skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Brilliant article. The Ottomans had an empire that lasted over 650 years, any Saudi "state" was no match for them. At one point Ottomans were a major threat to Europe, reaching and almost taking the gates of Vienna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna (Polish knights saved the day and then some!) . The Saudis must've been semi-organized nomads, no match for Ottoman armies. Once, I think the Sultan sent the ruler of Egypt, Ali Pasha, with his mercenaries and truly pwned the Saudis.*

But things change, or some think that they changed. Even today, SA army is not even a close match for the Turks, but money talks when it comes to alliances. Personally--call me a bigot--but I think it will SA decades if not generations to have a true modern army, not based on tribal loyalties and BS.

Fun Fact: Muhammad Ali Pasha gained control of Egypt in the name of the Sultan as was customary. Wiped out the Mamelukes, after inviting their leaders to a diner (killed by Ali Pasha's soldiers.) https://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/mamelukes-are... He became so powerful that the Sultan made agreements with him, he was almost no vassal and his family ruled Egypt until 1952.

Now the soldiers that made Ali Pasha that great were Albanian mountaineers, that fought not to embarrass themselves and for spoils. Totally undisciplined, uneducated, headstrong and they'd no orders from anyone else but their local area chief. They'd kill a superior for an offense and all soldiers would rally toward the "killer". Eventually they became a threat to Mohamed Ali Pasha's power so he sent them to fight the Wahhabi /Saudis in early 1800's. Two birds with a stone. Here's a typical Albanian mercenary in Egypt http://photobucket.com/gallery/user/Edli82/media/bWVkaWFJZDo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali%27s_seizure_of_po...
Ask HN: What are the reasons why you will not apply to YC in 2019?
What are the reasons why you will not apply to YC in 2019?
"... Imagine how he'd act if Saudi Arabia murdered Sean Hannity."
(sighs wistfully)
As someone who's often implementing models from ML papers, the issue is that english-language descriptions of methods is often found to be sorely lacking. Even good authors simply forget to mention small critical details of model design or training that wouldn't remain ambiguous if they simply released their code. Part of the effort of reproducing work is certainly figuring out which aspects of the model design are critical or incidental - but this is all greatly aided by not having to guess at what was actually done from a heap of english and LaTeX generally written feverishly over a few days before a deadline!
> I wonder what happens next, maybe some super advanced package manager will come...

This is what needs to happen. Javascript isn't a proprietary language, yet the entire ecosystem is currently inextricably linked to the single point of failure in a single company's proprietary database, language extension (which Node.js is) and package manager.

I would hold out hope for Webassembly but I'm certain it's just going to be swallowed up by the Node monster along with everything else.
It might even spur new European based social media companies that aren't full of American politics 90% of the time. To make Reddit useable I essentially have to filter out most of the website.

Also for a long time I've been frustrated with the content policing that American companies enforce on European users. As a German user I have always been confused by the fact that a topless woman is going to get her account closed while some guy with a burning cross in his backyard and a swastika on his forehead can post merrily.

Maybe the result of this is social media in Europe more closely aligned with people's values over here. I've never been a fan of Zuckerberg's 'connect the world' mentality.
I think the short way to say this is viewing angle. If you're seated where the angle between one edge and the opposite edge is more than a typical situation, then you'll want more than typical DPI and thus resolution.

One rule if thumb I recall hearing is that the TV diagonal size should be about 1/3 to 1/2 the viewing distance. I'd need to brush up on my trig to get degrees from that.
I think that's a given and priced in.
No need to be glib. The kinds of situations that are being discussed as the best for blockchain are literally the most intractable - hence why I said it was not a technology solution.

If you're in a situation where cryptocurrency is the best solution for currency, then you're probably in a lawless wasteland with abjectly destructive governance systems.

Seems like in that circumstance moving is the right answer.
exactly, I don't understand how a company like reddit could promote this FALSE idea. Links are not covered. Why do they do this?
To be fair to myself, I probably have a lot of useful code, I just haven't used it for anything.

I guess the moral of the story is that it's not really a failure if you learn something and keep your work archived somewhere.
> autopilot is not a real autopilot, in this case marketing names thing as they want since there are not laws what you can call autopilot

I'm a bit curious what you think a real autopilot is and how it works. Do you imagine a bunch of planes flying around with pilots asleep or away from the cockpit?

I think autopilot is probably a surprisingly appropriate and accurate name, but most people don't have any real idea what it means so we see a lot of surprising assumptions being brought to bear.
I already said this to someone above but check out the documentary "Three Identical Strangers." It's both enjoyable and will give you some interesting food for thought as to the ethics of nature/nurture research.
Most cars are drag limited well before 200mph. Terminal falling velocity is only about 120mph for a human, cars are less aerodynamic and a straight vertical drop isn't usually considered a hill.
On an interview, I was once asked, "Why shouldn't we hire you?". This got me totally confused, I was speechless for like 10 seconds. I don't remember the answer, it wasn't really anything remarkable. Still, I got the job.
The Dingo.. Er Google Ate My Patent
Exactly, the west part is that we tend to think that everything in the west is the whole world or whole field, when Asia is light years ahead in this case in that they focus on the underlining logic mathematically.
Deep learning is not mimicking how our brains work. It's just brain inspired. It may mimic of how some primitive areas of brain work in very low level in very crude way.

Take for example machine vision. ConvNET is inspired by the lowest levels of human visual cortex and there are analogies to be drawn, but no direct mimicry.
That's uhh, not true. At any rate, shouldn't we be listing to the climatologists on this matter, because their specialty is, you know, climate?
Decentralized will then be the target of the next regulation. They are too small to matter atm.
No, but from the article you linked:

“Gould doubts that the sex of the person administering the drug affects how well it works in a depressed patient, but it's never been tested.“

It seems to be related to stress response, which the mice were experiencing in the presence of male handlers. One would assume the same issue isn’t present in humans unless they become anxious and stressed when men are around.

That said, it does have interesting implications for the drug’s relationship with stress; e.g., it might have stronger subjective effects in folks with high stress or stimulation levels at the time of administration.
In which case that is still both obviously nonsense and irrelevant on two counts.

It's irrelevant because this was about FOSS vs. closed source, not about commercial licencing vs. noncommercial licencing. Even if commercial licencing were the solution, that says nothing about whether the commercial licence should be FOSS or closed source.

And it is also irrelevant because there are broadly the same legal remedies to malfeasance in all cases. If you are breaking the law, you are sill breaking the law if you are publishing your source code, and you are still breaking the law if your are doing it non-commercially.

And in so far as you mean liability for defects rather than malfeasance, it is obviously nonsense that there are any generally applicable effective legal remedies against terrible proprietary code if you look at the real-world quality of products in the market. You might be able to put together a contract that helps with that, but (a) that is far from the norm and (b) is obviously still irrelevant to whether the code should be open or closed.
Insurance Companies Are Monitoring Personal Telemetry
I'm gonna need a bigger living room.
> Are you claiming Marcus has produced no interesting research results?

Not the OP, but I'm not familiar with Marcus' contributions. What would you consider his top contributions? Are they all purely theoretical, or is there something that's already been applied in the real world?
These news don’t make a big splash when other companies use profiling to identify people. This one did because those profiles were used to incite violence. It’s news, just not to your liking.
They could use Bing. From personal experience Google is much better. I make the assumption that crippled Google will still be much better than crippled Bing.

I have no illusions about Google creating social change. That's not the point. Google will make it much easier than Bing to find information you need. It is more convenient. It could save lives in the right situations. That's enough of a sell for me.
Ask HN: If Diversity Is Important, How Come FAANG Aren't That Diverse?
Seriously. We see a lot of articles and studies about how more diverse teams are supposedly better for companies/groups, how they come up with new perspectives than non diverse teams, etc...

Then I look at the likes of Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/whatever and most of the employees seem to have pretty similar backgrounds. Mostly from wealthier families, went to good universities, often predominately male... yet the companies they work for make billions of dollars and are perfectly able to create products and services most of the world's population uses and depends on.

Where's the real world evidence that diverse teams do better, if most the large companies out there seem to be anything but diverse?
You should either write more, or (assuming you already write more), lmk somehow next time you write something.
Counter-intuitively perhaps, many of the benefits of 8K become readily apparent on tiny screens intended for use directly in front of one’s eyes, such as VR/AR headsets.

Discussions of resolution against screen size are meaningless without consideration of viewing distance.
But if Earth in ancient prehistory was dominated by CO2 that was eventually sequestered by plants under the ground, and that today our oil reserves are running low, then wouldn't it make simple sense that human use of fossil fuels must have a significant impact on atmospheric CO2 levels?

In that case, it's pretty settled that there is a significant human impact on atmospheric CO2 levels; the space for room to wander are, say, the exact distribution of CO2 released. I mean, physicists don't wonder and revise basic kinematics since that science is pretty much settled that Newtonian kinematics are very good approximations of reality.
BASES – BUZZEZESOCIAL.NING.COM
My humble opinion on what this means for AirBnB and the market: https://medium.com/@simon/airbnb-wants-to-reinvent-the-city-...
Spectre v2 mitigation causes significant slowdown on Linux 4.20
I also read it as a qualified positive. (1) Sound and unsound studies can be done in any field. (2) In this examination of the field of psychology, half the observed studies were found to be sound. (3) The implication that half the work in psychology may be unsound is concerning, and suggests a large cohort with problems in rigor, ethics, careerism, etc. (4) The sound work being done in psychology is as sound as the work in other sciences, and it's the unsound work that's the problem. (5) As an interesting side note, unsoundness can be intuited to a statistically significant degree.
But have you ever seen a film captured and projected in true 70mm IMAX? The difference between that and 4K DCP is immense.
That's true. But most people using free software can't simply ask for "help understanding" millions of lines code written in possibly multiple languages. Like a lot of the axioms of FOSS, the utility of that breaks down at the scale of modern software.
I think you're talking about using personas. I'm not surprised that was your reaction, as personas are often misunderstood, even by marketing folks.

The point of using personas is not to stereotype your customers but to establish focus sufficient to permit clear product decisions. In other words the idea is not "all our customers are like this" but "this is the type of customer we care about the most." Or more typically there are multiple personas, which allows you to create a matrix of product features with personas and again, establish priority for which feature to develop when, and how much to invest.

I'm using "product" and "feature" here broadly, so for example even in an ad campaign, each ad can be considered a "product" with "features" like where it appears, what's in the imagery, what the text says, etc.

You can run into trouble with personas if you start believing that they cover the entire range of potential customers. They don't, and again, that's the point: focus. That's why personas are sometimes given names and photos and detailed descriptions, to make it clear they're supposed to be individuals not stereotypes.
As someone who has dropped almost all social media (mostly so I can get more done, but also for privacy), I can point out some non obvious consequences. This blog post mentions that stopping the use of Facebook will prevent you from seeing your nephews baby pictures... This is true.

My extended family and remote friends actually got upset when I dropped Facebook. They asked why I didn't want to be part of their lives, asked why I was choosing not to talk to them anymore... All while texting me on phones that allow instantaneous communication of any type of election media imaginable, more so that Facebook allows.

Moral of the story: Facebook and other social media makes most people socially lazy with continuous use. If you don't believe me, go try to meet someone under the age of 30 "out in the wild", at a bar or venue. Bars used to be easiest places to meet anyone at, just walk in, sit at the front, and start chatting. I'm not talking about people who are on their phones ignoring the outside world; even people just chilling and having a beer just don't know how to talk to someone outside of their social media platforms.
When was the last time YC was relevant?
While there is definitely a focus on multiplayer games ($$$ drives all things), these last few years have also yielded some of the most incredible single-player games. Major studios are investing in AAA primarily single-player titles (from this year alone, God of War, Spiderman, RDR2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey) and there is also an explosion of high quality indie titles.

As someone that almost never plays online except some occasional co-op with friends, I don't feel one bit neglected by the current state of the industry.
Russian hackers allegedly attacked Germany and the US on the same day
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18570379
> I'd love to see another attempt at a photorealistic 100% CG movie

Isn't that what Disney's Lion King remake is doing?
I always thought "why should we hire you" is the new "tell me about yourself". Just an open, completely dumb question to estimate the ability of candidates to generally speak.
Act now because this sale only runs through December 3
“You can use this function safely with your MySQL database queries if and only if you are sure that your database connection is using ASCII, UTF-8, or ISO-8859-* and that the backslash is your database's escape character. If you're not sure, then use mysqli_real_escape_string instead. This function is not safe to use on databases with multi-byte character sets.”
An instruction set/ computer design with no instruction
Also avoid DNA services. If one family member does it it can compromise the entire family.
As long as the password manager is trusted. Some are run by a single person nobody's heard of. I met a woman in Vegas who ran one and who couldn't believe that people trusted it so much.
Cool i guess, Reddit will lose money, doesn't affect me or anything. What is the point of this disruption though? Nobody gains from it, it's like "if i can't have it, nobody can have it".
The problem is the exponential explosion of possibilities. Fairly amateur Python code can work through a problem in 10 minutes which, without gradient descent, would literally take a thousand years.
X: How to deal with technical debt?
I've read and enjoyed quite a few of Fowler's articles. The things I've taken from his writings have been concretely valuable so far too. I'm not experienced enough though to evaluate how his ideas stand up in big or complicated projects.

Can anybody comment?
what exactly makes it one of the best games you have ever played?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18575586
About 15 years ago it was good practice in JavaScript to check the function parameters to make sure the caller didn't do anything wrong, which would throw a friendly error message to the developer. But this seem to be thrown upon by new developers, they argue that it's "code clutter". This "code clutter" however solves almost all problems with the dynamic nature of JavaScript. Also type annotations and static typing do not substitute good documentation, nor does it substitute testing.
USPS website flaw exposed data for one year
This may be the smallest ITX case ever.
You may control the client, but do you control the client library? If you want to get the most out of something like, say, Python's requests, following these conventions are your best bet.
"Typescript is much more understandable than JS to someone unfamiliar with both."

From that point of view, I see what you're saying.
Can you give me one example where it has helped(not the it would be helpful) the users. All I see now is everyone including FB and Google using the same privacy model, and just ask for big "consent", which is not much better than age old T and C, as I do it without reading it anyways.
I didn't realize that the word "bokeh" is fairly new to English-language discussion of photography -- only since about 1998 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh ).

I had this series of thoughts about smartphone camera "portrait mode" which were like this:

(1) Ha, pretty funny that we're spending all this human effort and R&D time to try to realistically simulate what is essentially a defect in camera lenses that makes them unable to have a wide enough focal plane to accurately represent what is in front of them.

(2) But wait, isn't that snobbish and a little shortsighted? (ha ha). What is a camera for anyway, is it making art or faithfully what it sees or something else? There's whole academic disciplines about this hmm okay.

(3) Well, no, I mean, a photo which has been selectively blurred like this has _less information_ than we started with, so it's objectively telling us less, and that's why it's funny, that we are spending so much time removing information.

(4) But maybe that's just the same as editing. Surely a good editor of texts takes a lot of information and removes information to make a better story; in the same way surely a "portrait mode" is really about figuring out what the most important parts are of a picture and selectively obscuring the rest, so that the 'good stuff' can shine through. That's important and hard; with an 85mm lens at f1.8 you'd do it by controlling focus carefully, but doing it after the fact is definitely interesting.

So okay, the reason this feature is interesting (and hard) is that software is trying to guess what parts of a picture are noise that should be gently deemphasized.

Now, it seems like the best way that software companies can think of to deemphasize unimportant parts of a picture is to mimic what a physical camera does with a portrait lens -- choose parts not on the same focal plane, pretend those parts were out of focus, then soften the image in the areas that "should have been" out of focus and blur them.

Now that they have shipped products that do that I'd be interested to see what the folks at Apple & Android do next. Do their teams still exist? Have they thought about how they would emphasize the important parts of a portrait if they weren't required to simulate the mechanical effect of a camera lens? What else could they do, maybe a little more creatively, to make portraits shine?

(And have they reinvented anything that Photoshop plugin makers have been doing for a decade?)
> for European companies to have a competitive advantage

That moat is so big that even EU companies can't cross it. Our hands are tied even more than foreign companies.
Sure, but what's wrong with that?
And you think it's because of the bumpiness of the ride? You're going to kill someone driving like that on public roads.

I was in the backseat of a car driving like that in high school. Driver lost control while changing lanes, we swerved across multiple lanes of traffic, exited the interstate and flipped five times. The two people in the car not wearing seatbelts were thrown from the vehicle as we rolled.

Nobody died, but by rights any or all of us should have.

Seriously, stop.
Copyrights are not "rights" the way most other "rights" are understood. The term "right" in this context is an abstraction and it is becoming increasingly strained in the modern world. Copyright is a "right" the way that minerals rights are "rights" -- in reality it is a regulation on an industry.
Editor's Letter
There are a lot of ways to translate these questions. As an example: "Tell Me About A Time You Failed". It can mean "Can you stomach failing until we figure things out?" or it can mean "Are you willing to be vulnerable by exposing your failures?" or "What kind of problems you perceive as a failure?". I can probably write another half a dozen of translations of such questions.

I don't think there should be a right/wrong translation. And based on that, there are rarely terrible answers.

These questions are open-ended on purpose, so people will talk and say things which are essential to them.

As an example: “I didn't get along with a coworker.” isn't a terrible answer. It means that interpersonal relations for this person are important. “I struggled to balance work and life.” isn't a terrible answer, but rather show that he/she prefers an environment where the work doesn't occupy all the time/energy.

The only answer which I wound consider bad is a dismissive answer (trying to ignore/deflect the question).
I expect that if good high frame rate content was more common, this effect would go away. It's a conditioned response, not an innate one.

I also expect the effect to be lesser among younger people who are used to e.g. video games, although I have no actual evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) that this is the case.
not even google with their endless cash can figure out how to walk through the logistics of this. And then the sites themselves will have to figure out ways to pay for everything that is payable in their articles.
DOJ Indicts Hackers for Ransomware That Crippled Atlanta
AIUI you can keep the wages in arrears, in UK tax is due when you actually receive the money.

This is sensible: otherwise you might owe taxes if your employer company collapsed and you weren't paid, but without having income to pay it.
This is definitely real.

This was quite noticeable to a trained eye in the finale episode of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks returns season.

As I was watching it, somewhere mid episode where the story moves between two realms of reality, I noticed the image suddenly had a much more real (or “cheap”) appearance.

I was in awe. That was a super nice touch done a technical level which really helped elevate the story itself.
Interesting. Thank you for sharing.
Lean UXmas 2018