes but no one is willing to comment as to why.

Edit: since I see you have a downvote (surprise, surprise) I'll clarify that it wasn't me.
> you are much less likely to get mugged as a westerner in major cities ...

Less likely than where? Crime in western cities is at long-term lows. I've walked through many neighborhoods, rich and poor, in many western cities without concern.
Not to mention that recent versions of MS SQL can run (AFAIK) arbitrary R and Python code server-side.
I didn't flame anybody?

We're literally talking about mormons.
Some of these BS jobs aren't BS. Or at least, a subset of people maybe bullshitting their way through the system, but compliance personnel and corporate lawyers are necessary for reasons they don't give.
usually I am joining many different data sets many of which include some time of log data (sometimes petabytes in size but usually a few TB). the logs are persisted to hdfs or s3, which is why spark and hive make such a nice way of doing work compared to something like postgress.

also, its nice to plop json, avro, csvs, parquet, or what ever data in storage and just query/join/analyze it. no need to put the story on hold because you are waiting for the oracle dba to increase space again.
> whether I was doing something useful with my time, or whether I was just a crazy person.

This is grad school in a nutshell, but in the classical route, you have a lot of people to talk with who can tell you which bucket you're in.
They are missing an important structural point: MIT isn't really a school, it's a huge government research lab with a small school attached (look at the budget for which education is about 14% of revenues and 16% of expenditures). Research is primary (whereas, as some other comments have noted, it has atrophied in the French Grandes Écoles). They need another INRIA in the mix -- though not INRIA itself; that excellent institution would not survive merging with these others.

FWIW I am an MIT graduate who has lived and worked in research in the USA and France
Now this is the sort of way of handling competition I can deal with. Find the data they have locked up and that you don't compete on, but that you need to produce and collect anyway and then release it for anyone to use.
I imagine Op's question being brought up at some early morning staff meeting at YC headquarters:

Ohh and and one last thing everyone. Does anyone here who groks Arc want to make it their priority to start hacking around with Paul Graham's Arc code, which helps render our extremely popular social forum for hackers, with content that loads on both desktop and mobile at blazing speeds, and with nothing in particular actually broken?

(I don't imagine a lot of hands going up)
I can understand why you'd feel so strongly about this, but that doesn't make it ok to post flamewar rants to Hacker News. Posting like this in particular will get you banned here. If you'd please (re-)read the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively only from now on, we'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> The thing with US free speech though is that it is mostly only allowed in specific, ineffectual circumstances - like Twitter or "free speech zones".

This isn't true at all. Turn on cable news and read newspapers editorials. Read HN and Facebook and Reddit. See all the demonstrations around the U.S. today. Yes, some people have more powerful voices than others - people lack the bandwidth to give equal attention to over 300 million neighbors - but pretty much anyone can say anything, anywhere.
I’d love to explore that more. That is one advantage of bigger companies, more variety of opportunities and if you’re effective you can move between them or define something in between as you point out.

One aspect that I’d like to put words to is something orthogonal to the opportunities, which is the distance of the opportunity from the customer and a ‘real’ problem. This isn’t always true in big companies but at most you’d feel like a cog in the machine no?
The US government doesn't necessarily hold data with this level of detail. If they did it would be (in theory) in the public domain anyway. Remember the difference in size between the US and European countries.

As for why other governments even have to "release" such information, it's historical and surprisingly hard to change. The UK government holds possibly the most detailed map in the world covering every inch of Britain. But after 2000 when GIS based products started to take off people discovered that none of this data was available to use. OSM was created specifically to give the UK some open geographical data because there simply wasn't any and campaigns to the government were taking too long (the government data still isn't fully open).
In the Netherlands you are often expected to remove/install floor when you move. Also, interestingly, no warm water in toilets in there either.
The weirdest discrepancy between US/Can and Europe is the amount of water in and the size of toilets.
There's no logical equivalency between SQL and ML/AI.

SQL is a language that helps retrieve the data you're looking.
ML/AI helps you predict the future (using past data).

Maybe this is directed towards product people? But it has SQL in the title so it can't be. I'm confused as to who the audience is here.
You've posted more than one comment that crosses into personal attack. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again, regardless of how wrong or annoying another comment may be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I feel you (from Quebec too, working abroad). The thing that shocked me the most in europe is the lack of facial tissues, cleaning stuff and many other things we generally have in the pharmacies.
Brits to the same.
> Google just doesn't seem to be able to focus on products that requires service and customer support

That's literally any product that people pay for (instead of viewing ads).

Customer support isn't and never has been in their DNA. It's often rage-inducing how hard it is to contact a human at Google.

They seem to think they can engineer products that don't need humans behind them.
Well I certainly don't pay for porn.

And the times my other half sees odd payments on my credit card, she's on the phone claiming chargebacks lickety-split because nobody she knows would pay for porn.

So I have no data to provide on this matter. None at all.
Reading through that paper I'm not sure exactly what's new about it above and beyond what has been in a lot of the evolutionary algorithm literature, other than maybe formal proofs (which would be important). I'm sure I'm missing something though because this isn't my area.
that one component seem to be 32.8 percent of the code
anyway, this seem like a none trivial part of this project
Their biggest issue, I feel at least, is that their plots for original content are getting slower and slower.

You can actually do faster paced, more engaging content. Just look at 12 Monkeys and Fringe.
Reading this article triggered some feelings I've been having for a while. Honestly the internet, and everything political feels like a shitshow that's exceptionally depressing.

Recently there were racial riots in Sri Lanka. The government raced to block social media, messaging, and VPN's. Hell, even mobile connections were disrupted when people were desperately trying to contact their relatives while their houses burned. The government's reasoning was that they wanted to quash rumours. No talk of what they did in the lead up to the riots when communities kept pointing out fascist groups steadily gaining more steam and operating with a middle finger held up to the law. The government also ordered a media blackout during the time.

China praised these actions. China is also heavily invested in Sri Lanka as part of its belt project.

I have no doubts that eventually we'll see similar censorship arrive in SL. Criticism of the predatory nature of China will be blocked ruthlessly with the power that the Chinese gov seems to exert over social networks. China will probably happily extend its technology to countries under its belt project too. I can't see how this wouldn't benefit them.

In the midst of this, the US is also busy fighting China's ownership of Sri Lankan resources. The result is a split of political factions that have chosen China or US. The US media is now pushing stories that Sri Lanka's previous regime took campaign contributions as under the table payments from China.

The thing is, while I appreciate investigative journalism, everything around feels like propaganda. This article feels like propaganda.

At some point it feels miserable that whatever I read is trying to manipulate me rather than inform me. And if I can't be manipulated, then I'll be controlled instead. So when I think of the Internet, I don't really think of some powerful tool in my hand anymore. At a deeper level, it's just another propaganda machine that people will use against me, or take away from me if I don't play by their rules.
brazilian series 3% had diverse cast, but yes, in general lacks diversity. good observation
NyTimes article stating pretty much exactly the point I’m making: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/business/economy/trump...
Let's use 1985-1986 because that's when I was active at the store.

There were about 8M computers sold, and assuming Byte continued to sell at around 400K copies, this mean that there were 5% subscribers to every PC bought, or 1 out of 20. My guess is that sounds approximately correct for my hit rate. There were more pubs, but I bet that there were a lot of overlap for magazine subscriptions. If you subscribed to Byte, you probably had a good hit rate for also being a subscriber to PC Mag, so the spread probably wasn't a ton wider.

What I do remember was that Consumer Reports came out with a recommended PC. They loved the Leading Edge. Consumer Reports was a bit of cult back then and I bet their subscription base was in the millions (where does one find the subscribers for magazines in 1985?). When Consumer Reports suggested something, the word got around.

I remember people coming in asking for LE, but Ballard Computer had the franchise and was back ordered like 3 months.

Now that was power to influence the end buyer.
Machine Learning is usually seeen as a magic black box by many people.
So yes. There's a recent trend that seems to favor a machine learning first approach to solve very simple and mundane problems because people feel that they are missing some magic insight if they don't do it (FOMO).

For example, the author refers to a shopping newsletter where you personalize suggestions for certain products after a customer buys a particular product. This is very often a machine learning 101 example but really there's nothing preventing you from writing those heuristics yourself -no ML involved(e.g: if a customer buys a pillow, suggest pillow cases).

Machine learning does makes sense for something like that if your website is Amazon, but is definitely an overkill if your website is an e-commerce for house garments.

The funny thing is that usually you will end up writing those heuristics implicitly since you need to label your data anyways.
> anyone who wants to do science can become a grad student

A grad student is an apprentice. This article is about a less taken path for a master. As a former PhD grad student, I can say most grad students are not in a position to conduct independent research. Most get attached to some funding obtained by someone more experienced than them, and then spend most of their time getting up to speed until they are able to write their own papers on that topic. But this leaves them a very narrow set of skills. This is why most academics go through a postdoc.
Your new downvotes may be because HN guidelines say not to ask about or discuss downvotes.
- Cheese curds being available at any grocery store.

- Bagged milk

- Ketchup chips
Bill Williams: The Story of a Life
Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments? It's basically yelling.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Talk is cheap, show me the prototype?
Them themes though
People that manage people that do not need management amount to a lot of people in tech.
Can it sync with a local Apple store app 1password store, which I keep in local filestore?

I notice they require 1password 'membership' which I suspect means no: it only uses the web backed store.
You're missing the point. Much of the "intelligence" that AI/ML is touted as solving could be accomplished through standard SQL queries on well normalized data. But no one will invest in a company because we have proper data structures and accurate SQL reports that we learn from.
I have implemented jackson as package. Your way of vim cannot be extended to application that keeps secrets in config file (say json). With this implementation we just need to write the env and pass it to jackson, then jackson will resolve it as runtime.
We (speaking for majority of Québécois) definitely don't care much about the ROC and I don't think we should be offended of that. It's just the reality of two cultures forced to coexist by a foreign power :/
Ans it's reciprocal I think. As a student en computer eng. I see it a lot. All my fellow students apply for jobs in Quebec and I personally have a hard time finding anything outside of Quebec.
Setting Up Monitoring and Alerting on Amazon AWS with Terraform
Install floor? Like, carpet or hard wood? This seems like a lot of work.
So I live in Canada, but grew up in Australia. In Canada, you inherit the fridge and washer/dryer of the apartment when you move in. Back in Australia, fridges and washer/dryers are often things you need to bring along on your own. They're big items, I much prefer them coming with the property (if they don't suck, which in places I've lived, often they have!)
Thought this might be helpful to anyone wanting to automate setting up alerting with AWS+Terraform. (Thank you, Hashicorp team, if any of you happen to run across this comment. You make my life and my clients' lives significantly easier.)
No its is secret management package for python applications.
This story highlights a key problem with science reporting.

How many people are going to read this story correcting the original story? A small fraction.

Every time there's some sensational discovery it's all over the media, but whenever there's a retraction or the study fails to be replicated (another huge problem in modern science), the retraction never gets media attention.

It's pop science at its worst.
What if step one is a nonstarter? Wall street is not exactly a friendly environment for science types. And even if you manage to get a job like that, you're spending your time just making money for the sake of making money for some future of science. What if you never make it that far? Then you spent your life of Wall Street. If that's what you want, more power to you, but for a scientist that would be a sad way to ho.
The Judge could be lying even if the prisoner is actually executed - in particular he could be lying about the "and it will be a surprise" bit.
I never heard of a grad student program that pays you to do your research project. The ones I've seen, always offer a choice between paying you to work on someone else's research project, or you get to work on your project but you don't get paid; you do get access to facilities, but you have to pay an exorbitant fee for this. Am I missing something?
Nationalistic flamewar is not welcome on Hacker News. Please don't post like this again.
Sorry, you didn't bother reading the link so you may consult Google if you are interested.
If you post like this again we will ban you.
If it's a rental, and doesn't include appliances, of course you'd take appliances you purchase since you own them.

In every place I've rented in Ontario, appliances were included -- which is common but not universal.

I've only owned two houses, where it's a matter of negotiation. The first place we purchased from a couple downsizing to an apartment, and the terms of sale just included everything. We ended up replacing the fridge and stove after a couple years anyway. Also learned a lesson there, because they included an old fridge in the basement that we didn't need but figured whatever, why not. We never even used it, and then refinished the basement and ended up having to pay to have it disposed.

The second place left nothing but the dishwasher, while the people buying our place offered some money for all our appliances. We took our new fridge and stove - since it wasn't really worth it to us to sell <2 year old stuff and then have to buy brand new at retail price - and sold them the rest for next to nothing (or maybe just left them, I can't remember).
I seriously doubt this is true. Porn makes up like 20-30% of traffic and searches on the internet.

Even if only 10% of users are paying it would still be a very high number of transactions.
I think its going to be like websites/internet back in the early 2000s. Everyone knew it was the future, but didn't know what to make of it. Many did it wrong and the profits (if there were any) didn't live up to expectations. then bubble burst. lots gave up, but the survivors, and the ones that learned how to do it right ended up with near unassailable moats. now a large portion of businesses today have an internet/app presence, and its seen as indispensable to their business.
All other allocation strategies in practice (that come to my mind) pretty cold-bloodedly control access to life requirements. Communism probably being the notable exclusion, but I'd say my point is born out there too.

In that in non-communist allocation systems, if one does not produce value (somewhat arbitrarily defined, but usually semi-attached to actual value) then neither one nor one's children eat.

UBI fundamentally changes this, in that hypothetically people could do nothing (and reproduce), thereby eventually exhausting available energy resources.

If your point is that everything has an absolute carrying capacity, then agreed. But here I'm assuming UBI is implemented before resource scarcity is truly eliminated by technological progress.

Thereby leaving the equation in an "It balances, but only if these percentage of people work, age demographics don't get too out of whack, and population growth falls in range" state.
Personal attacks will get you banned here. We've warned you about this before, so please don't do that again.

Also, could you please not post unsubstantive comments or flamewar comments of any kind? We're trying for better than that here, and need everyone's help.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Unfortunately some library sites still rely on DjVu plugin, and with Firefox dropping support for native plugins, those materials became inaccessible. Especially because single download is dynamic and generated by the plugin itself from multiple smaller files.

Other than that, DjVu is a great format.

For those who wonder how it's better than PDF for scanned texts - DjVu uses different compression for background and actual text, thus saving tons of space.
One way to think about this paradox is as a game with two players—a prisoner and an executioner. The game progresses over five turns, representing the days of the week.

On each turn, the prisoner secretly chooses whether or not they expect to be killed on that day. Then the executioner chooses whether or not to kill the prisoner. The game ends on the turn the executioner decides to kill the prisoner. If the prisoner wasn't expecting to die, the executioner wins; otherwise, the prisoner wins.

The important detail here (which is obscured by the logical perspective) is when the prisoner is allowed to expect to die. If they're allowed to expect their death on every single day, the prisoner can just do that and win automatically. If they can only expect to die once, there's a situation the usual paradoxical argument doesn't consider: that the prisoner has survived until Thursday but has already used their chance to expect to die. In this case, they know they're going to die on Friday, but there's nothing they can do about it.
This story fits bitcoin pretty much exactly
The word 'promote' used in the sense 'to contribute to the progress or growth of' is inappropriate in connection with prostitution, since it has been around quite a while.

Therefore, I conclude, use of the word 'promote' is a Victorian dog-whistle.
Testing a big more, just dropping "dlig" from the feature settings declaration turns off the awful st ligature. So they don't have to 'all' be turned off to get rid of that one. What I don't know is what other ones get turned off by dropping "dlig" from the declaration.
My point is not that "we should do what SV wants" (I'm not even American).

My point is... where would people get the education that bootstraps them to understand the state of the art then? To me that is the University's goal. In CS that means learning lots that may not be practical for a regular job (advanced algebra/calculus, computer architecture, data structure theory, etc.). However, in the long run this should leave you better prepared for the "boring jobs" too.

Now, you argue that this kind of education may not be the most efficient training process to regular job excellence? I totally agree. College as devised today is designed as the first step into eventually being able to contribute to the world's knowledge, or at least making good use of it. It is not devised as a way to prepare you for the job world, where immediate applicability trumps everything (in general).

I don't know the US system enough, but here in Spain (and at least in France and Germany) there are alternatives to College tuned to that goal. However, most parents (in Spain) still want their children to go the College route. Why? Because College is socially reputable (there are non-college educated leaders, but they are the exception, not the norm), and data shows that college educated people do have a higher expected income throughout their lives. It is percieved as a ladder up the social chain.
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