skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are also fears about the level of access given to private corporations and the legislation’s loose wording, which could allow it to be used for purposes other than related to terrorism or serious crime.

Truth is, it will be used for purposes other than related to terrorism or serious crime. It’s alarming how democratic countries are invading the privacy of their own citizens, creating mass surveillance machinery that could become uncontrollably detrimental to the very institutions and structures that they claim to value and protect. Among the FIVE EYES countries, Australia seems to be doing a lot more (comparatively) on mass surveillance and having the legislative backing for it.

> The database will be accessible to federal, state and territory governments through a central hub connecting the various photographic identity databases.

This is how it starts, with vague claims of safeguards that belie the actual access and how they can (and will be) misused.

It seems like future generations will have to give up freedom to get some sense of safety (as painted by those in power).
Overall 50% taxation sounds about right?

Yes, medical care availability and quality suffer as the consequence of the European model, and that everybody regards it as "free" (despite having been taxed through the roof) doesn't help. On balance, it's probably better than the US system, but it's not the rose garden a large chunk of HN seems to think.
Hometown dancing
This article implies that WiFi is a privacy concern, but wouldn't any other RF signal work just as well? A bad actor could just create their own signal if you somehow protect your WiFi. That would probably be more effective anyway because they would know exactly where the signal was coming from and could choose a frequency for this application.
Bit logically where was he wrong? It seems like a bit of a paradox to me. You keep say it’s wrong but can you point out exactly where his reasoning is wrong? My vote yesterday simply didn’t change any of the outcomes. That is a fact. None of the races were won by a single vote.
It's not about experience. A significant proportion of the population is always going to parrot stock talking points with no independent thought.

Which is why there are entire industries dedicated to making sure that the talking points they parroting don't inconvenience the political and financial interests of the stockholder class.

The myth that democracy and policy appear by magic out of a nation of proud independent thinkers who rationally weigh evidence on the basis of information, logic, and a solid liberal education is absolute nonsense. That's simply not how it works - and the media (and ad) industries know this. So does the political class.

They also know that it's important to maintain the illusion, because people are far more likely to argue - and vote - passionately from a position of pliably expedient ignorance if they believe they're sovereign sages, than if they understand that they've been conned and lied to.

The same applies to corporate culture. Every culture has its convenient mythologies and its hard reality. In some cultures the two are observably close, in others they might as well be on different planets.

But it's important to create and propagate a mythology so that everyone at least knows what they're supposed to be believe.

These narratives are usually unconscious, but they reliably shape actual behaviour far more than any rational assessment of reality does.
I would much rather the cash machine crashes than starts communicating with the bank seeded by 00*inf bytes of random.

Besides, what exactly do you expect to do with the library in an "exceptional condition"? Do I now need to check the output of every single function for some non-local effects they have on each other?
Here's the page that lets you do it:

https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/ecorp/logintax.aspx?FilingTyp...

You have to enter the value of your net income and assets, and after you've done that it will update to the ~$400 amount.
>every few years

Every few decades for a properly sized and properly functioning system.
I'm now seriously considering adding that Prometheus photo to our press kit ;)

Jokes aside, my colleague @sachmans has posted a comment above that should hopefully answer your question on how we use AI. As for how we define AI, as an engineer myself, I'm a little annoyed by how it's become an umbrella term for everything from basic statistical models to ANNs. Unfortunately that is the reality of it - and so we've consciously decided to use it as an umbrella term for the various applications of ML/NLP/NNs that we use internally.

- Disclaimer, I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai
Oh ouch. That was not the intention but I can be socially awkward at times. Perhaps you can help me understand what I said that was wrong?

Happy to adjust the way I communicate so long as I can express that it was writing out code that didn't work as opposed to architecture and/or technical communication.
People seem to be disturbed by the indiscriminate nature of this cure. The immune system, unleashed, will target not only cancer cells but healthy ones as well. If this feels somehow aesthetically displeasing to you, ask yourself whether it feels more or less clumsy to shoot radiation in your tumor's general direction and literally poison yourself. Immunotherapy seems positively elegant in comparison.
> If only they could make a single case to fit all these various computer components in

They do. It's called an iMac and comes free with an excellent monitor.

Now, seriously, unless you plan to do a lot of GPU computing (I don't) the internal Intel graphics are pretty reasonable. I can't see how a 64 gig mini would not be able to be my main machine for 5 years or more. With an updated SSD, my previous mini is a pretty good general purpose computer.
To add to this good answer: in many cases you also don't want to overwhelm the users with frequent, unexpected changes, especially in 'enterprise' software.

This is not so much a problem when you add a new feature like this triple-click which doesn't change existing usage and workflows. But even here you want to add that to your documentation, inform your support staff about it etc.

For changes that affect the look & feel of the product, your users will curse you if you roll out multiple of those per week, even if everything is totally stable and free of bugs.
Apache Struts users have to update FileUpload library to fix years-old flaws
You won't have to wire them $80K. Believe me, I've been running Delaware companies from outside the U.S. for 10 years and it's always fine, even if you file late.

If you don't pay, the company eventually becomes void and you can no longer trade.

They don't come after you for unpaid franchise taxes on a void company - even for the $400.
It's indeed true that the problem is not caused by a lack of technology. Some places became much more sanitary, safe, well-fed on a much lower technological level.

But a more positive take would be that perhaps better tech offers a way to improve people's lives despite other disfunction.

London had pretty amazing communications 150 years ago, letters delivered 4-5 times a day to any of a million people. This machine took an enormous amount of human capital to run — thousands of literate & honest postmen, for a start. Today we can deliver a better outcome with much less input — just a few guys who know how to set up a cellphone base station. This doesn’t fix the dysfunction, but does offer many benefits.
>Of course building a tower capable of holding many tons of water is a comparably complex civil engineering task and is costly in materials.

In most cases it's not. You park a ground level tank on one of the taller hills in town.
Nothing; it is just much smaller by not providing POSIX and Linux like interfaces.

Alpine proves full musl can already run a full distro's worth of programs and is very easy to port anything using glibc.

Newlib tends to be used in projects like Cygwin as a small C standard library, where the rest of the POSIX API is implemented separately (by proxying to Win32 system calls for Cygwin).
Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages
A few years ago (maybe 10) we started getting "waterless" urinals in the UK. I assume that was a materials improvement (extreme hydrophobic coatings?). They have an outlet pipe, but no inlet.

That must save a lot of piping and water.
> Are we all becoming so politically correct that we effectively stop teaching our children the values of masculinity and femininity?

There is no value in masculinity and femininity ... those are labels for a complex interaction of personality traits which a given person shows or doesn't. There is no reason to teach those concepts. They are simply present in a human being. Most people are combinations of masculine and feminine traits - it is a spectrum and not a binary concept.
Blockchain.com $125M Airdrop ($25 worth of XLM per person)
Announcement here: https://blog.blockchain.com/2018/11/06/we-always-put-users-f...
API mocking tools and frameworks
There’s a scale difference.

CFC was a small part of the economy.

As a first approximation, burning fossil fuel is the economy.
In Italy (and other countries) we have both co-ed and inter-ed associations. "Inter-ed" meaning that there is a single association with separate troops for boys and girls, but chiefs can plan activities together as they deem fit. Would this approach be considered "ridiculous", "absurd", or "shameful"?
The second paragraph at the link explains why both of those matter given the problem domain...
Five countries sign letter urging Zuckerberg for evidence
Of course they started with exploiting the emulated device using a VM where they have full control.

The rest is just to show a scenario where this is actually a problem.
My guess is that the guy they interviewed spends his weekends hanging out with NGO types. How else would you get invited to any parties in Nairobi? And they love this stuff... saying "everybody profits" makes you sound like a cold-hearted evil capitalist.
Did you know that there was a prolog in Windows?

http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft...

Dr Dobbs (bad formatting) http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/extending-c-with-prolog/184409294

Prolog mentioned above, has been preserved on archive.org, but here for posterity... https://github.com/opless/small-prolog-walnut-creek-original
This is the best story on HN right now, it has been up here for an hour and nobody has sought to comment.

It brings insight on a WW1 reporter who most people know nothing of and could be enlightened by. A true literary gem is here.

Had there been a post on something really vital such as that newish function key strip thing they have on those Apple computers these days then there would be 480 comments on how to customise it best for Vi/Emacs.

And then we wonder why we - us - human beings - fall into the same traps of propaganda and war every time.
Early on in my career I actually did give someone some advice post an interview and what to read up on etc. He sent me an email thanking me. Then six months later he thanked me saying he got a job at what is now a famous startup after studying up on the topics I recommended (algos and data structures in general and the basics in particular - he wasn't a CS major).

I was proud of that one but man would it have been sensible of me to have asked him to re-apply at that time. I love working with people with that attitude.

Unfortunately, I had my first unpleasant interaction shortly after that and then have never given pointed feedback ever after. Is that really short-termism? I don't see the short-term/long-term implications. I only see that there's a lack of information and no way to prove that one is trustworthy enough to warrant the interaction.
Yes, that is true, for modern devices that randomize their MAC addresses. I wasn't up to speed on that. But at least you should be able to see that a device was newly connected to the network. (Due to increased traffic between the two.) If the home WiFi does not have very many devices coming and going, you could probably do pattern matching and learn to fingerprint individual devices. At the very least, you should be able to see that "someone is home".
Oracle are actively hostile to the security researcher community, with their CISO having told customers and researchers off for attempting to find issues in their products

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/oracl...

This kind of attitude goes all the way back to 2002 https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/01/16/oracle_security_cla...
How did u do? Sometimes having this attitude helps!
This means people at the very top should look back and see where they fucked up as it looks like this machine got a life on its own and starts to act against the best interests of the company.
There have been lots of toilet innovations "recently".

Toilets that use excrement to generate electricity, for example, like in this situation https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41680867.
On dealing with owning and borrowing in public interfaces in Rust
> Why did it take until the late 20th century for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to develop and the Gracie family crush almost all other unarmed martial arts at the start of MMA, when humans have engaged in unarmed combat for millions of years and every major country has long lineages of specialized competitive martial arts and tremendous incentive to find martial arts which worked and quick feedback loops?

This one is easy. Because Gracie jujutsu (spell it right please) with its emphasis on ground technique is only effective when you are unarmored and your opponent is unwilling to use lethal force. In military and/or life and death situations it is a good way to get yourself killed by a trained opponent. It’s not surprising at all that Gracie/Brazilian jujutsu only developed after the popularization of MMA like sporting competitions with rules that the Gracie brothers learned to exploit.
Just something for people too trendy for a phone
Funny to see people with real experience being downvoted... Typical leftists. They do the same in the US - destroying communities using welfare. I would explain how this works for the umpteenth time, but leftists never seem to listen anyway (or even bother to summarize their opposition fairly). What makes westerners think they can "save Africa" when their countries are disintegrating so quickly?

This is just part of Gate's tax sheltering. Nothing wrong with using legal tax shelters, but he's no savior!

I agree with majani's analysis!
> Why do humans have such a large mutation load on common genetic variants?

This one is answerable. Two reasons.

1. The human population is not in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium since it has expanded so much in the recent human past (agricultural revolution and all that).

2. The human population over the last 10,000 years has experienced very strong natural selection that has carried a lot of deleterious mutations along for the ride.

What is more interesting is why we have so many chromosomal abnormalities - humans have something like 100x the rate of chromosomal abnormalities as other species.
(for those who don't need one)
Allowed as in illegal? Which country, what regulations?
I could imagine that the main factor influencing how "wander and explore"-friendly a city is, might not be age or evolved-vs-planned, but rather whether it is car-friendly or not (i.e. the degree of density). Car-friendliness can be by design or might evolve.
I have far too much to read today. I really could do with a telepathic clone.
Sharing is caring ;)
I am on slow connection the entire week and it is a pain in the butt. I m sick and tired at looking at spinners and progressbars. It's not just gmail, everything google ( i suspect material designed) is sluggish. Try adsense if you want to ruin your day.
Or maybe it did, if you voted for the winning side. What if you ordered the winning votes and losing votes randomly, side by side, and eliminated pairs of opposing votes. You would be left with a set of winning votes, cast by individual people. You could attribute the victory to exactly those people.

Now, to extrapolate this to all of the winning voters, simply "sample" reorderings, or average it, and you have a spread responsibility amongst all those people who voted for the winning candidate/party.

In other words, votes cast for the winning side did decide the result, because of their collective behaviour. The effect of a single vote can be defined in statistical terms as being interdependent with the rest of the votes in the same direction. This means any winning vote cannot be said to lack all effect, meaning or power. If the vote is not without effect, then it must have some effect, albeit not absolute.

Another way to look at this is that if the voting is won by a difference of exactly one vote, whose vote was it anyway? You would spread the responsibility of turning the election equally amongst all voters for that side.

If we wanted to somehow quantify the "contribution" to winning that each vote has, we have to take into account how many votes were actually required to win. Let X be the number of votes in the winning side and Y in the losing side. Of all the X votes in the winning side, only Y+1 were actually necessary to win. So the contribution of each voter could be (Y + 1)/X, which is always <= 1 as Y + 1 <= X, measured in "decisive votes per person", or something along those lines.

So if the voting is won by exactly one vote, all votes in the winning side are decisive: without any one of them, the voting would not be won.

If, however, everyone voted for the same side, it would be 1/X, where you could remove all but one vote and still be short of removing a whole "decisive vote".
hastily searches brain for a contrived intuition pump

In "Star Trek: The Next Generation", Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge does not have a tech problem. He has a lack-of-properly-functioning-eyes problem.

It's been solved with technology, though.

In this case, maybe technology will enable people to create a sanitary environment even in the face of impediments from the state.
My take is not cynical, it's pragmatic, moreover, I didn't imply that Gates shouldn't doing what he is doing.

"Deaths from malaria in Africa fell from 800,000 per year in 2000 to 400,000 per year today because of the introduction of affordable mosquito nets. That fact alone refutes your entire arguement."

This statement only enhances my argument. Africa is a bountiful land of resources and ostensible human capital for labour. They should easily be able to afford (or make their own) mosquito nets.

Consider the vast numbers of unemployed people - and that making 'mosquito nets' doesn't require any skill or frankly machinery. The only ostensible 'import' would be some very inexpensive textiles. We're talking a few pennies per person. And that the 'upside' from the effort would yield dramatic benefits, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of saved lives. How on earth are zillions of people dying from something that literally only a few million dollars in 'external financing' (if they don't have the money, which they do) - and some pragmatic planning - should solve? That there needed to be intervention to solve this problem only highlights how dramatically dysfunctional the situation must be.

And as far as 'some' governments, no, it's pretty much all of them, maybe save Botswana, the shinning example, at least for now. [1]

Also - it's not just 'governments', and it's not just 'corruption' - it's lack of civic function all the way up and down society.

[1] https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept...
Which is why the rules exist, and why MMA is wrestling/boxing, not a martial art. Either you are training to score points within a rule system, or you are training to kill/maim/incapacitate. Don’t confuse the two.
Maybe this Reddit AMA helped it's SEO rank, as it's now first for “Photoshop in the browser”, but I've been searching for something like this for years and even entertained the idea of building one myself someday, but Google would only find old, Flash based stuff.

Really nice work, I'll check it out more thoroughly when I have the time.
Most things are examples of this - including Intel's latest CPU :)
Seriously though, how did the so-called "futurists" get away with applying Moore's law to all innovative processes without being called charlatans? Sky scrapers don't double every 18 months, food has gotten less nutritious... Ditto for education, transportation in the west, all non-emergency medicine, and many who are even "techies" think software has recently been decreasing in quality.
At our hospital we routinely use many of these therapies even in patients with a variety of autoimmune conditions. In about a third of patients, they'll have an exacerbation of their underlying autoimmune condition, which fortunately only rarely necessitates cessation of the immunotherapy.

One of several studies we reference when we treat these patients: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=27687304

What's interesting (and increasingly being studied) is the higher risk of developing an autoimmune condition after treatment with some of these immunotherapies. The absolute risk doesn't seem to be huge, but it's an interesting window into how these conditions might develop in the first place.
Forums like this would accuse Gates of modern colonialism if he attempted any of the government reforms or accountability measures you describe.
The current low water level in the Rhine has nothing to do with the glaciers, the lack of water is caused by the unusually dry last couple of months.

The global warming is actually making the glaciers melt more rapidly and increasing the Rhine level a bit, but at the end of the year the water level is mostly determined by rain fall.
Hanukkah Story Begins with Persecution Under the Seleucids
Here is a link to the pdf, without having to pay sagepub : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ursula_Staudinger/publi...
I didn’t want to start the meta-whine about the reading experience, but as you’ve been so kind, I’ll chip in.

I’m an Australian. I’m currently on holiday in Girona, Spain.

Holy shit how do you people deal with these cookie notices all day?! Techcrunch covers the entire screen with something you have to click [0], and it’s hardly alone.

This is insanity. Who was this meant to benefit?

[0]: https://share.icloud.com/photos/0KfvL5LoHln0FNLDqzrbdjRKg
> The reason to include wrestling is that it makes the contest more closely approximate a real fight. In a real fight your opponent does have the option to go to the ground.

And be immediately killed by anyone nearby, who need merely step on their windpipe or something. Going to the ground gets you killed in a “real fight.”
The Egyptian pantheon of gods and goddesses
Delphi/Pascal had the best strings

Single byte storage, so it works well with utf-8.

Byte length field, so it knows the length of every string and it can store null bytes.

An additional null byte past the end and pointer shifting, so every Pascal string is also a C pchar string.

Reference-counted copy-on-write, so you can copy it in constant time for reading and treat it as if the string was fully copied for writing.

Low-level memory management, so it can store 2 GB long strings. And in most situations you do not need a string builder, because strings are freed immediately and very fast when the refcounts zeros without staying around as garbage.

Behaves as a value type with the null pointer being the empty string, so you can never get a null pointer exception. Any string operation returns always a valid string.

(Optionally) index checked with the length, so you can never get a buffer overflow.

Unfortunately the newer FreePascal/Delphi versions made it all very confusing by adding an encoding field. In the past you could just assume all strings are UTF-8 as code style rule. Now each string has an individual encoding. It is converted automatically from one encoding, but not always, so in any function that needs to access the characters, you kind of need to check if it is called with an utf-8 string, or latin1 string, or some other encoding.