skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally believe that facial recognition software will eventually be employed by law enforcement no matter what we do; I also believe that this is a bad thing and lies on the path to a controlling and pervasive police state.

However, this article states clearly that there are recommendations to LE on how to use Rekognition in a meaningful and correct manner for LE's use case. I am highly confident that Amazon will provide technical documentation and manuals for a contract of that size; of course Amazon will not be able to conduct oversight on LE operations. LE may missuse it, the way they've missused Stingrays, stoplight cameras, clipper chips, and other devices.

You state that having 99% accuracy for identifying an individual will do large scale harm, and I agree; what about the 1 person out of every 100 that is falsly identified? The other side to this coin is the number of people law enforcement would miss recognizing without this software... This argument comes down to human ability vs. machine learning ability, and human discretion in interpreting results. I think with proper use it'll be a benefit to identying culprits quickly.

Regardless, it is still pretty evil giving LE any tool that can autonomously monitor people who have not committed any crimes. But who's going to stop them?
> Could you give a couple of examples?

Shakespeare, Vladimir Nabokov, Walt Whitman

I believe that English has many problems, from crazy grammar rules to horrendously inconsistent spelling. But to say it is not expressive is absurd, and suggests that you haven’t read any great English literature. This is not to say that the cultures you mentioned and many other have not produce their own great literature, of course.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I think the lack of desire to teach is a country wide problem for universities in the US. I think it's more apparent in the humanities because a teacher can define their opinion as "right" and put very little effort into educating students on the topic since they can just grade less harshly if they need to keep a certain pass rate on their students. On the other hand there is a much larger proportion of STEM work that is right or wrong and a teacher can't just pass students without it becoming obvious to the department that the students coming out of Professor N's classes have no grasp on the topic, and so they are forced to teach more skills that are useable in any class or jobs that touch on that subject
If you're concerned about this, can't you just host your own server to begin with?
> the 70 foot screen on my local theater absolutely dwarfs the 70 inch screeen of your TV.

Sure, and our sun isn't the brightest star. It's just much closer. Same logic applies.

When you go to the theater you are getting a boxed experience. The seats, the concessions, the atmosphere. Everything is designed with mass appeal in order to move more units. At home I can tune the experience to how I want.
> I have never expected that the other party is sitting and staring at the screen in any Slack or chat I’ve used.

OK, maybe not literally staring at the screen.

> What do you think has caused that expectation in your mind?

I think the structural analogue and communication style — even the name! — of chat is a verbal conversation. In a conversation, you say as little as needed and then pause for the other person to take their turn. Each utterance is pretty short so that you give the other party a chance to respond.

If you do that asynchronously, it takes forever to work through a sizeable quantity of content.

In email, the analogue is written letters. The expected asynchrony is high and in return the writing style accommodates that: each email is usually a roughly complete though with possibly some paragraphs. Since you know the person replying to you can reply to individual sections, it's OK to put out a complete thought. You don't have to shorten it to give them a chance to interject.
That's a tax (passed on to consumers) and a subsidy by another name though. GP's point is they don't want to pay it. Please debate the finer points of whether or not to have such a policy, but don't say that it's not a subsidy when it clearly is.
I thought about this too. My idea was to introduce some sort of version badges, like 'This client supports feature set 2018'. Every 2 to 3 years there should be new definition of which XEPs a client should support in order to be allowed to be called 'Supports feature set xxxx'.

That way you could very easily coordinate a common target for XEPs. Clients which would not support the newest features would still work with the others but users could simply see which clients support the state of the art features. And for developers it would make it easier to identify and skip old XEPs (e.g. how many XEPs are there to confirm a message has been received? Which is the recommended one for new implementations?).
Someone has to buy the lab equipment and pay the scientists. If you think their profit is 'exorbitant', then you should be investing in pharma. But historically and as a whole, they generate returns comparable to the rest of industry.
They should name the next devices after Boring, OR
Homeless German Shepherd cries like a human
> > law school

> Technically still part of the humanities :)

Law is usually considered part of the social sciences rather than the humanities (outside of the law schools that offer BSL as well as JD degrees, undergraduate study of law is often within political science departments.)
OS 10.4 was the last version to support classic mac apps - https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-confirms-no-classic-support-...

Mojave is the last version of OSX to support 32 bit applications ( https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/05/mojave-is-apples-... )

---

Essentially, all software has a end of life. I'll grant that Apple has done work to maintain their software across major processor and operating system changes, but at some point that support is dropped.
Yeah, that's a known thing. Sony uses some DRM system for cameras, and you lose the keys when you flash AOSP. If you google around, you can hack it to save and restore the keys. Not worth buying Sony on general principle. Plenty of other alternatives.
It's fun to dig up old predictions of where we'd be today. Here's an article from 2002: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1176510

>Moore's Law scales to at least 9nm: technologist

>It'll be at least a human generation before Moore's Law begins to run out of gas at around the 9nm and even then it may thrive, TSMC's chief technologist said Tuesday (March 12). Calvin Chenming Hu told an audience at the annual Semico Summit conference here that the 9nm node "can be ready more or less on time, in 2028 according to long-term forecasts or 2024 according to the 2002 (industry roadmap)."

Intel is off by 4-5 years according to their initial estimates (in 2011) of hitting 10nm, but they are 5-10 years ahead of where TSMC thought we would be 15+ years ago. TSMC was manufacturing at 10nm last year, incidentally (Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835).
Yeah, that was a popular pattern in the early 90s. Basically take a EE PhD thesis, dress it up and build some early engineering samples, file a patent application then go to Cisco saying "buy us or we'll make this product".

It worked a little too well.
Yep, totally agree. I think people get mad when they see that a cure for a disease exists that they can't have. They don't think about the institutions that created it in the first place. On the other hand, I think we could do a better job at providing medicines to people who genuinely cannot pay, or cannot obtain it for some odd reason (like the company stopped making it).
CORRECTION: My regret was referring to a problem where this code worked in Python 2 but not Python 3:

x = 100
y = [x+i for i in range(2)]

In Python 3 I kept seeing

NameError: name 'x' is not defined

However, after working around this problem with fixes like this -

x = 100
y = (lambda x=x: [x+i for i in range(2)])()

I have just discovered that the different scope treatment was due to a problem with IPython when using it in embed mode, for example by calling it with the following command:

$ python -c "import IPython;IPython.embed()"

It goes away when you call ipython directly

$ ipython

I mistakenly attributed this problem to Python 3 for years, I guess I introduced the problem because I had a different way of invoking Python 2 and Python 3 - yeesh.
> Britain is _fundamentally_ an island and a seafaring nation, and that's something Americans miss; you're never more than seventy miles from the sea.

In 2010, 123 million Americans, or 39 percent of the nation’s population lived in counties directly on the ocean.

There's only 53 million people living in Britain total.
I understand that. But I don't know what the linguistic equivalence of 'lossy compression' is.

All natural languages use a good bit of 'lossy compression' in a sense: we use a lot of shared world knowledge and context to 'get' meaning of things people say/write.
Or like saying that a room can't carry multiple sounds at once because all the air molecules in the room are touching each other.
This is purely additive. If you don’t want to look at these metrics, you don’t need to, but if they would be helpful to you, then you can. Speaking as a GCP customer, I’m very glad these are available. It means that I will more easily be able to tell the difference between issues in my service, and issues in the APIs I depend on.
Yes, according to the article, for prison banking and refunds.

The services you mentioned are okay, but having a state-approved monopoly over essential services is not okay.
There are a couple in my area:

http://www.clarityconnect.com/
https://www.lightlink.com/
For now, but in the next version there will probably be no OpenGL support.
A solution was in progress before Russ preempted it with his own thing: dep.
I find that a somewhat odd evaluation. English is comparatively intolerant of changes in word order compared to a lot of languages.
Different restaurants have different noise levels. You can choose to visit quieter locations. Choosing the right restaurant for the occasion and company is actually one of the most important things to get right in dining out.
> why does Google think that spending money in this way is useful?

It's not useful, it's required. You have two choices. You can do the equivalent of what Microsoft did for a long time, and hide in the Pacific Northwest and pray that the Monster in DC just leaves you alone, while all of your competitors lobby to have you destroyed. You will not be left alone no matter what, if you achieve that kind of success, no matter how you achieve it. The only rational choice, is to get in the game and try to influence the outcome, which is what all of your competitors are going to be doing. Microsoft learned that very painful lesson after waiving at the US Government for years and thinking they could ignore what was going on with their competitors lobbying. Google learned from Microsoft's mistake, and got in almost immediately once their position became dominant.

With the politics in DC, you're either in it defending your position, or you're dinner being served up by your competitors who are very aggressively in it and trying to use the political machine against you as a weapon. The US has a $7 trillion government system top to bottom, one third the size of the economy. There's no avoiding that.
The percentage of all PhDs earned by women has just, in the last ten years, hit 50%. Of the STEM fields only biology has over 50%, and engineering, physics, and math are in the 20s. A lot of strides have been made, but "most inclusive and least hostile" is not born out by the data.

https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/fraction-p...
> with morality

Wait, we actually care about people who are stupid, desperate or boneheaded enough to commit crimes? Yawn. Wake me up when this is Weimar Germany, and not only in the eyes of the hysterical.

...

And an article about Facebook providing Facebook-only Internet to some rural location in Africa is indeed only relevant if a non-negligible number of people live in that specific place in Africa, because ... why do we we care about some random rural location in Africa?

(The likelihood of any kind of interesting technology/mathematics/HN-material being produced there is astronomically low.)
Unfortunately, Java is a bit of an archival nightmare. Java Applets can do pretty much anything they want, they aren't consistent in that sense. Unlike Flash you can't just run them offline in a Projector, and the code structure of an applet is different from that of a normal Java app. This is on top of being unable to play Java games without getting a tonne of (well deserved) security warnings (unless you want to pay Oracle $100 per month for a signature.) Java in the browser was just a bad idea all around.
From the actual press release:

> During the transition process, Charter must continue to comply with all local franchises it holds in New York State and all obligations under the Public Service Law and the Commission regulations. Charter must ensure no interruption in service is experienced by customers, and, in the event that Charter does not do so, the Commission will take further steps, including seeking injunctive relief in Supreme Court in order to protect New York consumers.
They'll rip out anything of value, but how valuable is installed coax? Wouldn't it be cheaper just to leave that in place?
It's not saying the RAR file is that. It's saying you can only get access to the file through a password-protected website on the dark web.
There's no shame in relying on the help of others and there's no hypocrisy either. I'm prepared to being unable to get a neighbour to let me use a phone. I can accept that. If I'm able to get help, that's great, and if not that's also something I can accept. I have only done this once ever, anyway. Such a rare occasion does not outweigh the happiness and peace of mind that I get by being without a phone.
It's an official language, but not a full _working_ language, something which seems to be slated to change within the next few years.

In my personal opinion, however, knowing the quality of "Irish" [1] that the translators will have, is that it still won't really help translation all that much if you wish to actually communicate with native speakers.

[1] There's a huge rift forming in Irish between the "Gaelscoilis" or "Urban Irish" that is learnt and passed on by non-native speakers and that which is passed on in the traditional areas. Unfortunately, there's also a lack of communication between the two areas, partly because they struggle to understand each other; natives from the traditional area often have to translate the non-traditional speakers' Irish to English in order to understand the meaning, for instance.

There's also the fact that the people creating the legal terms for the language often don't really have a firm grasp on the history or nuances of various words or the language, and are often themselves not native speakers. This led to a funny incident where they translated "dental hygienist" as "toothed hygienist" in the official dictionary of new terms. It's also likely to lead to a "Neo-Irish" that is completely divorced from the language as used in the Gaeltachtaí (traditional speaking areas); one linguist has even gone so far as to say it'll be "Irish in English drag", which looks truer and truer when you look at the errors they make and pass on.
Local government standing up to a big cable company? Is this what it looks like?
It’s not more complicated; it’s simpler. If heavy gauge electrical wiring was run, and copper twisted pair was run, then fiber can also be run.
This level of detail effectively holds them to a higher standard, not lower. I'd pay for that.
That's a big one if alcohol consumption is involved, like the parent comment mentioned.
Isn't comparing TSMC to Intel process nodes like comparing apples to oranges?
The RAR file was posted on a “dark web” site. The password needing to be cracked is the one on the RAR file itself, not the site.

Source: I was at the HOPE talk he gave and also talked to Michael at the conference about it too.
Beginner’s guide to cross compilation in Nixpkgs
The more interesting question for me is what evidence would change Russ's mind?

The package managers for many successful languages and distributions use lockfiles and constraint solvers. Not only is that empirical evidence that it works technically, it is evidence that it works socially — users are able to understand and work with it, and the package ecosystems for those languages have evolved with those rules in place.

Empirical data from Go's own package ecosystem is useful too, but you can only learn so much about package management from a corpus that does not have sophisticated package management. The ecosystem has already learned to work within the restrictions so you'll mostly see packages that confirm the system's own biases.

It's like countering passers-by on a bike trail and concluding that the only vehicles users need are bikes.

I'm not saying vgo isn't better. But it's an unproven approach where lockfiles and constraint solving are proven, multiple times over. The burden of proof lies on vgo.
The primary relevance is that this looks at the business details of a tech startup, JPay, which is in the not-insignificant industry category of incarceration services (estimated 1 to $2 billion) https://blog.ycombinator.com/pigeon-dot-ly-yc-w15-a-startup-...

The secondary factors of relevance are: hardware sales, the increasing use of mobile/tablet computers, the impact of private contractors on the cost of government, and interesting/controversial pricing schemes.
This article has no real data backing up their claim, although they are probably correct.
...as opposed to the average HNer who has little to do but offer their opinions on the latest startup and complain about how young people today don't know anything about programming or web design?
If Intel goes multi-chip in the same package like Ryzen, then yeah, they can get more cores in, similar to Ryzen Threadripper.

So there is a leap coming for Intel as well if they go that route, and after the massive success of Ryzen, they are likely going there. Just easier to scale core counts if you can use smaller dies and just use a lot of them with an interconnect fabric.
My favourite quote about the English language:

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

— James Nicoll
Half the article literally talks about Huawei though.
Did Netflix get Facebook blowback?
They both manufacture silicon gates.. what does it matter if the production infrastructure on top is different.
> The very concept of the letters presupposes that sub crews have full control over their missiles, that they can fire them based on instructions in a hand-written letter. That does not mesh with the safeguards surrounding other weapons that require external command/codes prior to launch.

The whole point of the submarine component of the strategic triad is to be the ultimate guarantor of MAD by presenting the capacity for launching a retaliatory strike in the event of sudden destruction of the highest command authorities (and, potentially, the land-based components of the triad), so it is absolutely plausible that submarines have a looser set of controls than bombers and land-based missiles because otherwise there would be no point in having them.
Not defending anybody, but I think the point in the article is sound. If my child were missing, I would want every technical resource possible to be available to find her. Having "big brother" be able to identify me quickly in a crowd doesn't seem that bad on balance ... if I'm in public, I expect to be viewed.
Given that an arts degree in the US easily costs a quarter million (at least at a decent art school) these days, I think "poor" isn't the word I'd use for people who don't take it.

Just "not willing to be in debt for the rest of their lives".
A large proportion of pharmaceutical development is funded (directly or indirectly) by public funds. There's a very strong argument that single-payer healthcare systems should issue a blanket moratorium on buying new patented medicines and direct the funds to research. Major pharmaceutical companies spend significantly more on marketing than on R&D, so it'd be a net win for the taxpayer if they just paid for drug development directly.
I think there are a lot of blockchain projects working on exactly that issue now - I like to think about an internet that is totally distributed yet (because of blockchain) totally secure. I'd like to think it would make the internet at large even more secure, avaliable, and faster, but I don't know enough of the technicals to know if that is actually feasible or just a pipe dream.
Racket: v7.0 Release Notes
As others have pointed out, Google bought Android long before Apple released the iPhone.

Even after Apple did release the iPhone, the strategy behind Android was entirely focused on competing with Microsoft, not Apple. Google was terrified that Microsoft would get into the smartphone OS market and achieve a dominant position, and then muscle Google out of mobile search and advertising. That's why Android is open source (well, mostly). Google made the Android OS free for manufacturers to use with their phones as a way to get them to use Android instead of a Microsoft OS.

The strategy worked brilliantly. Android has done exactly what Google wanted it to accomplish. Microsoft has never gained any meaningful market share in the smartphone market. And between Android and various deals with Apple, Google has a tremendous presence with smartphone users.
I'm not famous or important enough to have a streak or reputation worth preserving. I have considered some situations in which I may reconsider owning a mobile phone. Besides not wanting to have a source of distraction always on and always on me, I also do not want a device that I cannot control and cannot ever fully trust.

A phone without internet connexion that I can completely trust (i.e. free all the way down to the baseband) is something that I would consider owning.
This was ten years ago, so I don't even care about it any longer..
Each listener iphone will almost never get each stream chunk at the same millisecond, but it can be close enough most of the time, depending on your use case.
I pay $69 to fios for gigabit in Manhattan
I meant examples of expressiveness over German.
Edit: You were comparing English with other languages and implied it is more or as expressive as the majority of languages (or at least the ones you are familiar with). Thus my question.
Yes, it impacts the standard that you will be taught in schools and hear on the media, as well as what you should use in formal situations. But, outside of the higher registers, it really doesn't impact it at all.

People rarely speak the standard as a native language, and we're much more likely to pick up our language from our peer group and parents. This does, of course, change with higher educated people, who are more used to using a higher register [1] of language that more closely follows the standard.

Also, not everyone speaks like they write; writing really should be divorced from language when talking about language change and such, as it's generally not indicative of how people talk since they're following set standards that are explicitly learnt, unlike language which is acquired naturally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
No, this article is mostly a bout of "let's express pity on these poor people because we're compassionate/upstanding/Christian/whatever", and does not go into particularly much depth about JPay.

(Nor did those legislators, but that's typical of legislators.)

It does go into just enough detail about JPay to bring a smile to my face. But simple schadenfreude is not what HN is for, I daresay.