skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you give an example of something you learned or read in the news that had a practical effect on your life?

Today the news told me that a particular road I use to get to work is closed.

Yesterday the news told me that a charity I usually contribute to, but forgot to this year, is falling short of its annual fundraising goal.

Last week the news told me that a product I use has been recalled for safety reasons.

The only people who say that the news is irrelevant to their lives are people who don't actually consume the news, and choose to imagine that the reality is identical to the parody in their minds.

There are more news sources today than ever. If you don't like the one in front of you, there are others.
Yes. Some people even use crushed aspirins to reduce acne in a pinch. But it's probably not a good idea, as they are not meant to be applied to skin.
Specially when you try to kick them with any cheap excuse to increase the rent by 300/€ month. Right?
How one Vilmonic player cracked the genome of artificial life
AlphaZero published on Science
You're not wrong, but the author's code does in no way rely on the fact that you could theoretically iterate over all the valid Int values in Swift, so it would have made no difference if the Int type was somehow truly infinite.

And the author clearly acknowledges this:

>it’s best to think of Int as modeling the infinite set of all integers
The 3% is an average. Some years it'll be higher, and that extra income goes into your savings and offsets the bad years. Plus there's the cushion mentioned and that should also be accumulating a larger and larger safety net.
Colorado Springs undertook a radical experiment in government
4 checkboxes instead of a slider for the level of detail is easier to work with IMHO.
Maybe we just haven't tried hard enough.

While researching a comment for another thread I discovered an interesting fact: the US has now spent approximately as much money on fusion research ever (since 1955) as it did on the Manhattan project, alone. Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised that progress is so slow.
Excellent resource, thank you for sharing.
Does anyone know how or if this will affect OAuth2 logins? Several of the sites I run rely on Google OAuth2 and get the user's avatar using Google APIs. It's a simple thing that does not require Google+ but it's unclear to me how it will be affected.

What is this the 3rd or 4th social network Google has failed at?
Haha personally I am a little baffled that my one small comment on gold sparked such a big thread.

Yeah, gold is kinda similar to bitcoin, kinda different. I don't think much of what has been said is particularly new to most people.
If you explore the word2vec family of algorithms, you can improve text search by pulling in external datasets. E.g. use a model trained on Wikipedia to find synonyms, or build a neural network that maps user search terms to documents in your database.
Because (despite what you seem to think) Citizens United did not create a tyranny.

And it seems ironic that you oppose Citizens United, but favor the First Amendment. If Citizens United had been decided the other direction, that would have been a blow against the First Amendment.
I think, it's not a problem if the platform is also doubles as your own bank :D
Only by people who don't know anything about the history of hip-hop, and quite frankly if they can't even learn that much of the history they have no opinion worth hearing.
Thanks. I just Googled this, expecting it to be hard to get hold of in the UK, but was delighted to discover it was broadcast on BBC Four last night and is therefore available on iPlayer for the next 30 days. Looking forward to that.
It's a well-known scam. You make something difficult to get in order to make it look more important than it is.

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." Emma Goldman
My first reaction when I saw this - probably a reaction due to previous repeated news about Voyager 1 leaving - was "But hasn't it already left, multiple times?". This is explained somewhat in GP's footnote [3]:

In early November, the team noticed a sharp decline in the number of particles, but not to zero. This means that the spacecraft still has a long way to go until scientists can declare it free from the solar system.

Due to the fact that the power of the Sun rises and decreases, the position of the heliopause is not constant. Therefore, it is impossible to say exactly when Voyager 2 will leave the Solar System.

So your interpretation is correct, Voyager 2 is approaching the boundary, but hasn't yet definitively crossed into interstellar space. The phrase 'leaves the Solar System' is misleading, depending on your interpretation of where it ends. We can probably expect a few more confused articles announcing this in the next few months until it is certain.

[3] http://earth-chronicles.com/space/voyager-2-is-even-closer-t...
I agree that "show more" is not the right form of interaction for a documentation page. Have you considered measuring engagement in other ways (tracking search results, link clicks, anchor clicks, short "is this page helpful" inline surveys, etc.)?
As in the majority of cases, it's likely a mistake that has held over or gone unnoticed from the time when content was created.
Charitable Giving Holiday Guide Revolutionize Philanthropy
Netflix? Can't even browse the catalog without signing up first.
iTunes? No results
PBS? Not available due to rights restrictions.

Pirate Bay? Hmm...
I suggest it because that's exactly how I put my first ML model into production a couple of weeks ago. All my model does is update placeholder text to give suggestions to users based on previous actions. Took about 3 hours from start to finish: write training script, run it on cron, throw result in a cache, add API endpoint for accessing cached model, fetch model on frontend boot and store in state store, and integrate with search component.

https://updates.moonlightwork.com/updated-skill-search-now-w...

This book is kind of dated, but it's what I used for inspiration and reference: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00F8QDZWG/ref=oh_aui_d_de...
If you look at the history of the world there was an apparent (and counter intuitive) acceleration in the rate at which borders and governments were shifting, largely due to war and revolutions. Then we hit about 1945 and suddenly - it all but stopped. The only very large change being the fall of the Soviet Union, which did not involve direct war nor even revolution.

Nukes have made war between major powers a thing of the past, until they can be contained. 'Modern' nukes make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like a joke. The 'Tsar Bomba' [1] is a nuclear weapon that was tested by Russia in 1961. Its yield, which was not at full capability, was more than three thousand times as powerful as Little Boy [2], the nuke that practically destroyed Hiroshima. You can't win wars against WMD.

A single missile that is failed to be detected or intercepted and you're looking at fatalities in the tens of millions. And there are thousands of these weapons operational and ready to fire today. Russia has even been developing a nuclear torpedo that's designed to create an artificial tsunami that would produce a devastating radioactive wave greater than 500 meters in height that would annihilate a target. The reason for a nuclear torpedo is to bypass all conventional anti-missile ballistic/laser/etc technology.

In my opinion the issue is relatively simple. If China's growth and development continues at even a fraction of its current pace they're going to become the most dominant nation in the world. This will change the world in unimaginable ways. The current powers on top are pretty happy with the status quo, and aren't ready to say goodnight just yet. Traditional war is not an option so I expect we're going to see a continuing increase in aggression on the two new fronts of war: economic and information.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
A rising economy can't compensate for stupid executive decisions.
Yes but Apple also finances the factories and is deeply embedded. The system might just be the most advanced integrated supply chain on the planet.
Can you name a historical society where there wasn't any manner of "aristocratic ruling class"?

It is a historical constant that rich people are more likely to find themselves in office. Campaigning takes time and effort and you don't get paid for it, so you pretty much have to have some wealth stashed up before you can run for office. That was true then as it is true now.

That doesn't mean that there has never been a democratic government in all of history. No matter how wealthy you are, in order to get those jobs, you have to convince people to vote for you.
This is also a great way to become a better engineer - a lot of jobs are improving existing systems, so you get a different category of lessons building something from scratch to completion. Doing a write-up at the end is also teaches you to communicate better.
Yes but they can only warp their own specific kind of protein not take over an entire reproductive ability of the native cell.

It’s orders of magnitude less reproduction.
The story of the fall of the Roman Republic is not so much a story of the decay of democratic or governing institutions as we know them as it is the story of a ruling oligarchy that gradually loses the ability to discipline its own members and keep them united in a common policy.

The sky isn’t so much blue as it is light that has a wavelength around 450-495 nm.

I understand that a historian would take great offense to the anachronism you’ve pointed out, but I still can’t help but to think that we’re describing the same thing with different words. Yes yes, words matter, but, there’s some underlying truth about when groups of apes stop being able to govern themselves that comes out, no matter the words.
how likely would it be that a father and his son would both be elected as president

If all 300 million people lived identical lives and had identical histories, then the chances are about one in 300 million.

In the real world, people who take specific life paths, get specific degrees, and acquire specific skills are more likely than others to end up in a particular place. Especially when the other 299,999,999 people get to weigh in on the decision.

Just as not every one of those 300 million people has an equal chance of becoming a database administrator at Google, and not every one of those 300 million people has an equal chance of becoming a barista.
Survivorship bias here. There are lots of other Google acquisitions that sank without a trace.

It seems the hit rate is low whether inside or outside Google.
"Hey, why are all of these people in my house watching this game? I never noticed because I was so into the action." Not really sure that would fly.
Not easy, but I agree that it would make it easier. I would have to have stepped through the process shutdown code in a debugger, walking through the code to understand when the lock was acquired, and maybe setting breakpoints to count how often it was acquired.

Then again, that would require kernel debugging and a second machine and there would be numerous logistical problems, so I might not have bothered.

I spent too much time trying to reconcile the discrepancy and I ultimately failed - maybe source code would have helped.
You have hit upon the dark secret of the industry. ML is a solution looking for a problem. It’s nowhere near as bad as blockchain mind, but ML and Kubernetes both have far more people eager to do them than there is actual work...

Having said that there must be a beancounter in your organisation whose job is making forecasts. That person wouldn’t hesitate to lay you off if the company hits a rough patch. I think you get my meaning.
They already have a text rendering system for the UI, and it only needs to render to a texture once, then just keep it around and overlay it on every frame. Stuffed into a square format because that's how GPUs like textures.

At that point, the GPU doesn't care if it's overlaying text or something like a barcode. The main priorities would be resilience to image/video compression, and being large enough that you can't just crop it out of screenshots, while not impeding gameplay. Since it's only for the unstable testing builds, why spend more time than necessary implementing it?

Is there something I'm missing about what's wrong with this approach?
I am decoding for readers who did not get the humour:

instead of a single data cap with overage pay and consistent speed for all destinations, you get various separate caps for various destinations.
This is exactly what sense does
https://sense.com/
As someone who is trying to use Aozora Bunko to get practice material for learning japanese, this saddens me.

https://www.aozora.gr.jp
I have been on the waiting list since they announced the international edition a while back. I'm looking forward to seeing how it works out.

It's still a biased source, of course, but at least it's outside the advertising-driven bubble.
> This "don't vote for the lesser of two evils" business is nonsense.

I was talking literally, not figuratively: two options would be "yes" or "no" for a single candidate. There would not be an option for a second candidate, however unlikely to win. Thus, sorry, I am not buying "use your right to vote relentlessly" whatever the options. If the ballot box is rigged, the other three boxes of liberty (soap, jury or ammo) should be considered instead. My 2c.
Super-solid helium state confirmed in beautiful experiment
what is it about OCaml that makes it popular as a first stage in implementing new languages and/or compilers?

also...

> and eventually we hope to hook into OCaml’s excellent garbage collector

isnt WASM gc-free? why would the output need explicit GC interaction?
I learned two things from this -

1. Apparently modeling is a solved problem. No need for any knowledge of math/stats folks, just use the latest python packages.

2. Data collection is more important than actually knowing how a model works and even more importantly doesn't work. What happens when he is hired and can't put together a reliable model?

I think his approach is solid (using projects to learn and being ambitious), but it feels like trying to run before you can walk.
https://apnews.com/216f4fe17e85429a82ee088ed2a73b41
I'd rather be part of the masses who think rationally. If it were up to me, the system would look very different but it's not. I have 0 influence. The best I can do for myself is leave the country if it gets bad.

If everyone thought like me, then society would churn through governments like toilet paper and life would be better for people like me who only stand to benefit from change.
How We Test Software at Microsoft – Ten Year Anniversary
Fired became 'let go'. Layoffs became 'reduction in force'. In my experience, I've never seen 'fired' and 'laid off', or their counterparts, used interchangeably.
He is a genious in a broader sense. I am also following him on philosophical and political issues that he expresses his opinion
What GPU and OS X version are the older Macbook Pros?
Pirate game
This is a great idea for a simple application of ML. Thanks for the tip!
Pretty easy and you can find schematics online!

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/BPBQXM10--pro-co-bpb...

this is the kind of cable you are looking for if your audio card can only output balanced audio via TRS plugs (like mine, Yamaha AG06).

Good luck!

EDIT: Found the schematics for you!

https://www.mediacollege.com/audio/connection/xlr-jack-stere...
do you really think Kasparov writes about chess when he runs out of money?
>But it was similar enough that they quickly asked Ron to make his repo private.

How is this infringement? Why did he oblige? Unless he got paid by them, he should not have obliged with their request.
Ask HN: Is GDRP causing commercial censorship?
Here's the website in question: https://www.carrabbas.com/

I mentioned this restaurant to my girlfriend in Italy (because they catered a Christmas party last night), and she can't access the site at all. That is, it says "Our website is unavailable in your region."

Is an Italian restaurant afraid of Italians?!?

In all seriousness, is this just GDRP stupidity? How can someone in the EU have full access to information when companies do stuff like this?

Granted, this is a seemingly innocuous example, but to me it hints at a much larger problem!
Yes, you wonder how Alphafold compares with the combined wisdom of Foldit. You start out with a secondary structure prediction from Zhang lab and ask a panel of experienced humans to fold up the protein into a plausible tertiary structure. As a human you have a good idea what larger pieces fit where, but AI still has problems with the large picture, cf. the leopard sofa problem.
> "Democratic norms" are a gentlemen's agreement to not use these highly effective tactics against each other

This, more than any one election outcome, is what scares me most about our present moment. We've certainly seen malicious and undemocratic practice in the past and survived. Presidents from Nixon to Jackson have been utterly ruthless to opponents, and while Trump criticizes the press with particular zeal, he seems to achieved less actual influence than a lot of predecessors. (GWB, Nixon, and FDR all come to mind as having more actual influence over the press.)

What's more alarming is that it looks like our actual infrastructure doesn't work right and it simply took ~200 years for some of the cracks to show (or develop). The filibuster went from a rare protest or blackball to a motivator for bipartisanship to a minority veto, and then it went away. "Advise and consent" becomes a way for the legislative branch to cripple the others. Failure to appoint (and recess appointments to back it up) lets the executive cripple the judiciary and bypass the legislative. The only legal check on the executive is reserved to an increasingly partisan Congress, under rules of impeachment and pardon which have never been put to a full test. And all of that is before we touch on any of the more controversial representation, districting, and voting rights issues.

I'm not predicting national doom like some people have, but I'm definitely worried about a situation that alternates between paralytic divided governments run on recess appointments and executive orders, and united governments openly favoring their constituents in the absence of real minority-party or judicial checks.

(As for the nuclear metaphor, I can't help noticing that it seems to be about attack, rather than armament - in which case the dying part happens regardless of reciprocation...)
My point is that they never bought the right for the design from OEM from whom they bought their first digital cameras, and that OEM itself never bothered to limit access to the design as it makes no money to them.
That will only make those systems hard to understand for other developers and the company isn’t in the business of entertaining a single developers ML fantasies.

I get the machine learning is interesting to some people, and it certainly has its place, but applying needlessly complex solutions to simple problems is how software developers get a bad reputation.

If you don’t have the need don’t use: ML / AI / Cloud computing / Hadoop / or any other random technology.
Sam Altman is the President of Y Combinator, and that was roughly his experience as well. YC does not consider having a billion dollar exit to be a requirement for advising and picking billion dollar startups. Neither do most VCs I’d guess.

In some ways it may be counterintuitive, but in others it makes sense. A successful founder only has a single anecdote. Someone running an incubator has something much closer to empirical data. You can only run 1 experiment at a time, while they can have hundreds or thousands.

Also, you don’t necessarily need talent executing in a specific domain in order to recognize it in others.
For everyone who finds this (and similar work by ESR) valuable, consider supporting him on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/esr
In related prion news, does anyone have insight into the recent studies suggesting that Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD, increasingly prevalent in North American deer and elk) may be transmissible from infected animals to humans via cooked muscle meat?

In 2017, there was a Canadian study that seemed to show that feeding macaque monkeys raw muscle meat from infected deer was capable of transmitting the disease. I don't think the study has been published yet, but it's described in detail in this Norwegian report (https://vkm.no/download/18.25950e0715e84a118a6ec492/15069251...) and forms the basis of an advisory by the Canadian government (https://www.thetyee.ca/Documents/2017/06/24/Risk-Advisory-Op...) suggesting that consumption of all potentially infected meat be avoided.

Then in 2018, a separate seemingly very similar American study was published (http://sci-hub.tw/10.1128/JVI.00550-18) , saying that no evidence was found for transmission to macaques, even after direct cerebral exposure. The NIH issued a press release (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-find...) with the headline "NIH study finds no chronic wasting disease transmissibility in macaques".

Suffice it to say, there seem to be contradictory messages here. Is there some overview that would help to clear things up?
Previous discussion on HN (2011): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3140797

>I know from considerable experience that the plus operator had a distinct meaning from the quotes operator so this change definitely implies that Google queries will be less fine-grained no matter what quotes means now.
How to learn Kubernetes with Minikube
The more you look the more parallels you see. Unpopular military quagmires in far-off places for no purpose but the enrichment of the leaders, dislocation of traditional ways of life, increasing political polarization, the privatization of the military, rampant corruption, endemic racism and xenophobia, battles over access to citizenship and voting rights, and a set of elites so obsessed with their own privileges that they refused to reform the system in time to save it. All taking place a few decades after a decisive victory in a long cold war, leaving Rome hegemon of the world.

I recommend checking out The Storm Before The Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan. It illustrates the process from "hey, the rules don't technically say bills have to start in the upper house..." to all-out civil war, step by step.
How many steam engines have you made?
You can look inwards as much as you would like but isn't it impossible to not see this entire industry as a ponzi scheme?
In spite of !== Because of. I can't dumb it down for you any more than that.
Native code that wants more precision can use rdtsc. JavaScript in the browser should have its timer precision reduced, to prevent timing attacks, but that should be done by the browser, not the OS.

The reduced precision isn't what really bothers me though - it's the cost. My measurements suggest that QPC is about 25x as expensive as rdtsc on this laptop - expensive enough to make calling it too frequently a problem.

This article explains some of the reasons why rdtsc might not be used to implement QPC, and I'm curious as to which one applies, and how machines this applies to:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/SysInfo/acq...
So we could hypothetically convert nginx to WASM with wasmer, then convert it back to native code with cmm_of_wasm? We've come full circle.
Anyone checked PowerBI from Microsoft? I think it's a great BI solution that isn't widely known yet.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA
The hit rate isn't as important as how well the hits perform. The list above has done quite well, and I highly doubt that Google has spent as much on the losers as the winners have made for them. If so, Google would be out of business (or close to it).