skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It’s simplistic to cite flood risk as a reason not to build somewhere.

I didn't say people shouldn't build in Houston. I proposed a framework under which the economic incentives would presumably provide improved signals about whether building/living in Houston was a better idea than doing so elsewhere: require developments built in areas that can make federal flood insurance claims to pay something into the risk pool. Developers and potential residents can decide if the rest is worth it.

Costs like plowing snow or risks like earthquakes and wildfire risks seem to be covered by local taxes and/or private insurance. If the savings Houston achieves from having no need for them really do outweigh the problems of flood risk -- as your comment seems to suggest -- then presumably Houston would remain an economically appealing place to live even after my proposed change.

Presumably the same thing happens with the Netherlands and the Dutch bear the economic costs knowing it's worth it.
Isn't it the case that many behaviors had to be specifically encouraged or coded into the bots to get them to work at all? They learned an impressive amount on their own after being pushed in the right direction, but this is far from a pure random reinforcement learning approach as this article suggests.

This article also really understates how clowny the bots were playing. They appeared confused and aimless for much of the game, until they found a clear objective like an enemy hero that moved too close to them, or they had a numbers advantage that allowed them to pressure an enemy building. They were brutal at closing gaps and pursuing enemies to kill without hesitation, but didn't perform well at all beyond that.

This isn't to take away from the accomplishments of OpenAI - to get to this stage after 18 months of work is an impressive engineering feat. It's just telling that the bots have only learned one single strategy, don't even execute that very well, and still have to play with hero restrictions that rule out counters to that specific strategy of aggressive skirmishing and pushing.
A Distributional Perspective on Reinforcement Learning
Another thing is that Netherlands (most of it) is flat. Much nicer to ride bike on even ground than where there are even small hills.
> provided you are in a wreck, wearing a helmet greatly reduces your risk of serious injury and death

So . . . you wear a helmet when driving? Because people get head injuries all the time in car wrecks.
Speaking of TESTING things... it would be VERY NICE if a dedicated 'test channel' were setup for 911/e911/whatever. Maybe it'd be stuffed in to the developer options page somewhere, but I SHOULD be able to send a test call that gets an automated response and logs success/failure. It should use and behave exactly as 911/emergency call normally does, including working without any service (maybe also rate-limited), except not tie up actual emergency resources and be expected from time to time.

Even if just checking IF a cell-phone works for that connection in a given location.
Not a one of these examples is less than chilling, even terrifying, and provokes a sense of immense outrage. Like examples of rape, murder and child abuse by total strangers it makes us all feel fearful and powerless, but it also misses a critical point. Most children are abused or neglected by family and loved ones, not distant authorities or strangers. Most people are murdered (including children’ by their nearest and dearest.

It’s important to make those distant authorities which somkften get things wrong be accountable, yet at the same time we have to avoid the bottomless pit of something like Stranger Danger. The examples you cite are sensational, but they’re not typical. The typical case is the child being raped by a family member or family friend, the wife being murdered by the husband, or the friend being murderers by a friend. For every extreme and chilling case of someone far away in a position of power abusing thst power, there are hundreds of much quieter yet no less damaging cases of the same thing being done close to home.
> It's not that people here are thinking about the subject carefully, they're just disagreeing reflexively.

Voting isn't specifically for correctness/incorrectness, but encompasses many things. In this specific case, I think the voting reasoning or on your comments can be likely be summarized as "is the comment contributing usefully to the discussion, or providing useful or insightful information in some other way". I think people aren't viewing your comments in this discussion as providing that, and some people may believe they are actually the opposite.
I race triathlons. Bike commutes are a bonus chance to get some miles. Cruising at 14 mph does nothing for my fitness level.

(all except the graze pedestrian part, I try to avoid that).
> If they pay bonuses to themselves, then their premiums will be higher than other insurance companies so they would lose customers, the same that stops any other business from doing the same.

This might stand up in a highly competitive market, but even there you have network effects, and asymmetric power/information issues, that keep it from ever being completely true. In a market like health insurance where large fractions of people get their coverage from their employers who make choices for their employees, it's not really credible to say that high premiums will drive an insurance company out of the market. Moreover, the data bears out that premiums, profits, and executive compensation are all increasing while the overall cost of our healthcare as a nation spirals out of control.

> And since taxpayer funded healthcare is off the table in the US, we have to work with what we can.

If you expect elected officials to fix it by writing them letters and angry comments on the internet, well, yes. But campaigning and petitioning are not the only routes to accomplishing political goals. The teachers' union/wildcat strikes across states with unified Republican control of the government that successfully forced wage and funding increases, despite timid unions that wanted to push for less, should be an indication of what actually works. We don't have to accept the system as it is.

> The biggest problem with health insurance right now is everyone is not forced to use healthcare.gov so the risk pools don't have the correct distribution of healthy and unhealthy people.

That's a problem in that will cause premiums to spiral faster and eventually shutter those insurance pools. But that's a slow death. The largest problem in health insurance right now are the actual, living people being forced across the country to either suffer or die from solvable medical problems, people who are rationing medication because they cannot afford to buy more, people who are being forced into bankruptcy by a broken system. When lives are already being destroyed today, a patch that prevents the rate of lives from being destroyed from increasing quite so quickly is nice, but it quite clearly misses the forest for the trees.
Cool initiative based on positive ideals. From a practical perspective, NYC citizens have a number of good options for internet access; however, perhaps learnings from this community project can be brought to more needy areas outside the US.
LA resident here for eleven years (coming from ATL which has its own horrible traffic and is worse by miles for bike commuting, fwiw).

> I visited the US recently and you can drive for 30 minutes in a car and you are still in LA, if you drive for 30 minutes in the Netherlands you're in a completely different city.

My not-so-pedantic comments to these facts are (a) LA is freaking HUGE (if ever fly into LAX at night, pay attention to when the earth becomes a solid carpet of city lights. It's a looong way from the shoreline). We aren't constrained by water on three or four sides like say, NYC/Manhattan or San Francisco.

And, (b), at LA's 101/10/405/surface street speeds, thirty minutes may only be three or four miles (or two, if you venture to travel at The Wrong Times), while you can get to one of the major secondary cities (Anaheim, for example) in about fifty minutes if you time it well.

So, while technically true, those points aren't representative of How Things Really Are, imho.
(me: exclusive transit/bike commuter here for 6+ years)
Are you suggesting that someone should wear a wet shirt so that they can stay warm? Or wear an ice cube to stay cool? I guess I'm missing the joke?
> social justice warriors

Never met an adult who's typed that nonironically.
Please provide an example of an RDBMS with petabytes of data. Seems unlikely.
Implicit Quantile Networks for Distributional Reinforcement Learning
It feels safer because it is safer. Having to be aware of traffic that's moving at a substantially different speed than one's self is extra cognitive load that benefits neither the fast or slow traffic. Humans have a finite amount of attention they can give to what they're doing. This applies to kayaks and boats as much as it does to bikes and cars.

This is just a
And for iPhone?
If your goal was to argue that the terminology is wrong, then you’ve made some errors in formulating that argument—both logical errors and social errors. We all like a good pedant but you have to be upfront about it and explain why using the correct terminology is important. You failed to do either, instead, your arguments appeared to be arguments about conclusions rather than arguments about definitions:

> Heating via electrical resistance is 100% efficient. All energy goes into generating heat. There is no loss.

This sounds a bit coy, doesn’t it? It’s a bit suspicious that heat pumps are completely omitted from your comment, and it’s also a bit suspicious that explicit discussion about terminology is omitted, and instead the definitions are included as a presumption. Putting the main point of your argument into a presumption of the actual text of your argument is nothing short of poor form (i.e. rude) if done purposefully, and the rest of the argument built on top of these presuppositions is boring and uninformative.

If you can imagine a better approach, consider discussing the terminology and definitions directly, and then explaining why sloppy terminology can cause confusion. You have still not explained why the terminology is so important here. Instead, you’ve made the following statements:

> …if you stop to think about it for longer than it takes to jab at the downvote button, the reason why it matters is interesting.

> It's not that people here are thinking about the subject carefully, they're just disagreeing reflexively.

Consider whether these statements make claims about the internal thought processes of people who disagree with you, and whether making claims about how other people think will further whatever goals you have commenting on this site.
The elusive quest for robotic hands
I lived in Amsterdam for more than ten years and recently moved to a smaller city. Amsterdam really has it's own bike "culture". Cyclist in the rest of Holland are far more forgiving to pedestrians and other traffic in general in my experience. I have no trouble cycling in Amsterdam, but I do have to pay a lot more attention than normally.
You may be technically correct, but just barely, all of the energy put into a heat pump is turned into heat, not only does it move heat it also adds it own and that conversion is 100% efficient. Now a 100% of heat generated by the compressor may not make it into the space being heated but most of it is along with a bunch it pulled from the outside environment.

Honestly you are the one being obtuse. Efficiency can be measured many ways, but in the case of heating and cooling I think everyone would agree the efficiency that actually matters is energy efficiency for both economic and environmental reasons.
I think the solution to this problem is pretty simple:

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. need to invent an entirely new language for people to communicate in and simply make the expression of these kinds of ideas semantically impossible.
My general rule is that there are at least 3 copies in different physical locations, at least 2 of which are not within "tornado distance" of each other.

The way to think about backup and DR is "what would it take to destroy all of this?" and keep making the answer more and more extreme until it is so horrible that if it actually happens you won't care about what you lost.

PS: Also always remember that a backup you don't test isn't actually a backup.
From the article:

> Taking down shitty content works...a place for meaningful conversation

Right now you'll find (or won't, rather) people on Twitter banned for sharing factual but 'problematic' news articles or for referencing crime statistics.

A good number of users might find such views 'shitty' and not 'meaningful' and that's where the problem lies - people are being deplatformed, not for the red herrings of doxxing and celeb nudes, but simply for having opposing and uncomfortable opinions.

Again, from the article:

> I still need to use Twitter for work, but my personal view is that any content I contribute is promoting white supremacy

Madness. Anyone with such a bizarre personal view ought not to be taken seriously.
Robocalls tell seniors net neutrality raises phone bills by $30
When you mentioned DX II I immediately thought of Alex st john and thought "surely that's a coincidence". Amusingly, I was wrong.
There are serious problems with exceptions.

1. It's often not clear which exceptions can be thrown from a function. I don't think many languages force you to list them all. In most languages it is a case of "this function can throw any exception it wants - read the source code (and of all the functions it calls) if you want to know which".

2. Adding context to exceptions is even more verbose than Go's error handling. In the video for this post for example, where they have fmt.Errorf() for each line that might fail you can easily add context like "opening file failed: ..." or "parsing file failed: ...". The equivalent with exceptions is a separate try/catch for every line! I've never seen anyone bother with that.

This seems like a bit of a flaw with the "handler" approach by the way. Rust's map_err() is a bit nicer.
I find the same way with Celsius too. Or, like when you grow up the world kind of conditions you to associate certain feelings of heat/humidity with certain numbers.

I always get confused going to the US, but I do like that they have more values as you mentioned. Or, Celsius only has 40 numbers that tell you how things are.
Maybe it can export bitmaps suitable for OCR libraries or services (like https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=ocr) to convert.
I am not sure if I understand your question. If a macro expansion violates typing rule then you get a compile time error of course.. is it a question about the quality og error messages?
So Verizon bought Yahoo a company where every single email account had been known to have been compromised[1], and now they are seeking to monetize those same accounts by scanning their their contents and selling that data to third parties? No wonder the Yahoo hacks and very late disclosure didn't derail the deal. These two basement brands deserve each other.

[1] https://www.oath.com/press/yahoo-provides-notice-to-addition...
Why typescript? wouldn't that choice reduce the number people that can contribute?
> In US cities, most cyclist act like they're in a race.

Eh, I think it depends where you go in the US. When living in Portland I couldn't afford a car and so I biked exclusively, and people were super mellow. Cyclists would even gently chide other cyclists for running red lights, failing to signal, not having lights, etc.
The magnetic moment of an atom comes from the orbital motion of the electrons about the nucleus and also the rotational motion of each electron about their axes (called "spin"). In the case of a hydrogen atom there's one electron that contributes to the magnetic moment, which is how you're able to magnetically capture an electrically neutral atom.
Do you have examples of a low-tech gravity train? From what I know there's serious limitations to this tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_train#Objections
Not sure if you are trying to be funny but you aren't.

"The next day, doctors implanted stents in his clogged “widow-maker” artery."

By that time they could have clarified the insurance situation. In any case I don't think it's acceptable that any kind of emergency can bankrupt you if you have the bad luck to end up at the wrong hospital or wrong doctor.
> Has anyone in the US considered flying overseas to get treatment done?

I think a lot of people do but in a lot of situations you need to deal with things right now.

If you get a heart attack, you can't just hit the pause button on life, crack open Google and start searching for "best heart attack treatment center outside of the US", then research things, book the travel arrangements and take a long flight.
And how much of this additional cost goes toward medical cost?

The US health care issue can only be solved by higher taxes and lower cost (it’s currently at 2x the cost of developed countries.)
There's no reason to care about print being broken, unless there's a reason to care about print being broken. Both cases need to be supported. The developer ignoring the error value if they don't care is perfectly rational.
This is really going to depend on the region you're building in. In much of the North Eastern/Mid-Atlantic USA, assuming a plot with good drainage/grading, basements are awesome. They're a perfect place to put the house mechanical equipment (HVAC/water heater) and run necessary pipes/wires/ducts. Good luck running new wiring/plumbing around the first floor with slab-on-grade.

Basements are also generally preferable to crawlspaces, because they're (semi)conditioned and can be dehumidified/sealed as necessary to prevent mold/water issues to the framing. Crawlspaces are not typically sealed, and issues (mold/rot/leaks) can often go unnoticed, because nobody wants to crawl around to inspect. If you use your basement for storage, you'll likely be down there frequently enough to notice any growing issues.

On top of all that, many people finish their basements to add additional living space. This is typically very easy to do (DIY), because tapping into a few ducts and power is all right there.
The US mostly has different land use laws than the Netherlands. For example, minimum parking requirements and minimum setbacks from property lines basically require sprawl. You get more bang for buck on bike infrastructure when a neighborhood in denser than what is usually allowed in the US. There is usually stiff resistance to changing the US zoning rules.
Ask HN: Why are postgresql-common commands all over the place?
Is it just me or I honestly feel the command-line interface for the postgresql-common package seems to be poorly designed. pg_createcluster, pg_ctl, pg_dump, pg_reload, pg_wrapper, pg_lscluster, pg_createcluser, pg_ctlcluster. The list goes on. initdb, createdb doesn't seem to be pg specific. Is there a single wrapper to manage pretty much all services? Apologies for the rant but I feel like I had to put this out somewhere.
In Seattle, too. They look like they took a wrong turn at the Tour de France.
I love the idea but how do you connect to the greater internet? What will happen when you get a request to say what user was running on a certain day talking to whatever, or handle NSLs?
"append","delete","copy" in Go is parametric polymorphism hardcoded in the compiler. append can be called with many different array types. There is nothing complicated with that.

go can iterate over arrays irregardless of the element type the same way with the same construct using "range", therefore "range" is polymorphic.

The real debate here is should the compiler be "privileged" or should there be API in userland to implement these behavior.
but the tech was fine.

Yep, AOLserver was one of the first “app servers” and it was well regarded. The other PG built his company around it.
My bicycle doesn't have nearly as many air bags as a typical car.

You're right, though. Cars are fundamentally dangerous. High risk of violent injury or death, and, even in the best case, they subtly harm your health and longevity by encouraging a sedentary lifestyle. Damned expensive, too. Perhaps we should all just move to Rotterdam so we wouldn't have to deal with them so much.
Real estate is valuable because it is a constrained asset rather than a productive asset. Given supply and demand, there are going to be areas where property is extremely valuable, but wealth creation is not accomplished primarily through owning constrained resources, but through making limited resources more productive. Owning land may signal prosperity, but a culture where it is expected to be the driver of prosperity is going to have issues.

Interesting paraphrased quote: "Saying your home is the best investment you ever made says more about how bad of an investor you are than it does about how valuable your house is to you".
This is what I mean when I say all politics is identity politics.

Our basic social instincts are designed around identity politics formed along ethnic lines. What we really need are politics around principles, however. It's the same general evolutionary lag as with our instincts around food. We are wired-up to eat as much fat and sugar as we can, whenever we can, which suited us just fine for most of our history. So too, are we wired-up to be nice to our own tribe and quite hostile to the other. In 2018, just giving into either set of basic instincts is likely to kill us, however.
In many cases, the community was the problem. In many examples given above, teachers and social programs cooperated resulting in child sexual abuse.

In many cases that was "unintentional". All these programs intended to do, in most cases, was to take the children away from the parents. Because they end up in a structure that is like a prison: enforced helplessness in an environment with predators, child abuse was the result.

In a non-negligible amount of cases, however, child abuse was the whole purpose of the social program. The people who carried out the program took the actions with the specific purpose of abusing children.

There is a third case of course, where the social programs merely break the power of parents (and still put the child in that environment), and abuse probably did not result.

Now the huge question is: would the outcome have been better, for the children (not the aid workers !), if no actions were taken at all.

And with the Dutch numbers we can calculate. Odds of abuse in the group of child care children ... something like 10%. Odds of abuse if child care interferes ... 33%. Yep ... the outcome would have been better if no actions had been taken at all (and that's taking the complaint numbers as fact, when in reality, of course, they're a lower bound).

Given what actually happens to these children, those prison-like institutions, I must say I can't call this outcome surprising in the least.

There's a movie, the first half of which is about this problem from an adult perspective: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7153766/

But the point is: the outcome would be better if nothing was done at all. It would be a lot more visible too, which I bet is the real issue the government is reacting to.
Don’t believe the lies! All the pictures in this article show a sunny city with happy cyclists. Apart from the last 2 months this is demonstrably false since everyone who lives in the Netherlands knows that if starts to rain the second you get outside to grab your bike and a strong headwind will follow you relentlessly, even when you make a 180 turn.

Those are the facts. Don’t believe this propaganda.
> If Let's Encrypt is a malicious actor, they could MiTM a connection to your site, and present a VALID certificate to the target user, as they hold the private keys used to sign the public certificate.

And if they were able to turn off certificate transparency logs or targeted users only without it (or a hacked browser or whatever) to keep site owners from knowing about invalid certs being given.