skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the '90's, there were -- or something closer to this. E.g. IIRC, "prairienet", in Illinois -- run, again IIRC, by U of I or some affiliated organization. Perhaps there was State involvement.

It wasn't a "social network", by today's standards, but you could get a free account.

The "Internet" received a big boost with an government/academic initiative for high speed links between universities and perhaps some other, government locations. Initially, this was to be segregated out for use by academics and their designated projects and the like. But after a year or two, it was opened up to the general public.

There's a phrase, "Privatizing the profits and socializing the costs."

This connectivity had a lot of value to users. And private companies succeeded in inserting themselves and extracting it. Building upon the public investment that started the whole thing.

This is part of why you don't see public social networks. Similar to how ATT, Comcast, et al. fight tooth and nail to limit and shut down any public ISP initiatives. And they have the bigger pocketbooks, as well as legislators in pocket.

Why are there no public social networks? There are certainly other arguments, other pieces to that puzzle. But one primary one is, because there is money to be made.

P.S. https://localwiki.org/cu/Prairienet
I never said guns would not change the situation, but I do believe they would make things worse.

When was the last time you've heard of a gun-wielding vigilante saving the day in the US? Was he in his car with his family getting robbed by 3 teenagers at a stop light?

I lived in Brazil and I've been robbed and I've witnessed people being shot in gang fights, and I don't see how having a gun on me would've helped, so forgive me if I'm cynical of armchair vigilantism.
Exactly. Google also sends all the data from all your contacts back to Google so they can publish it to the entire world including to China!

(To that portion of the world that knows your Gmail account and password, and if you were traveling in China and accessing your email account then yeah your contacts would also be transmitted to China.)

I just can't believe the higher-quality clientele that used to be Hacker News are eating this up like this. I guess we're all human after all.
I'm of the opposite opinion. While I enjoy the look and feel of a book, I'm tired of carrying them around when I travel and moving them when I, well, move. Best of all I can sit on my couch, wine glass in hand, and seconds after reading a book review in the Times I've got that very book in my hands.
> you can opt-out off the tracking in 3 clicks, and your data is safe (so far)

Yes, if you know where to click! But would you have known without reading this that disabling "Location History" does not actually .. well .. disable location history?
MoviePass is opting some users into its new plan even after they cancel
I believe the barter hypothesis is already in Aristotle, so it’s perhaps several millenia old.

Anyway, the issue does run deeper, since the barter theory is implicit in for instance theories of banking, inflation and the money supply. See “veil over barter”. It’s pretty important economists get it right.
> My $100,- Motorola Moto C plus is great but I can't remove the Google search box from my home screen for example.

Can't you get around this with a 3rd party launcher like Nova?
For large calculations, the magic of an FPGA is in its throughput. Imagine that you have some mess of addition, multiplication, ... The time for the first calculation hardly matters. Even if the FPGA is slower getting through the first calculation that took 100 clock cycles on a CPU vs 10 on an FPGA, what happens on the next clock cycle? The FPGA cranked through an entire second iteration while the CPU is a few steps in. Next clock cycle? Now the FPGA has pushed another whole calculation through the pipeline.
Kafka-Kit: tools for scaling Kafka from Datadog
A web of anxiety: accessibility for people with anxiety and panic disorders
9 tips to do if the iPhone or iPad does not work anymore
Look at the tweets in the last days from Trump regarding Omarosa...

Personally, I'm disgusted that twitter is the official medium of the POTUS.
Controlling fracture cascades through twisting and quenching
I understand these metrics are easy to capture, but only if the browser / device makes it accessible via APIs. How difficult would it be to notify users (like GPS use, or Notifications on a phone) that X information is also being captured and allow for an opt-in?

It's not trivial as obviously applications need to know at some level where users are clicking / tapping to function, but does the device need to share that with the code being executed and/or can it hide that layer?

I'd pay good money (or pay money to support) a browser that did this well on mobile / desktop. (Tails browser has similar prompts for this kind of thing)

Admittedly, I am not well versed in the lower-level workings of the browser, so this may be a stupid thing to ask for.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription due to the lack of good movies. Pretty sure they track it carefully.
So have the Democrats.
Yes. On the radio this morning they mentioned that the bridge had been refurbished a couple of months ago. It seems like a big red flag to me.
You're talking about selling things that enable violent crimes against others, while the person you're responding to is taking about selling benign things with which one can only harm oneself. They seem categorically different.
Yes! This is the domain of Reinforcement Learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning
Indian railway was built with Indian taxpayer's money to transport raw goods for exporting to British factories.

India had a highly developed set of kingdoms even before the British invasion, and in an alternate history where British had never invaded India, they'd have built the railway and industrialized anyway.
No hadron can achieve the speed of light. See:

Ek=mc^2/√(1−(v/c)^2)−mc^2

For v<<c you have significant discrepancies on the energy required to accelerate to a specific speed with regard to mass. I.E. Newton: Ek=(mv^2)/2

As v->c it does not matter as much, the lorentz factor is much more significant, the mass operates just as a base multiplier and sum factor.

As v->c, x->0 where Ek~1/x, i.e. tending to infinity with a division by zero when v=c.

In conclusion, the speed is the relevant factor instead of mass when near speed of light, regardless of the object being an electron or the mount Everest.

Of course, assuming the equation holds ;-)
I think the argument would be more along the lines of, "I marginally dislike the concept that I no longer own these products, but I absolutely hate the other team, which therefore deserves my attention to a much greater degree."

They're not necessarily related semantically, but in terms of allocation of attention (a finite resource), they are competitive.
I'm genuinely curious how many iPhones are sold in Turkey. Important to note, I just read that Turkey already had the 2nd most expensive iPhones in the world, behind Brazil, due to tariffs.
> You are what you do.

I used to argue that, but it omits our entire internal life. Our internal lives are so much greater in scope and, I think, by far the majority of our experiences.
Ah, I mistook the - at the beginning for a separator.

It does fail the triangle inequality, though, as the following python snippit demonstrates:

import numpy as np

def randomvec():
return np.random.rand(4)*2-1

def cossim(a, b):
return np.dot(a,b) / np.sqrt(np.dot(a, a) * np.dot(b, b))

def metric(a, b):
return -np.log((1+cossim(a, b))/2)

def main():
for i in range(20):
a = randomvec()
b = randomvec()
c = randomvec()
a2b = metric(a, b)
b2c = metric(b, c)
a2c = metric(a, c)
print a2b, b2c, a2c
if a2b + b2c < a2c:
print ' *** fails triangle inequality'

main()
If the buyer/owner of the of the fridge is the landlord but the user and power bill payer is the renter then the landlord has little incentive to care about power consumption.
It isn't that hard to
-- strip down and make your social media private
-- enable dual factor for everything that has it available
-- use ublock origin properly
-- use good passwords and a password manager
-- opt out of "upload all my contacts to you" whenever possible
-- default deny location sharing
-- use a VPN
-- Use the Lite app instead of FB app, and generally use less social media

I'd say that's minimal effort and private enough for most purposes.
I'm glad you like and want to use this functionality. I don't. Hopefully we can coexist simply by my turning off my location services and history.
Sure, yet another way to say "expectation" at this point is learning from past mistakes. Is it fine to say "don't give these institutions money that have made bad public stuff"?

I think the only reasonable answer here is to require the public entity making/maintaining such a system organically grow the system as a private company would. That is difficult to do with a public coffer because, while altruistic motivation may exist individually, as a whole waste will often take hold. Oddly enough, unlike the private sector, the only way to do this without large amounts of public waste is to not grow employee-wise.

Kind of a tangent, but in summary, take a small, focused set of devs, build a the system with features you want, and resist the urge to grow the feature count (beyond reason) and only grow the maintenance employee count, not the development employee count. And don't politicize it (however one does that).
If you have enough cities with electric buses in their fleets you could probably hop skip from one muni bus yard to the next.
Validating arguments in a better way: JavaScript hacks
Indeed. BYD's electric vehicle production is heavily supported by Chinese subsidies and cuts in these subsidies have had a big impact on profits. Its stock has been steadily declining since the announcement earlier this year.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-byd-results/chinas-byd-wa...
Apple will recycle any Apple product for free just by handing it to them in any of their stores. An Apple phone ending up in a landfill is the consumer's fault.

These recycled phones either end up as refurbished phones in other markets, or are taken apart by their special robots down to the individual pieces, which are then recycled themselves.
From the average skill level of Google engineers I know, I would say yes, most would do a very solid job on the average interview question.

However, you probably wanted to know if that means that they would all get back in if re-interviewed, and the answer is no. Google is famous for tolerating huge numbers of false negatives in exchange for a small reduction in false positives. So, by definition, many would fail, even if they are capable Google engineers.

When I interviewed, I knew nothing of this process. Which was probably good, it would have made me a lot more nervous if I had know what lottery I was about to enter. In fact, I was pretty arrogant, seeing that typical questions were "just CS", and thinking my CS knowledge was pretty solid, I didn't even do any prep work. So I was probably pretty lucky to get in.

My own assessment of the 5 interviews I had were that 3 of them went very well. 1 went so-so (the interviewer assumed I was a webdev and ask me all sorts of specific server balancing questions, whereas I have worked mostly on compilers and game engines.. I managed to do ok-ish since I do know distributed systems). The final one I felt went badly since there I actually didn't manage to solve the problem the interviewer asked (it was one of those more puzzle-y questions), but I guess I somehow did ok, since I did what you're supposed to do in such a situation: show that you're a good communicator and problem solver even when you don't know the answer.

I was dissapointed in all these interviews since I was hoping for interesting questions specific to me (how did you implement this type inference algorithm?) which never came.

Of all the interviews I've conducted for Google since, I've only had a 1:40 ratio of seeing people being accepted, even though plenty seemed highly capable to me. Usually some other interviewer didn't have quite as good a time with them as I did. You really need to make all of them happy to pass.

To other answers that joke that these interviews are the hardest thing you'll do at Google, I'd like to disagree. At least in the teams I've worked, I've done things that thoroughly stretched my abilities, way beyond the level of interview questions. Of course they're of a very different nature, but that is the point: interview questions are very distilled, idealized, and problem solving in the real world is very messy, and to my mind at least, much more interesting.
Yes, it's usually abbreviated as CLRS.
I used to work out at the gym, but I got bored of it, and wanted to do something that would give me some kind of 'skill' at the end of it.

So, I looked on Twitter, and found a post about a BJJ class near the office. I had my gym clothes with me, so I popped down for the class after work, and I've been going a few times a week for the past three years.

I can have a terrible day at work, and the second I step on the mat every worry I have tends to melt away, if only for an hour or two. It also gave me a great perspective of being "the newbie" again, something I had missed at work at times.
Vocational Training Is Back as Firms Pair with High Schools to Groom Workers
Tech interviews, coming from someone transitioning into the field, are blowing me away. One national retailer I spoke to does two phone screens, then an onsite round with nine coworkers. I've never seen anything like this in my previous field (mechanical engineering).
>there is a basic human psychological need that is not being acknowledged in this solution

Then I guess we need to change human psychology :)
India Looks to Curb U.S. Tech Giants’ Power
Actually, no, according to the abstract:

> ... The present paper will argue that our currently best physics refutes even this most moderate form of ontic structural realism ...

It's a mind bender though.
> This is the physical world equivalent of believing gravity makes things rise

No, it isn't. At least it's not as clear cut as you want to make it look like with the hyperbole.

Higher interest rates have both deflationary and inflationary effects. The mainstream only acknowledges the short or medium term effect on borrowing and consumer spending. But interest rates are just another price of the economy. Higher interest rates also means higher costs for businesses. And they add to the government deficit, which is also inflationary.

Maybe Erdogan is looking at Argentina, where the current interest rate is above 45% and whatever anti-inflationary effect it could have had has long ago dissapeared.
Performance Monitoring and Auditing PostgreSQL – Top Resources
Tour de France TV Broadcast from Denmark Used Augmented Reality for TTT Analysis
Diesel Buses are deadmen walking at this point.
From what I understand about the current science... it wouldn't matter if we could end emissions instantly today. It's already in motion and there's nothing we can do to stop it. All we can do is to try to not make it worse.
Such a powerless attitude. And these things are presented as if they are objective truths that one day programmers will eventually "figure out" rather than a subjective, and very disempowering, perspective.
Well, ask LA how that is working out [1]. While I applaud the effort it is not without its problems. I always thought that we should have moved to electrify school buses. while the initial expense is high it would have protected systems from fluctuations in fuel prices that have put a real hurt on them at times.

plus it would get kid used to the idea of an EV world and not having to sit on buses idling for too long

[1] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-electric-buses-2018...
16,000 just for Shenzen. They've made the full switch to EV this year for a city of ~14 million inhab. It's crazy.

For comparison, Paris (I should say the Parisian region) plans to have only 2,000 zero missions buses by 2025! And that official numbers includes NGV... So much talk about the transition (remember the "Paris Agreement"?) and yet, so little progress...
After having read a bit, I'm a bit disappointed. While the intent goes in the direction I would like to see, the actual execution does not follow scientific principles. "Consultant collects some data, derives conclusions, and writes a book" is actually again only anecdotal. You need to think about your sample before collecting the data, otherwise your outcome is biased by who gave you a consulting gig.

Consequently, the work has never been published as peer-reviewed paper with experiment and/or real-world data, so that someone else could validate or reproduce results.
Is that assessment correct, or did I overlook scientific papers?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money
It sounds like a nightmare to me.

A fridge service provider might run the hardware longer, but they wouldn't care much about your power bill, nor fridge features - if old phone monopolies, cable boxes and current isp's are any indicator.

And good luck trying to prove to a fridge service provider that their unit has an intermittent thermostat problem...

Recycling might be the responsibility of the company, but they might systematically find the cheapest way to do it without regard to the full externalities of how it's accomplished.
It becomes brutally difficult in the context of a time-limited interview. You have the pressures of: 1) anxiety about limited time, 2) anxiety about hidden "tricks" or "cleverness", 3) inter-personal anxiety.

It's that last one that I think algorithms/white-board coding entirely fails to see the trees for the forest. You would think as an industry that seems to lean heavily towards introverts and people in various places on the autism and social disorder spectrums, that the industry would not rely so much on high-pressure inter-personal communication scenarios for interviewing.

Which is not to say that soft skills don't matter: they absolutely do, and most industries their job interviews are much more highly focused on soft skills. The point is that you are testing soft and hard skills together in a highly charged mix.

If I want to sit down and play with an algorithms problem, I'd probably like to do it in a quiet room with no one watching/looking over my shoulder, and if I'm writing anything for most of the thought time it's scribbles and doodles, not algorithm-appropriate diagrams. "Programmer's Tourette's" of a sort imply that I'd probably be swearing at it for a while as I work to make sense of it. Asking a complicated algorithms question in a whiteboard scenario requires me to "play-act" a more linear string of thoughts, which diagram nicely, than I would use in an actual puzzle situation, while trying to be personal/presentable/well-spoken. I can certainly do that, but that mix of social skills and problem solving skills is very rarely needed in real life where we mostly compartmentalize such things to meetings versus coding time.

Then add in the ticking clock anxiety, that I don't feel like I have time to breathe, much less patiently tease out a solution to the problem.

Then add in the exhaustions of jet lag and trying to do all of that for 8 hours.

I feel like a lot of these sorts of questions, I could solve the problem rather well on my own time, or I could be a great, sociable, and presentable candidate with smart thoughts but maybe not immediate solutions. You want to the test for the former, but present only situations where the latter works well.

I feel like I'm not far from a baseline human on inter-personal skills, and even am somewhat more extrovert than the average programmer, and knowing that I have problems doing "both" the soft and hard skills for an eight hour interview day, I sometimes can't imagine how anyone in this industry gets hired because it's almost like we've optimized interviews to be intentional hells for programmers by trying to test hard skills in high pressure soft skills environments.

I very much believe that the technical interview culture as it exists today meets the definition of hazing [1], and that one day the industry will look back on it and wonder what was it thinking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazing
Exactly. Cops can't break into a hotel room without a warrant, but agents of the management might be able to, depending on local laws. The 4A doesn't apply to them.
Apple will pay you to not throw your old iPhone in the trash.
True, true. I mention divorce since marriage is a risky behavior which leads to terminal conditions in more than 50% of the cases contracted. ;)
>We have to stop letting architects design, and cities then build, hipster bridges. Their primary consideration must be their integrity and longevity.

Agreed. You don't have to go back to roman times to see engineering for function over form. If there's one thing the red side of the iron curtain did right it was not letting form compromise function when it came to public works and civil engineering.

>At least the examples we have today were clearly not undermining their integrity for the sake of a cool design

What people like to see follows what they're used to seeing. A good example is the GMT800 Chevy truck platform. In 2000-2005 everyone thought they looked like ugly slant eyed jelly beans, now they just look normal because people have gotten used to them. If we built functional things people would get used to how they look and start to like it.
Ayn rand ( love her books) had a similar affair

http://brucelevine.net/how-ayn-rand-seduced-young-men-and-he...
Ask HN: Static Site Analytics Without Cookies?
I run a couple of static sites, and am interested in aggregate stats about visitors - total number, referrer/origin, time of day and maybe location at the resolution of like, 100Km or so (eg State of origin or similar).

Are there any easy ways to do this that don't need a cookie consent pop-up, and are GDPR compliant (by recording zero PII)?

I'm happy to trade recording much less information about users in order to achieve this.
TTT = Team Time Trial, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_time_trial
A 16-year-old car will kill you in a crash that a new one will let you walk away from. That's one big, important factor in the new vs. used debate.

There's also the factor of how it's going to affect your job and life if your car breaks down. A 2-decade-old car is going to break down at some inopportune time, like it or not, even with the best maintenance.
This seems dishonest.

Older people, in general, have far more time to devote to political pursuits. The primary reason it's mostly older people talking about politics on TV is that they can be out at a political event at 2pm and stand in front of the camera crew.