skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Lightbulbs produce light and waste. Bitcoin produces block security and waste

all consumption of energy produces waste, the question with lightbulbs is whether we can get more light with less energy and certainly from 100 years ago there was lots of progress.

the same question simply doesn't apply to PoW currency, because energy expenditure is the goal since it directly converts into security. you can't ask for more security with less energy if security is defined in terms of energy. and that's exactly the case with bitcoin.

if you want your metaphor to work - imagine a lightbulb that has a dimmable enclosure and it automatically dims proportionally to how many lumen is emitted so that luminosity of the whole device is constant. no matter how much energy you throw at it or how efficient you make the lightbulb - the apparent outcome is the same, therefore there must be something else this process gives you to justify expending this or that amount of energy.
They may be thinking of this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house...
Seems a bit hyperbolic. Even if mass transit was ascendant/dominant, you'd still have "last mile" issues where only a car would suffice.

Wishing for cars to go away is as pie-in-the-sky as wishing POTS or Email would disappear. Simply not going to happen - it's too ubiquitous.
downvoters please share your reasons with us
It would be better for all if there were enough unions for a choice to be had there, and if negotiations were across all unions and businesses 'in a sector' at a time.

This way there isn't a dramatic power imbalance...

* Big corp VS single worker
* Monopoly on labor (Union required) VS single corp
* Monopoly on type of job (Union required) VS single worker

That gives a choice at every possible side, and also gives the worker the option of switching unions if the political leadership of one is poor or they have bad support/promotion.

It also gives sets of businesses and sets of worker pools the opportunity to reach the most amicable agreement for the compensation and treatment of works as possible.

This does nothing to reflect larger economic imbalances caused by things like minimum wage, but it could slow or reverse the deterioration of the middle class and increase stability of workers within an area which would promote more investment in having a community there and fixing things like insane housing costs.
Japanese companies generally have a better employee relationship. Granted, some parts of it are exploitative, but at least workers are treated like family and not like exchangeable cogs like in Western cutthroat capitalism. There's respect and decency shown, whereas in the US it is common and legal to be fired on the spot, in some states even for no reason.
Then econ 201 clearly hasn't studied a graph of income inequality over time, and appears ready to ignore that the bulk of economic activity has shifted from manufacturing and other labor-intensive activities to the financial industry. But by all means, tell us more about how folks working "gigs", the pervasiveness of underemployment, and the frequency with which individuals have to work 3 or more jobs to survive isn't a societal problem.
You can always write a code-generator to ease the pain.
It's not just cutting out jobs that it is a problem, it's also the over-supply of clothing and 'fast-fashion' which is creating extra garbage. Auto-mating these things and making it cheaper and easier to move clothes around is only beneficial to those at the top of the capitalism chain - it's not particularly great for the planet.
> This is a non-starter for most voters.

Only to the degree that they've been trained to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and identify more with the interests of the owners than their own personal interests.
Capnproto is built by the guy who originally built protobufs, and he cites capnproto as being better because he was able to learn from his mistakes. Makes me optimistic.
What is silly is not taxing the economic efficiency reaped by capital owners and re-distributing it members of society so that they don't need to be employed.
again? Sears was already mayor investor in Prodigy since 1984, finally getting rid of it in 1996. Cant find it right now, but there is a clip on YT from some breakfast/morning TV show where presenters shop around dialed into Prodigy system presenting variety of Sears catalog items.
>Fields with scalar types are always present. Even if you don't set them. Did I mention that (at least in proto3) all protobuffers can be zero-initialized with absolutely no data in them?

I don't this complaint. You have to initialize data with something. proto2 had to "solve" this problem in C/C++/Go by making everything a pointer. How is dealing with null the "sane" case against zero-initialization?
That's what I hear from Go devs all the time, doesn't sound convicing to me.
NO, this is NOT a simple instance of "breakdown of democratic order".

Also, all military personnel are not only allowed to disobey any unlawful order, they have a DUTY to do so. Trumps order to kill Assad is an example. [1]

Moreover even with potentially legal orders, there are orders that present military professionals with moral dilemmas, "...decisions wherein the needs of the institution appear to weigh on both sides of the equation. Whether the issuer of the order is a superior officer or a civilian leader, the same principles apply. In the face of such a dilemma, the military professional must make a decision, which cannot simply owe its justification to the principle of obedience, and must take responsibility for that decision. " [2]

It was rather firmly established at Nuremberg that "following orders" is no excuse for immoral or illegal behavior. Up and down the chain of command, every person is expected to take responsibility for their actions. Those actions may include modifying or refusing to implement orders. The consequences may be anything from commendation or promotion to court martial or death.

Yes, they are taking a risk in countermanding the POTUS/CIC. They are also exercising responsibility.

[1] http://www.ucmjdefense.com/resources/military-offenses/the-l...

[2]https://www.army.mil/article/47175/breaking_ranks_dissent_an...
> From my understanding of the article's premise, a key part is whether the memory management is automatic or not. In C, everything on the heap is manual, you have to explicitly free and ensure it lives long enough for all owners and borrowers

But everything on the stack is automatic, so by this definition any type of automatic memory management being a "GC", then C has a GC (stack), paired with an unsafe mode (heap).
Uncalled for. Yes you can implement brute force search very conveniently in Prolog but there's obviously much more to it. You can dismiss ML in a similar way: It's fine as long as you know that it's just glorified curve fitting.
If they were using any sort of neural networks approach with stochastic gradient descent, the network would have to spend some "gradient juice" to cut a divot that recognizes and penalizes women's colleges and the like. It wouldn't do this just because there were fewer women in the batches, rather it would just not assign any weight to those factors.

Unless they presented lots of unqualified resumes of people not in tech as part of the training, which seems like something someone might think reasonable. Then, the model would (correctly) determine that very few people coming from women's colleges are CS majors, and penalize them. However, I'd still expect a well built model to adjust so that if someone was a CS major, it would adjust accordingly and get rid of any default penalty for being at a particular college.

If the whole thing was hand-engineered, then of course all bets are off. It's hard to deal well with unbalanced classes, and as you mentioned, without knowing what their data looks like we can only speculate on what really happened.

But I will say this: this is not a general failure of ML, these sorts of problems can be avoided if you know what you're doing, unless your data is garbage.
They teach you economic history and show that predictions of pervasive unemployment and lack of spending power caused by technical innovation have been made every decade and never been borne out as new ways of delivering societal value are constantly being invented.

In Econ 301 they teach you to never say never.

Whether this time is different than the previous rounds of automation or will have larger dislocative effects is the at the heart of the current discussion. We’ve literally been worried about robots replacing all workers since Fritz Lang made Metropolis in the 1920s. Maybe those concerns were early and maybe we’re repeating ourselves. It’s not really clear.
People have predicted that it would be a problem every year for the last hundred years. And those people were all proven false.

How many times do the same predictions have to be proven false before we don't take them seriously anymore?

People won't do that though. We will continue to hear the same predictions for another hundred years, and every time the people making will say "but this time it's different!"
Interesting. That sounds like it could be a fun read just to see the change in management styles around programmers.
How is this different than having both required and optional.
Show HN: Self-Driving F-Zero Bot Using Stable-Baselines with PPO2 and A2C
> There is no reason given to why they take per-student expense out of the picture, other than 'we just don't think it should count'. And that seems to be the entire basis of their finding that rankings are riddled with flaws.

What? Why should you count expenditure as a positive? The only thing that ought to matter is achievement. If you hold achievement constant, but spend more, that is objectively worse. Which is the whole point of the article.

> There is much research (once you sort through the partisan fluff from research institutions with obvious bias) that supports the positive impact of revenue per student on academic achievement on standardized tests. It's actually funny this article popped up, I legit just read a paper from 2015 called "A Cost-Benefit Analysis for Per-Student Expenditures and Academic Achievement". I genuinely read that this morning. Weird. The authors found that "There was a significant correlation between revenues available per student and ACT scores as one outcome measure of achievement." And just to drive that point home, they replicated the findings from a 2002 study, further solidifying that sentiment.

Yes, but did they adjust for the confounding factors the authors of this article point out? I'll bet they didn't.
I find it odd that this was considered a pressing matter that needed legislation.
> Sometimes you wonder how things can stay broken for so long.

Taiwan doesn't want the mainland's government, and the mainland doesn't want Taiwan's government.

If Hong Kong had been militarily defensible, it'd be in the same situation.
>3. Having a man sent to prison for making Windows Restore DVDs from ISO images that you could download freely from the Internet

Please stop parroting that non-sense. They didn't even bring the case against him, US Customs did. He was also warned more than once by Customs to stop, and he didn't.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/04/27/the-fac...
What? More people across the entire world have more access to those things that actually matter than ever before in history. This is indisputable fact. There are also 7.5 billion people now so it's impossible to compare absolute numbers without looking at the actual billions who have been lifted out of poverty.

There is greater inequality and that is a real problem, but the bottom is still rising, helped along by the very things you seem to mock.

It's a really big stretch to say that some people are somehow worse off now than before because of a lack of public bathhouse (we do have public shelters and bathrooms) and lack of cell phones (we do have libraries, subsidized phones, social services, etc) and just comes off as disingenuous.
IBM Using Blockchain: ‘For a Smarter, Safer, More Sustainable Food Supply Chain’
Ultra-diluted T.pubescens attenuates cytokines and ROS-mediated neuropathic pain
Right - this is the same as having the possibility of both required and optional. I'm saying there should not be any possibility of a 'required' field
All good points, and clarifies my wording about Texas doing a good job (relative to other states) of educating Hispanic students that suggested otherwise. But the widely divergent results between the aggregated and disaggregated view isn't sufficient to declare, like the article does, that the ranking using aggregated view are using a flawed methodology. They're measuring different factors than the authors of the article, and the nuances of both are equally squashed under the pressure of producing a simple metric.

Cohorts are useful because they capture a group with some shared attribute, and racial cohorts are particularly useful because they're overwhelmingly consistent through time and datasource for a particular person. The disaggregation into racial cohorts in a ranking like this would be a useful indicator of how the outcomes of a particular person would change solely by moving states. But it's not an effective indicator of evaluating a state taxpayer's contribution to the quality of students coming out of the state's schools -- students who presumably perpetuate the results of the quality of their education in their life, producing a myriad of poorly-understood impacts on the state as they do so. Both of them are worthwhile questions to answer, but they're very different studies. But one calling another flawed on the basis of this is jarring.
A compiler can determine that a local variable x has no "next use", and insert the x = [] at that point to help garbage collection (or else provide some map of what is live).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_variable_analysis
> We have C++ code from half a decade ago that looks nothing like what we are writing now.

well, Rust code from half a decade ago is also somewhat distinct from today's rust.. even basic cases don't compile anymore : http://progopedia.com/language/rust/
"that wasn't some other cryptocurrency/blockchain based thing."

This is probably intentional on the part of all of the promoters, investors, and potential users. The idea of the cryptocurrency world is to completely replace the existing global financial system; if a company uses an ICO to build a business that then takes payment in dollars, they've lost, and their backers will be very angry. The whole point is for the ICO token to be the primary means of payment for services within the company's ecosystem, and the backers are rewarded by having an advance claim on those services by virtue of owning the tokens.

The question I'd look at to see whether an ICO is a scam or not is "Are goods or services of non-monetary value being exchanged for tokens?" I suspect the answer to this is negative for the vast majority of tokens, but it's also pretty early in the development cycle: most ICO-funded companies are <1 year old, while it typically takes 2-3 years to build something somewhat useful.
>No one is arguing, 'cellphone, hence no poverty'.

The parent comment certainly does. Specifically mentions "things that used to be luxuries" being available to the poor as a reason.
Uproar over publication: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/bogus-homeopathy-dat...
Answer set programming [1] may be what you're looking for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_set_programming
Pizza Hut's ‘Little Free Libraries’ Look Exactly Like Mini Pizza Huts
How would graphql help reduce the latency of API calls between services?
"Hey! I just found out - that tool isn't magic, it's JUST CODE!"

What a con, I'll be sure to avoid anything like that in future.
There is nothing stopping you or anyone else from buying a robot and renting it out or something.

Those workers should feel free to do that right now and spend their money investing in capital.
And you’re doing a great job at that. I was giving you a hand when you obviously needed it, a thank tou would have sufficed.

But in all honesty not understanding how something works makes your opinion on the topic about as valuble as a turd in the rain.

Understanding how things work before attempting to pass judgement is “just” a matter of common sense and decency. But since no superior ordered them and you don’t have to have them, here we are.
>Surely everyone has the same problem.

Yes, we do.

But the appropriate answer in most cases is "it's up to the business logic". Trying to solve it at the transport layer is futile.
The people buying those clothes are doing so because they see value out of doing it, so it's beneficial so them as well.

Your point about externalities is still valid, though.
Resolution isn't really brute force search, in that it doesn't search all possible solutions at random; the search is directed by the programmer's rules.

But yeah, it involves quite a lot of backtracking, that happens when the resolution engine needs to go back and try something different. When this is a problem you can sometimes use the cut rule http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~billw/dictionaries/prolog/cut.ht...
I think I have no more than a 50/50 shot of calling this right but I'm going with up. But only till Friday..
Neither of those are binary formats though, and if I’m picking up a binary format like Protobuffers it’s probably because I want the performance benefits.

Personally, these days I’m taking the approach of just outright avoiding pretty much anything google does. Either because it solves a problem only they have, or they’ll probably just drop it out of the blue one day. Or like Tensorflow, it’s fucking impossible to get your head around because their documentation seems to be written with the goal of being maximally confusing.
Rationality is somewhat of a new concept to humans. It's somewhat surprising that economists took it so literally for that long and put and any real faith in it. The lemma of rationality does make the math a LOT easier, and we're doing better now about the irrationality aspects, but that spurt of faith in rationalism was quite interesting.

For the large majority of our history, we've not been rational in the least. HN had a good discussion [0] on the Medieval Mindset [1] earlier in the summer. For ~1000 years in the Medieval period, the main mindsets were not rationality vs. irrationality, right vs. less-wrong vs. wrong, etc. But more Pious vs Impious, Cruel vs Kind, The Ideal vs the Real, etc. The people were no less people, but their heads weren't ours.

What economic theories will come next, what new ways of thinking, what new mindsets? We're so focused on the rational, the 'right' answers, these days. But life, as we all know, is VERY stochastic ( a fancy word for random ). Maybe new mindsets about the randomness, bounded and given standards of deviation, will be a new paradigm, not just in economics, but in everything we do.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17058487

[1] https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2017/09/thinking-mediev...
Hardware security keys go open source with Solo
Wow, actually just looked at her Twitter feed, it's pretty hardcore anti-Republican. Their Thanksgivings must be interesting.
Cautionary editor's note: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-31971-9#change-hi...
Ranking is nearly meaningless. eg compare these:

School A - full of underachieving kids that are pushed to get avg grades

School B - full of avg kids getting above avg grades

School C - full of smart kids getting top grades

School D - full of smart kids getting nearly top grades, but soft skills, nice personalities and VIP friends

School E - Mix of kids getting relevant grades

Which is the best school for each kid type? They're impossible to rank. Many schools with top grades are only there because they kick out failing kids, not because they're better at teaching. Many schools are rated good because they can improve grades, but you wouldn't want to send a smart kid there. Many private schools sell themselves on creating well rounded kids, not necessarily good grades.
> And it is a pitty to see this kind of thinking from otherwise intelligent and educated people.

What kinds of thinking?

> Dreamers are not illegal immigrants

What is "dreamers"? If you refer to people DREAM Act has been about, they are by definition illegal immigrants. That's the whole purpose of this law - if they weren't illegal, there would not be any need for this law to exist. The whole purpose is to convert them from illegal to legal status. This may be the right thing to do - I actually like this solution, if only it would be combined with actual immigration reform and not be just "well, we feel bad about you so we decided not to enforce any immigration laws anymore and see how it works out". But the absolutely first step for it to work is to recognize there are illegal immigrants that need this solution.

> up to now I dis not see any plausible proof of people getting resident status by cheating

Then you do not follow US politics as close as you'd like to think, or your ideological filter does not allow you to encounter the facts.

> at the moment the current US administration is also pushing against legal residents of foreign origin

What you mean by "pushing against"? The only "push" is if somebody is suspected of fraud, this will be investigated, and if the evidence of fraud would be found, the person who committed fraud would be denaturalized.

> This will not the affect the ex-pats from, say, Norway. It will affect migrants from Latin America.

It will affect anyone who commits fraud. There are much less people from Norway immigrating to US, and even less of them have reasons to cheat instead of following proper immigration procedures, so statistically more people will be caught in fraud from Latin America than from Norway. So what? Does US have some obligation to people of Latin America to suspend American immigration law because they are from Latin America? Or deport some Norwegians just to keep statistics nice?

> And with their path to citizen ship blocked by some BS like that

You mean US immigration laws? Yeah, too bad Americans dare to put some bullshit laws in front of people only exercising their natural rights to become US citizens without following naturalization procedure, too bad they require honesty in applications. No country would dare to do that, every other country just accepts whoever comes in and believes whatever they say, no question asked, citizenship granted right at the border, just sign on the line, and only stupid Americans (probably because they are racist) have immigration laws. Right?

Implying that it's somehow racist to have immigration laws and actually enforce them makes no sense. Only in a bizarro world of modern US politics it can be seen as a viable argument.
SoftBank in danger of over-WeWorking itself