skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The universe is about 14bn years old.
Earth is about 4.5bn years old.
Humans are about 100k years old.
Writing is about 5k years old.
Radio communication is about 150 years old.
The laser is about 50 years old.

So that window holding our current level of communication abilities is 0.15% to 0.05% of our species' age, and our species is in a similarly tiny window.
Believe so.

See: mad hatters
Don't bother with napkins. The data is open. TNC trips average about 150k / weekday [1], BART carries about 415k trips / weekday [2], and Muni carries about 750k [3]. Thus, public transportation carries about 8x more people, with the caveat that not all BART journeys start or end in SF.

On the other hand, 99% of vehicle trips in SF are either private cars or TNCs.

Neither of these was my point, though. My point was that comparing cost between a per-trip price and a per-person price will always favor the former when there are multiple people. But most trips don't involve multiple people, which is why such an analysis is besides the point.

1: http://tncstoday.sfcta.org/
2: https://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership
3: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/ridership
But why not a fully-autonomous robot that employs machine learning to detect nearby lakes and streams that can hand-deliver the water?
anyone else have experience with GDAL? god i hate that software so much but it does some cool stuff. Been working with GDAL/QGIS on the regs for about 5 years now and it's pretty amazing what you can do. everything looks great in a map
Mine was in reference to Python projects - I haven't tried it on cross language references.
I think these people are referring to those visible on the streets, and not living out of their car or in the shadows of homelessness. Oftentimes in Seattle the people who are visible are unfortunately in the worst shape, mentally or otherwise.
I have a 6, I'm planning on going to an SE just so I can actually reach the top of the screen with my thumb one handed.
I think that the trade-off is described better between the moral issues and the ability to provide your service to more users. I don't think making even more money is much of a factor anymore for Page and Brin.
> Why is the solution that the nation just foots the bill to make a bad investment instead of the individual?

Almost the only economic reason in a rational choice model [0] for a public program is the existence of externalities that justify action that would not occur in a market system without government intervention to internalize the externalities; in this case, that would be diffuse social benefit that offsets the negative expected financial return to the student if they paid full price in the market.

Of course assessing the existence and, particularly, value of such externalities is, in practice highly subjective.

[0] which is known to be inaccurate, and real-world irrationality may provide additional reasons.
I haven't looked recently, but at least a couple years ago salaries in LA were terrible compared to the COL.
Rename symbol in the python extension uses Rope, fwiw: https://pypi.org/project/rope/
No specs? At all?
The Effective Altruism community has produced a lot of discussion about donating early vs saving and giving later.

This post does a good job of listing some of the trade-offs and includes several links to more discussion: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/4e/giving_now_vs_later_a_su...
"Germany proves tuition-free college is not a silver bullet for America’s education woes": (https://qz.com/812200/is-free-college-possible-germany-shows...)

"German university enrollment rose by 22% as tuition disappeared...—while the number of Germans who opt instead for vocational education has declined. On the other hand, the cost to taxpayers of subsidizing higher education went up 37%. [Later:] ...The shift to dependence on government funding, combined with the increase in enrollment, has also meant a 10% decline in spending per student in the last few years, the OECD reports. Today, German public schools spend about $16,895 per student, compared with $27,924 per student in the United States."

"In Germany, low-income students can apply for grants and loans totaling around €650 a month ($580) to pay for living expenses. Since almost all students live off campus, this creates an unanticipated outcome: Even in a country where universities don’t charge tuition, students are still graduating with debt....68% of German students work,... and “students from a lower socioeconomic background try to study faster.” Students are also more likely to choose practical subjects like marketing or human resources. Meanwhile medicine and law degrees, which take longer and therefore cost more, remain careers mostly for the wealthy."

"Three-quarters of German’s adult college graduates have children who also earn university degrees, Woessmann said, compared to a 25% of adults who don’t have degrees. (In all, 57% of the equivalent of high school graduates go on to college here, the OECD reports, compared to what the Bureau of Labor Statistics says is 69% of their American counterparts.)"

Then, there's "In Norway, where college is free, children of uneducated parents still don’t go", (https://hechingerreport.org/in-norway-where-college-is-free-...).
not so fast. youneed to compare tesla death per mile withother high end sedan death per mile. comparing a population of all cars include a lot of less secure cars, like city cars, old cars and cars that haven't enjoyed the same level of maintenance a driver with high income can afford.

iow tesla needs to beat the average 2014+ 3 series death per mile.
Far from the only book that's been life shaping for me, but one of the first: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Yeah, who in his right mind would broadcast his position to all the possibly much more advanced, resource-hungry and expansive species out there? ;-)
That's cowgirl to you.

So, if we prioritize, say, addiction treatment, more people will want to be addicts. Right.
Volvo unveils all-electric and autonomous truck without a cab
This is just about implementation, not shipping. It's still extremely early in the process. See:

https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features
I wonder why many people visualize aliens to be entities with flesh or something else like how species (that move or grow) on earth.
I think aliens can also be in the form of new elements, rocks, gases, waves, or some entity which is beyond the ability of 5 senses of humans to perceive. Currently we use other methods to transform perception of entities so that humans can see/feel/hear/understand.
But the devices we build for this purpose are built using earth elements. It could also be probable that earth might not be having those elements which are required to give humans the ability to perceive other entities.
Either I don't understand double buffering very well (not unlikely) or I don't know what you mean by "frame budget". Wouldn't swapping one buffer for the other be faster than most or all of the computations going into calculating that background buffer and easily doable in a single frame?

What am I missing?
> why wouldn't I want to use something horizontally scalable instead?

Besides the (purported) reliability reasons other commenters have brought up, because "vertical" [0] scalability is, often enough, more efficient in terms of money and (human/engineering) time.

This can hold true even if paying a premium for both the hardware and the humans (which, presumably, are more expensive due to their scarcity, as implied by the article).

The promise of "horizontal" scalability is being able to achieve arbitrary performance just by adding more units (e.g. servers), but not at any particular efficiency (slope or shape of the curve). Even that promise is suspect in the face of Amdahl's Law [1] and USL [2]. In reality, the Fallacies [3] matter, so the most general-purpose supercomputers are still bespoke and expensive, even if they're assembled from (a selection of) commodity parts.

Even just in the realm of commodity hardware, I/O-heavy loads are going to benefit from keeping everything as close together as possible, on as fat pipes as possible. Distributed databases or any distributed data handling (that doesn't involve heavy processor use, such as compression or transcoding) is what I've personally seen suffer from this issue. 20-60 "inexpensive" ($3k-4k) servers instead of 2-3 "expensive" ($20k-$60k) ones.

Cloud infrastructure further confounds any calculation, since, with the most popular provider, AWS, you'd pay 2x-10x what you would buying and operating your own hardware. That, multiplied by the inefficiency of scaling a distributed system, especially on a network you don't control, may well be higher than the price premium of a mainframe.

OTOH, if "you" are like Google, and are paying commodity (or below) prices and have had operating your own hardware, as cheaply as possible, as part of your strategy all along, including investing in experts/specialists to keep it cheap, then mainframes wouldn't make much sense. Amusingly, it seems popular to emulate only part of the big players' distributed systems, the software, while ignoring the context that made it so useful for those players, the cheapness of the hardware.

[0] I'm using quotes because the terms are a bit imprecise in comparing mainframes, which, even traditionally, involved distributed processing. IIUC, the reason there's a "C" in CPU is from mainframes, which routinely relied on processing units that were not central. Other commenters have asserted that mainframes are horizontally scalable without detailing what that means.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

[2] http://www.perfdynamics.com/Manifesto/USLscalability.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...
If PGP signatures require TLS, that's a serious problem with PGP.
A difference though, despite the name, computer scientists aren't calling themselves scientists (I mean what science do most of us do?). Calling yourself a scientist comes with a large amount of responsibility and accountability.
Science, in general, has had a reproducibility problem for some time now. There was a big article about it in Nature a couple of years ago.

https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on...
its a bad faith argument. a step above trolling.
He is basically just saying that the errors need to be independent, so you can get that with different capture mechanisms. I think that is wrong. For example, small, fast and poorly reflective will have similar detection performance for lidar and cameras. I think that the real problem is getting consistent statistical estimators and fusing them at a useful update rate. Has anyone seen the lidar from the uber crash? It would be interesting to see if a person could "tell" that the poor pedestrian wasn't an artifact quickly from lidar alone.
> Tibet (and now pretends Tibet never existed)

Do you know what Tibet has been like before? It's a bloody brutal slavery society that majority of the population lived in a unbelievably inhumane condition.

Also, Tibet has been a part of Chinese territory for centuries.
Spam robocalls will soon account for 50% of all calls
Geometry inferred from range sensors can certainly provide an additional useful source of information, but it's far from clear that the right approach to controlling a self-driving vehicle is mostly to solve a geometry problem. For example, even if a range sensor can provide a perfect estimate of the location and geometry of pedestrian, how do you predict whether the pedestrian will dart out into the road or stop because they see a car coming. Human drivers have learned from years of (mostly) visual experience observing human behaviors to make reliable predictions about such things. Perhaps machines can too.

Since evolution didn't provide us with our personal lidars, human drivers are an existence proof that it is possible to learn reliable driving performance from vision alone. Which isn't to say that machine learning based on vision alone is already close to human-level or competency or that human-level competency is sufficient for a automated driving system or that sophisticated sensors don't make the problem a bit easier. But I don't know how you can be so confident that vision alone (or primarily) won't be route that eventually succeeds.
I don't think the amount of water in the state going to agriculture is relevant. I have read that the amount of water in the LA basin is enough for 100,000 people (don't know if that counts their lawns or not). Sure, there's water in California - hundreds of miles away up north. That doesn't help LA, though, without monster aqueducts.
when national debt goes down , private debt goes up. Private debt is the issue. The federal government has no issue paying debts because those debts are dollar denominated. The private sector on the other hand can't. Government debt is not the same as household debt, unless of course the household can print their own money. Image you are the Joe family and all your debt is denominated in Joe dollars, do you anticipate you will have a problem paying that debt?

Reducing government debt will result in bad times for the private sector. Ever wonder why Clinton's surplus resulted in large private sector debt and then a crash? This is why.
Yeah, humans suck at attention. But until we can program computers to tell me what is a foreground moving object, what is a shadow, and what is the background... you literally can't solve the "Should the car apply the brakes right now" problem.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.02225.pdf

Just go through this recent paper I found on DDG.gg and see the amount of effort it takes to parse foreground / background data that a self-driving car needs.

You gotta figure out if there's a still-object on the road. And whether or not its a shadow (shadows don't move after-all but its safe to drive over). Like, neural networks can't do that stuff 100% reliably yet. And it may never happen.

Or some researcher next year might come out and discover a method to parse background / foreground / shadows out of pictures. But then there are a whole host of OTHER issues involved.

------------

I think self-driving technology has potential. But you need more than just neural networks hooked up to cameras. I really like Waymo's direction with advanced super-human sensors. Avoid the shadow / background / foreground problem entirely and just have LIDAR give you the precise coordinates of all objects within 100-feet of the car.

IMO, if self-driving technology ever happens, it will be because of advances in advanced LIDAR or other kinds of sensors. Stuff that can avoid the research-problems that the "Deep Learning" community hasn't been able to solve for the last 50 years.
TLS only authenticates the endpoint, not the delivered packages. You need PGP/GPG anyway. TLS only provides a privacy that most organizations neither want nor need. It is overhead in terms of connection management, crypto processing, and additional PKI management for which there is no benefit.
Check out this episode from the Kevin Rose's podcast:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kevin-rose-show/id10...
Well, part of it is just the sheer scale of US education institutions. If we define University students as everyone enrolled and seeking a Bachelor's or higher then the number of University students in the US is greater than the total number University students in all of Europe. Also about 70% of high school graduates in the US go on to at least attempt a Bachelor's according to the NCES where as in Germany, for instance, only about 30% do. Germany has the highest number of University students of any EU member nation. On top of all this, a typical American university education is more expensive than its European counterpart.

So to start providing this education at no personal cost we would have to come up with a rather large sum of money that is not currently being allocated. Roughly on par with the total educational costs of Europe. What do you cut or where do you raise taxes to make that allotment? It would be a huge readjustment.
This looks tedious to use directly, but it'd be good to build things like editor plugins on top of. The docs also show that it can do stuff that would not be simple to do with search and replace (e.g. transforming function arguments).
> I'm of the opinion that the complexity of possible human behavior and phenomena is too great to allow for some experiments to be replicated and controlled.

If these elements of human behavior cannot be confirmed by replicable experiments, what chance do we have of knowing about it.
Claims about such behavior are nothing more than stories, for they are not based on evidence.

> There are some scientific facts about humans that you can establish because you can do a replicated, controlled experiment and there are others that you can't

There is no such thing as a 'scientific fact' that cannot be established by a replicated controlled experiment. The stated dichotomy is really important though, and one that it seems psychology has partially failed to make. For it lost its reputation by presenting 'stories' as scientific fact.

That is not to say there is no value in studying human behavior that is beyond science, but we need to realize that we cannot treat the result of this as 'scientifically true'. Instead, it is something like 'intuitively true based on anecdotal experience'.
This is a great read! The code is very clean and easy to follow and the progression of ideas is well thought out. Even if you don't know Go you could learn that along the way without too much trouble. He also just released a companion volume writing a compiler for the Monkey as well.
Have you visited? Could you tell me more about how you know this?
Google to sunset Fabric mid-2019
There're plenty of documentation about this. You just need to get out the media bubble.

Tibet right now is just a fine place to visit.
As a millennial I took a pass on mainframe jobs, even though I find mainframes interesting, precisely because of job security.

Companies are not going to change their culture overnight, and they currently view employees as disposable. There's not many jobs in mainframe developer compared to say web dev, and the skills in mainframe developer to seem like they transfer poorly.

I have a better chance at keeping the actual day to day of my life stable if I keep skills in an industry where I have lots of opportunities for jobs. Unless companies employing mainframe developer start offering garunteed pensions that are funded up front or a much higher average salary than the alternatives, it's not a gamble I'd be willing to take

Edit: additionally the mainframe engineer talent pool seems to skew much older than other development. That wouldn't be a problem if the field was growing. Having a decent chance of always being the new guy or junior even if you've been there 10+ years would probably do little for job satisfaction given how many people automatically defer to seniority. I have no real interest in having my ideas ignored for years
Ask HN: Opportunities for combining programming with math/physics
Hi! I'm a software engineer, in my late 20's, located in Europe, working on Java enterprise applications.

I love physics, mathematics. I simply love the clarity of mathematics, the abstract yet elegant way of reasoning, and how everything falls together. I am also curious about the world around; and I simply find reasoning about the natural world, using mathematics is abstract way of thinking, and witnessing how this abstract reasoning leads to deep insights, later confirmed, an irresistible satisfaction. I am amazed about how many things we know about the Universe around us, and about how many things we discovered in the last century.

In my free time, I allocate time for learning mathematics, physics. But I'm worried about my future (will I be employable in my 40's, 50's?), and about the fact that I'm losing time instead of preparing for my career. I say to myself, that due to current problems (global warming, pollution) there will be a big need for physicists in the future, that by combining knowledge of math/physics with machine learning I will be able to track energy, new materials design, environmental problems, that quantum computers are the next big thing, and so on.

From your knowledge or experience, do you know if there are career path combining programming with mathematics/physics skills? Am I a dreamer in the sky?
My extremely run of the mill US suburban high school taught us about the Great Leap Forward in its regular world history curriculum.
25 Weight Loss Strategies Reduce Obesity Get Results Fast
I'm not so sure we have the same definition of doing great.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-jackson-californi...
I would not have thought of using cpp(1) like that. I will be using calendar fron now on. Thanks for the tip.
Visualization of storm surge is an amazing and sobering use of technology
Or being advanced, this civilization would be extremely cautious of any other civilization, and would most likely not facilitate communications with others.

For a civilization to survive and be qualified as being advanced, not only implies being smart enough to develop some technology but smart enough to know when NOT to use it. e.g.: let's not use nuclear warheads, let's not use grey goo, let's not communicate with possibly agressive alien civilizations.
Think of all the reward points though!
Why is everyone so locked on the word "art"?

I think in this context it means "it was abstract (and it proved they could think in abstracts)" and "it was for amusement not their daily struggles".
Or try http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup for a more unix/software design focused fortune database in an implementation that supports color. Interoperable if you are an efficiency die-hard with a color blindness problem.
Brave's home page proudly promises to "Block Ads" in big red <H4> tags and tries to convince you that the "average" user is losing hundreds of dollars a year over ads. Are you sure you want to talk about hoisting a prejudicial bias upon ads?
the reason why apt (and I assume apk) don't use SSL has nothing to do with the CPU

https://whydoesaptnotusehttps.com/
Ask HN: Chatrooms/Social Networks for hospitals?
Do patients have some social tool to connect with other patients and chat with them? I imagine it would be a useful tool.
Related thing, I remember some people (probably me included) making fun of Microsoft for skipping Windows 9, and now here we are with iPhones.
Kmetan is serious. Half of the first detections of FRBs were traced to a microwave oven at Parkes Observatory.
Introduction to HAProxy ACLs
This isn’t popular, but I’d challenge anyone who thinks homelessness in Seattle isn’t primarily an addiction and mental illness problem to go spend a few afternoons in areas with significant homeless populations

Chronic homelessness is at the very least, a huge confounding factor in terms of social work, combating addiction, and treating mental illness. If someone doesn't have a stable address and someone else has to go out to one of several encampments in a dry river bed just to find them to deliver treatment or services, those services are going to be much more expensive. The living conditions themselves are also going to exacerbate the problems to be treated. This is why it's commonly thought that the 20% of the homeless population which falls into the "chronic" category accounts for most of the crisis services expense caused by the homeless.
Things might be different in LA’s situation, but if it is anything like the Bay Area, dense housing located where the jobs are won’t worsen traffic much. Better to have people living near work than commuting in from distant suburbs because they can’t find housing near their workplace.
Has anyone tried altering this to use the Wikipedia data? eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_13

The most appropriate sections seem to be Events and Holidays and Observances. There are also links to parallel daily databases by the BBC and New York Times.