skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Was just about to say that after reading for a minute I understood nothing about the material. It was just a random array of buzzwords.
Yes, it's important to understand what you're doing.

However: a country without a military (or an allied country with a military) is very quickly not a country. If the US and Europe stopped having a (working) military, they would be immediately taken over by totalitarian regimes who would be delighted to trample over all the rights and privileges their citizens currently enjoy. South Korea, Taiwan, and many other countries/regions would instantly be destroyed by powerful and dangerous neighbors. Free countries are not free because everyone around the world is nice; they are free because people are willing to die to protect them.

A military must have weapons that can kill people. The real goal of such weapons in a western democracy is not to kill people - it's to be able to kill people so that no one will take over or threaten the country and its allies (at least not without consequences). It is entirely ethical to enable self-defense, and self-defense is the purpose of the Department of Defense (remember, its very name is "Defense"). The ACM code of ethics doesn't forbid this, because it focuses on unintentional harm, not intentional harm from a lawful order to protect a country. The author seems to think it's unethical to enable self-defense, and that's just nonsense. Weapons (and anything else) can be misused, but we need to hold the misusers responsible - not pretend that they aren't needed. It's a good thing that military personnel are willing to risk their lives to protect others, even those who don't appreciate their sacrifices to do so.
So what are the advantages of this over say python dicts? Genuinely asking thanks.
Can someone clear this up for me?

"This Solid POD can be in your house or workplace, or with an online Solid POD provider of your choice."

"you never have to sync, because your data stays with you"

If you choose to keep custody of your own "pod", how are you supposed to achieve redundancy without some kind of sync / backup process?
NYT/WaPo/WSJ: Make people click or view ads

All other news outlets: Make people click or view ads

Random-blog: Make people click or view ads

Free games companies: Make people click or view ads.

Internet businesses are a vicious circle of cash for ads. Ads are deeply embedded in the business model, but is advertising the goal of any of these companies?
I don't understand this guy at all. Two things confuse me:

First, the purpose of a military is to be able to break things and harm people as effectively as possible. Did he think his job would involve making the military less effective?

Second, why is it bad to work on software that's used to kill people? Killing isn't necessarily bad. If this software helped kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or Ayman al-Zawahiri, it would have a hugely positive impact upon the world.

To me, the post comes across as a bunch of meandering moral grandstanding. The core thesis is either utterly pedestrian ("Think about the consequences of what you’re building.") or totally fringe (that helping the US military is immoral).
One country waging most of the wars and maiming instead of killing is not an improvement.
AFAIK, the consequences of DNA depend as much or more on the processing of them by RNA and otherwise than on the original genes. I wonder how the theory accounts for that (I'm not pointing out flaw as an armchair cynic, but asking a question.)

Also, obviously environment plays a major role in our lives and I'm certain Plomin would agree: Abusive parents (or no parents), childhood experiences (think of rape survivors), education, the opportunities around us, access to resources, etc. etc. I would guess he's talking about an essential psychological nature that may determine how we respond to those things. My question is, where does he draw the line between that 'essential nature' (accepting for sake of argument that it exists) and environmental influence?

EDIT: "Plomin’s argument is that, in a society with universal education, the greatest part of the variation in learning abilities is accounted for by genetics, not home environment or quality of school– these factors, he says, do have an effect but it’s much smaller than is popularly believed."

Calling it "universal education" (the Guardian's paraphrase, not necessarily Plomin's words) is a big stretch - it's so different in different places, including in the same country, that it doesn't all fit under one term. Without more specific claims, it's hard to address that quote but I was reading in the last year about one poor school district which had accomplished a milestone: Half the third graders could read. Half those kids are in deep trouble, and I don't think that's due to genetics.
Source? I did a good faith search to find it, and the closest I got was the 1998 bombings of the US embassies and an attack on a college by Al-Shabaab.
Not OP, but wonder if they are talking about the ongoing persecution of Christians [1], Uighurs (in Xinjiang) [2] and Falun Gong practitioners [3]

[1] Chinese officials burn bibles, destroy crosses and force Christians to renounce their faith https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6149897/Group-Offic...

[2] China working to 'exterminate' Uighur people, detention facility eyewitness says http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-28/china-working-to-elimi...

[3] Defining a Genocide
https://www.theepochtimes.com/defining-a-genocide_2624083.ht...
With websockets, it's actually up to the server to implement the cross origin detection. The library used in this application does not implement any protection.

So it's possible for any page on the net (eg evil.com) to connect to your socket and exfiltrate any data.

Make sure all tabs are closed and never visit any sites with advertising on it while this is running.
I would recommend a language with a repl for that kind of project
Silly rabbit...Trix are for kids.
>If you told me in 2008 that we'd have mass market electric car

A tiny fraction of global auto sales for sedans worth $50k+ are a long way from "mass market", not to speak of the fact that more than 300,000 Nissan Leafs have been sold globally.
Thanks! That’s good to know!
Having been there too, I strongly endorse your opinion. Did you make it to Tikal and check out the pyramids? Climbing Pyramid 4 and staring over the canopy at endless jungle was one of the better experiences of my life.
> pro decadence and anti wealth

Pro-decadence but also anti-wealth? Do you mean their philosophy is to spend as much money from their income on luxuries as they can in order to pass money down into the economy or something?
Whoa, this is encouraging. A thoughtfully-written piece on an extremely important (and, lamentably, controversial) subject devoid of hyperbole and rancorous partisanship.

... published by The Guardian, no less. I am shocked and very pleased.
This is a paper submission that was submitted to the ICLR 2019 conference. To preserve the integrity of the double-blind submission process please do not "dox" the identities of the authors. I am not an author of this paper.

Previous works in this area (and there are many) have tackled the exact problem of natural image generation. The specifics of the methods presented in the paper are of considerable interest to the ML/AI research community, but what I'd like to highlight here the results.

One might suppose that a neural network could never make images consistent with reality because there are so many hidden latent variables & strong causal factors that lead to the generation of coherent real-world imgaes. For instance, laws of light transport and camera perspective, smooth texture variation on objects, bilateral symmetry in organisms, what objects are "possible" and which objects are not.

Often to generate images that are at least plausible under our reality we need to make use of explicit physically-based rendering techniques like simulating the transport of light and accurately modeling a lot of high-fidelity geometry. We have to hard-code so many physical equations and rules into these systems, and even then we still have a hard time rendering everyday things (candlelight, soap bubbles, food).

Prior to this paper, I certainly had my doubts that neural networks could ever capture enough implicit "knowledge" about the world to synthesize an image (not in the training set, mind you) that could convince a human it was real. Machine Learning is the study of generalization and we know of no useful guarantees on generalization for finite-size training sets and overparameterized models.

To my knowledge, this is the first paper to generate high-fidelity natural images with no apparent visual artifacts (blurriness, weird textures that could not exist in the real world). The laws of light transport (NP-hard to compute) appear to be convincingly preserved, and I am blown away.
Thirsty Cities Drill for Water
A zero tolerance policy doesn't mean much if your process A) doesn't allow ways to remove counterfeits after they've entered your supply chain, B) is slow enough to allow counterfeiters to make profits before they're kicked out, and C) has low enough barriers to entry that losing a seller account is a relatively trivial inconvenience.
The Tesla Positive Spin PR Patrol is in hyperdrive.

If the CEO of any company outside of Silicon Valley was being charged with securities fraud, this place would be calling for heads.
I only skimmed it but this doesn't really make sense.

a) Obviously if you work for the military, killing people is going to be involved somewhere. That's what the military does!

b) Why would put so much effort into locating wifi routers when they wanted to find phones? They have no need to hide that objective - it's a perfectly obvious thing for the military to want to do.

c) I didn't get that far but is he assuming that "find a phone" = "kill the owner"?
There are two levels. One has ads. One doesn't. Presumably they're doing this to force their ad-viewing users to actually watch the ads.
That's one discipline case per institution roughly isn't it? Some of these universities employees many thousands of people. I don't think anyone thinks that any level of bullying isn't a problem, but it's hard to see it as a wide-spread institutional problem when it's just one person per university.
> This button has since been removed on the app

Who wants a bet the backend API still works?
Startup Wasteland vs. Minority Cryptoparadise: Hacker Tech Culture in NYC vs. LA
> it doesn’t include the batteries (biggest impact)

I suspected this (it wasn't spelled out, but became likely as I was researching). That said, I think it's somewhat mitigated by the fact long flights wouldn't really be necessary. Enough battery to fly the route and perform the end action, with some sufficient overhead (an additional 50-100% capacity?) would possibly be sufficient. A few minutes of flight time likely gets you quite far.

That said, it also works towards my point of specific areas that are tracked may be sufficient. If it's hard to fly a drone from miles away to avoid launch site detection and still have a delivery payload large enough to be useful, that's beneficial in itself.

> my number of $10k is a fair median point for what it’d really cost on these bigger drones.

Fair enough. I agree that actual deployment is probably either an additional $5k-$10 or some multiple of the base price, depending on how some items scale.

It leaves the question open as to whether the larger drones could still be useful though. Being able to fly a bomb up to a corner office in some building and detonate it, or quickly drop down to a motorcade someone has entered, might be a good return on investment even at $30 or more, depending on the target.

> just not personally experienced in this field

That's correct, and it's why I value your input on this, since you seem to have a lot of experience with the actual drone portion.

I don't mind being proven wrong, or shown evidence I'm wrong or off in calculations. I do mind just being told in wrong without new number or without specific objections provided as to my methodology, since I went through the effort to provide them in the first place. As such, I appreciate you providing some real numbers to specific models for this discussion.

> I’d be more than happy to continue the discussion offline.

I appreciate the offer (I really do!), but I'm worn out by this discussion at this point.

Additionally, I doubt we'll make much headway on the actual tracking system part of the discussion, there's too many variables, and too much variation in our different ideas of what those variables entail. As those variables stack and the differences multiply, the expected end values diverge too wildly.

Since I think neither of us have enough hard data to reduce enough of those variables to fairly static values without quite a bit of research on each (such as how many priority targets are there, how the military treats this topic, current state of the art video tracking techniques, the effect of weather on video tracking, etc, and truthfully that's a lot to invest in an internet discussion), it seems unlikely to be all that fruitful. :/
> I'm not sure what to read in the implied statement that we can do something about genes

Gene therapies are a known quantity, as is genetic awareness (in mating). It is evident that, at least generationally, something ethically-sound an be done to change our genetic character.

Of course, some people's minds will shift immediately to eugenic killing and sterilization, but I'm not sure why anyone would get the impression that the Guardian is (currently at least, though they do have an authoritarian bent at times so who knows) much for those things.

I, for one, want to see the day when we edit out the "recurrent" nature of the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
>Does Panasonic hold the patent and Tesla makes them in the giga factory?

I believe Panasonic also owns the GF1 equipment, while Tesla owns the building and leases the space to Panasonic.
CBS All Access is US-only AFAIK, so I don't think GDPR is a problem for them
The author is naive beyond belief.

What kind of software did he think the DOD would have him writing? Fart apps?
> Whilst in the US, random shootings are.. random..

What you are saying is astonishingly untrue.

https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-u...
Yes, an unpowered LED emits no light. But an OLED that's barely on, for example at uniform 1% grey looks like crap because of the noise. People describe this as a "texture" or "banding". It's the consequence of trying to drive millions of individual semiconductor devices to the same emissive power. At higher brightness you can't notice the noise.
They are at least giving people correct instructions to change this, unlike a bunch of sites that just tell people to turn off ad-blockers.
Good thing that you mention this. I get a lot of requests of users that ask for adding support for custom events. I'm very strict in what I allow. If it could be named tracking, I say no. Custom events could allow tracking (if people use it like that or not), I will say no to those requests.
If they legalized meth and cocaine that would remove the cartel from the market.
Well this is a brilliant way of shifting people to PopcornTime.

What exactly are they tracking that Firefox is interfering with?
They were hacked a few months ago, though I'm not sure what it entailed. Service was down for a couple days on and off.
An essential concept for this discussion:

Another problem that Plomin encounters with explaining his findings is that people often confuse group and individual differences – or, to put it another way, the distinction between means and variances. Thus, the average height of northern European males has increased by more than 15cm in the past two centuries. That is obviously due to changes in environment. However, the variation in height between northern European males is down to genetics. The same applies to psychological traits.

“The causes of average differences,” he says, “aren’t necessarily related to causes of individual differences. So that’s why you can say heritability can be very high for a trait, but the average differences between groups – ethnic groups, gender – could be entirely environmental; for example, as a result of discrimination. The confusion between means and variances is a fundamental misunderstanding.”
It's ironic that this advice is written on a website with an 0xFFFFFF brilliant white background.

Edit: thank you, Dark Reader[0]

[0]https://darkreader.org/
Picks & shovels.
Most stores don't sell products for third parties. And no third party sellers means a drastically reduced inventory.

I don't like the fakes any more than the next person, but I think the problems are genuinely more difficult than the various armchair experts on HN seem to give credit for.
Agreed -- making alternatives, which are as good for the professor, and free for the student, seems like a great idea.

Correcting incentives is indeed hard. My guess is that, with professors, the ideal is actually zero explicit incentive: teaching well, or passing lots of students, should get you no more money, and neither more nor less subsequent teaching duties. They will never all be great, but the ones who are great at gaming any reward system the administrators can think up, those ones are always terrible. And seeing them richly rewarded is disheartening for the more honest.
Wasn't aware of this, thanks for reporting! I wonder why they didn't put this in their official 3.30 changelog, it's quite a big change. I seriously doubt this will be exposed through dbus or anyhow customizable, but it's a huge step forward anyway.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/commit/ebe6f59d7e...
I stand corrected on this, my sentence was too strong and large, I should have been more specific. I still maintain the rest of my points though.
Lots of people disagree with you, and believe that killing is necessarily bad.

No matter how bad the person you're killing is, it's still not OK to kill (except in extreme circumstances of self-defence).

Capital punishment was abolished for a reason.
> Escher also actively collaborated with the English mathematician Roger Penrose.

What!!??

... OK. Somehow I always assumed that Escher lived in 1800s. But he lived (1898 – 1972) and he knew Penrose who is older than I thought (born 1931, 87 years old).

I suspected for a moment that the article was intentionally inconsistent, but it checks out.
A related but more concise set-theoretic discussion is given here:
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/9741/what-are...
One thing that helped me: switch to the "Basic" theme, which makes the search results look like Google's. It's remarkable how much can make the same results seem better. I spent a while with this theme when first switching, and it helped me realize just how much I'd mentally associated "good results" with "looks like Google results".
Yes, this is what I don't understand. I'd wager the most dangerous weapon used by the US military is either Microsoft Word or PowerPoint to produce operations orders.

It seems that if a product's utility isn't directly tied to a military outcome, then the outrage never materializes.

Project Maven caused outrage because of the direct link to military drones. However, advancements in AI and machine learning haven't caused the same outrage but can be used for the same purpose.
That was the scariest episode so far in the series, especially in the beginning before it started to normalize...or descend into madness...YMMV
The workbook docs are great along with these how is it good/not:

* Hair on Fire, is this a nice-to-have or a must-have?
Access to Market, do I have easy access to potential customers?

* Day 1 Revenue, does this have the potential to make money from day 1 or does commercialization require further thought?

* Revenue Scalability, does this target market have scale?
Defensibility, how hard would it be for someone to create a copycat?

* Lack of Competitors, is this blue ocean or red ocean space?

* Personal Passion, is this aligned with my interests?
Unfair Advantage, do I have some special skill set that makes me the perfect person to launch this?

* IP Creation, will I be creating something of technical value that could be re-used elsewhere?

* Acquisition Potential, is this idea in a space where there is acquisition activity?
> Instead of pushing weed across the border, they’ve been heavily pushing Meth, Heroine, and Cocaine instead.

Citation needed. They've always pushed all of the above across the border, but you seem to be conflating two unrelated things: legalization in a few states with the opioid epidemic. What seems to be a far more likely driver of the opioid epidemic is the availability of cheap synthetic opiates like fentanyl that are highly concentrated, and therefore easier to smuggle.
LOL @ "North Virginia" . Also, when he says R^2, is he talking about Pearson's correlation coefficient? That paragraph is confusing, and in the next one he admits being mystified by the idea of gaussian distributions... I guess I should stop trying to make sense of the technical elements of this article.
A counterexample: Costa Rica (where I'm from). We haven't had an army for the last 70 years and still remain a country. Superpowers (e.g., US, China, Russia) might need armies as means of mutual deterrence. Smaller countries not so much.
>Capital punishment was abolished for a reason.

Not in many places in the US. And not in many, many other countries.
Edit: I misremembered, the product was the Ripple Rug (ripplerug.com) and the problem was arbitrage where people were selling it on eBay for higher than retail, then drop-shipping via Amazon. Returns when it showed up in an Amazon box were paid for by the manufacturer, not the drop-ship seller. Links in the News section of their site, look for stories in 2016-2017.

(original post)
I can't recall the name of the product or find it with some quick searches, but I recall stories of one product that did precisely that after their product started being counterfeited heavily and undercut on Amazon - they have a cheaper version that's available on Amazon and a higher quality version available only directly from them.

I believe it was basically a stiff synthetic material blanket with a bunch of large holes and attachment points such that those points could be attached together in a bunch of different ways to make a wide variety of configurations for cats to play in.
That's because here in the US students don't think of it as a union. If the student union became a real thing where students collectively threw their weight around by making demands and staging protests/walkouts/etc. it would lead to change in administrative policy.
Thank you. At a first glance, that is an interesting/intriguing site.

Note that it's another $500 for the controller module they recommend. (I know, I was asking after the Max2's raw panel. But in considering making one of the ones on this site work.)

There's also a listing for a 31.2" panel capable of 4096 colors (per the description). $2300.
Outstanding for sure
wow, 'double-tap => Esc' is genius. I have a habit of smashing Esc a few times anyway ("for good measure"? I don't know). I will be sure to try this once my UHK gets here. Thanks!
> I'm curious why you chose to host the data yourself instead of giving customers the data immediately at the point of collection.

I want to build a brand around trust. If people self-host and say they use my software, but are doing different things behind the scenes, it would hurt my brand.

Simple Analytics does host the data themselves, so people know the numbers are not tampered with and the data is handled the same for every customer. If people use our scripts directly, vistors of those websites can be sure that we respect their privacy with our values.
Yeah. 2 of those gallon bottles.
I think the poor quality and restrictive distribution of news media these days is largely a matter of efficiency. I've taken an interest in tools to make honest reporting more efficient, so that more of it can be done per dollar, and I wonder what others on HN think would be useful.