skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's more that every tech company in china has done 'black-mirror' type things. Thats not including the social credit score which is obviously a black-mirror thing the entire tech sector is participating in.
Nothing too deep. I just loved the idea from this book : http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/ , where you can download even the .tex source and compile it yourself (and read the tex comments, they are great fun!)

Then I bought a few copies of this one, and I found that there are many books of the same kind. I enjoyed the concept and decided to buy all such books that I found (and ask my library to buy one or two copies as well).

> My main question is: how far do you depart from the conventional incentive structure of capitalist/market-based societies?

LOL, this is just a silly criterion of mine for buying books. Do not read too much into it. By the way, it acts as a great filter: authors who are obsessed in spreading their knowledge no matter what, tend to write very interesting things.
Maybe I'm not getting what you are saying.

But a rasterized text has a lot more information about each character than the raw ASCII values. If you halve the resolution or add compression artifacts an OCR will still pick it up.

If they rendered raw binary data they would have to add lots of redundant information as well as spreading it out over a large enough area. Maybe that's what you meant but didn't fit the 'trivially to do' part for me. Seems a lot easier to just render the text.
Thanks, wasn't loading for me.
I get where you're coming from (and I was convinced that I would dislike the article when I realised what it was about).

However, there's some good advice:
- get real data

- clean it, play with it, build models

- focus on the cleaning, as that's what the gig normally is (and damn right too, your models will be way better if you've taken the time to understand your data).

I did find the and then he got a job part annoying, but the post was much better than I expected (relative to other towardsdatascience posts).
On writing Pull Requests well
> Clearly he's just shamelessly pitching a drop-shippable console with some branding on it.

Actually there's no branding on it either - it's straight drop-shipping from AliExpress.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/5/18127315/soulja-boy-handhe...
Did they ever unfuck the merging of Google+ comments with YouTube comments?
Evelyn Berezin, 93, Dies; Built the First True Word Processor
Coming back to Engelbart and his invention of the mouse and UI (besides other things): He made it clear that human-machine interaction happens mainly with our fingers, and in particular with our index finger. This kind of fact of human behavior takes generations if not 100’s of years to change. Once an invention demonstrates that all following inventions need to stay within such boundaries, adoption of new inventions seems to be much faster (what is an educated guess without scientific proof).

To come back to human-machine interaction, we think that the successor of the mouse (also for mixed reality for office) sees a much faster adoption rate than the mouse in the last 50 years. At least, we have bet a few years of our life on it with https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/coolest-mouse-ever We can tell you in a few years, whether our assumption was correct :-)
>> It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. We didn’t challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the right time to shoot for the stars.

They did it again with Quake, but then it was the end of a small team being able to beat the AAA development houses. I was in awe that it was created by a few guys, no huge budgets or huge team.
Good marketing books with more substance than Seth Godin's?
> I care about my finances. But I don't worry about them.

I don't see any distinction between "caring" and "worrying" in this context: "worrying" means "thinking about it". When people say "without having to worry about finances again" it must be understood as "don't even want to think about their account balance ever in their whole life".
Cool, so I guess my career is meaningless, then. :)

Getting a degree is something I very much want to do, but it's something I haven't been able to do (due to the time and money required to do it). I ended up jumping straight into the workforce in the hopes that at some point I'll have saved up enough to actually enroll (since my high school grades left much to be desired; it's a miracle I even got my HS diploma).

Really, though, 99.995% of IT (in my experience at least) doesn't actually require a degree (obviously, since I'm doing it right this very moment without a degree and have been doing so for more than half a decade). It does require a lot of background knowledge that, sure, might've come to me faster had I received a formal education in IT, but I've been able to acquire it just fine through real-world work experience (and have been paid for it, to boot).

My interest in getting a degree has more to do with my interest in a lot of the more theoretical concepts. I'm able to stumble through a lot of things via self teaching, but I do feel like I'm missing various critical pieces, so I'd like to fix that. None of those pieces are getting in the way of me doing my current job, but I do feel like my career is prone to stagnation if I don't have those pieces.
Quite addictive. :)
I don’t think the rules are silly. I think they’re subjective.

For what it’s worth, I think interventions to make Twitter feel safer for trans people are important. I’m sorry I said something that made you feel otherwise.

I would prefer to do it in a way that women’s rights advocates can still do their work, but that’s probably impossible in the current climate.

Safe spaces require a formal hierarchy of identities so you can resolve these issues. Either trans rights come first or uterus havers’s rights do.

My preference would be that Twitter allows you to choose your mode of governance, so you can browse on “safe for trans people” mode or “safe for women” or “safe for conservatives” or whatever mode you prefer. We probably need multiple versions of each since there’s variation even within these categories.

I don’t think there’s any way to do this within liberalism. It has to be an anarchist solution. It’s a mistake to think there’s a good universal answer.
Holy shit THIS IS HUGE NEWS, How has it only gotten five points in seven hours !?!? Do you guys understand how fucking big of a deal this is !?!????? The entire internet ad industry is over ! Apocalypse Ad Industry and Apocalypse NOW ! HOW DOES THIS NOT HAVE MORE UPVOTES

this is a digital weapon that will prevent the transfer of billions of dollars of wealth per year that are generated throughout internet ads. It’s like a digital nuke has just been created to destroy an entire industry. AND NO ONE ON HN IS PAYING ATTENTION (?!?!?)

am I the crazy one here for seeing this as a hugely significant event !?!?!?
apple can buy QCOM by lunch time so market cap is important. Next, a phantom firm worth $5 can sue MSFT in China
I have a sense that people who are hot know it, but they also know they're not.

If you're the hottest out of 10, you know someone who's the hottest out of 100. They know someone who's the hottest out of 1000, and they know someone who's the hottest out of a million. And even they look at others like themselves, and think "She has a better smile than me... she has better hair... she's thinner..."

If your identity is in your hotness, you can't win. You can only lose.

Disclaimer: I'm not hot. I'm not close. This is my impression, not my experience.
NASA’s Voyager 2 probe has entered interstellar space
>At over $600 a barrier, the cost of concrete during the eight years of the Iraq War was billions of dollars

Does anyone have any insight as to why resistance forces are seemingly so much more effective today compared to the past? Rebels were able to bleed the US of billions with the threat of a cheap car bomb

In the past there didn't seem to be situations like Vietnam and the middle east with guerrilla warfare being able to drag things out for years and making things so costly.

Is it because the US isn't willing to go total war and massacre civilians until they give up Mongolian style or what?
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18648334

Other submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18649491

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18648442 (1 comment)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18647946

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18647744
You’re presuming that those workers have good prospects for finding a new job as good as the one they currently have. This is harder when you are older.
> Is it because the US isn't willing to go total war and massacre civilians until they give up and stop aiding rebels or what?

Or maybe because we did stuff like that, and it lead to more resistance.

You can't murder your way to peace. Killing for peace just leads to everyone being dead.
http://www.bjp-online.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Majeed0...

These 30 foot jersey barriers (they called them t-walls) went up around Bagram Air Field when I was there on vacation in 2010.

Before that, all that they had was a 16 foot chain link with concertina on top. Not really great at stopping bullets.
The most effective weapon on the modern space battlefield is boron-nanotube foamed concrete, though it'll probably work on earth too. (PhoamBCon)
The first pain point in the article of no browser support is no longer true. There is now grpc-web https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web/
It's like you can't even run a tech company anymore.
To get started, I'd pick the most important business problem you have and then solve it using the simplest machine learning approach.

You mentioned using Pytorch. Instead, I recommend a classical machine learning using a library like scikit-learn (https://scikit-learn.org/). Use a random forest classifer and you'll get pretty good results out of the box.

If your data is in a postgres database across multiple tables, you will likely have to perform feature engineering in order to get it machine learning ready. For that, I recommend a library for automated feature engineering called Featuretools (http://github.com/featuretools/featuretools/). Here's a good article to get started with it (https://towardsdatascience.com/automated-feature-engineering...)

Finally, you will need to define a prediction problem and extract labeled training examples. I see people in this thread have suggested ideas of problems to work on. The key here is make sure that you pick a problem that you can both predict and take an action based off the prediction. For example, you could predict that there will be an influx of shipments to fulfill tomorrow, but that might not be enough to time to hire more people to help you fulfill them.

If you're curious what the process looks like end-to-end check out this blog series on a generalized framework for solving machine learning problems that was applied to customer churn prediction: https://blog.featurelabs.com/how-to-create-value-with-machin...

Full disclosure: I work for Feature Labs and develop Featuretools.
I suppose I’ll ask this here.

Does anyone know of a good way to archive a Google+ group. There is a bunch of good info about hacking the Kankun smart plug that I would like to preserve.
I like your 'vote with your wallet' idea for open source. Want to get that issue to the top of the ticket queue? Pay up! It makes perfect sense.
Indeed - parent is not incorrect in saying that a more mature permissions model has been available for years. However, only for the last couple of months has it been mandatory to actually use that model in your Android app. It is now enforced (by requiring target of at least api26) when submitting updates or publishing new apps: https://developer.android.com/distribute/best-practices/deve....
The title made me think of the killdozer.
The US has been in a 'trade war' with China since the 1980s.

But it's been a 'frog in warming to boiling water' type scenario.

By that I mean - the protectionism, corruption, IP theft etc. has been going on forever - it's just that we didn't care.

Actually - we didn't mind - because a backwards mess of a poor economy might want to do 'whatever it takes' to move forward.

Everyone (well most) was very happy to see China come out of the doldrums. It's better for everyone, generally.

But now that they are reaching for advanced economy status ... the 'issues' become ever more apparent.

I don't like Trump one bit, I find him kind of nauseating in his demeanor - and - I'm not even sure his manner of approach to the 'war' is right.

BUT - 100% of politicians are otherwise incapable of standing up to China. Ironically, it just mike take a loose-cannon douche-bag to do it.

'The West' speaks with 1000 voices: CEOs, NGO leaders, politicians, bureaucrats, federal/state, different countries within federal entities (i.e. EU), heads of Universities, research establishments.

China speaks with 'one voice' and they have a plan, which can actually be carried out.

So if anyone tries to stand up to them, China can scare that 'little individual' with all sorts of things, and by 'little individual' I even mean heads of state.

But ironically, in totality, Western powers do have the upper hand, both because of the direction of trade, but also because of the size of economies, sophistication, all sorts of other reasons.

Example: Trudeau in Canada will mollify Chinese and would be afraid to do anything because China could threaten to not buy Canadian commodities. But here's the thing: they are commodities! So if China stops buying hardwood from B.C. and starts buying it from elsewhere, then as prices receded in Canada and prices increase 'elsewhere' - other buyers come to B.C. for hardwood.

China buying a commodity is like them scooping water out of a river -> it doesn't matter who buys what, the aggregate demand is the same.

But the interim calamity and fear from China walking away will push Canadian CEO's to make Trudeau cede whatever to China.

As an example.

NPR just had an interview with the Robert Lighthizer [1] who talks about the fact China has been saying they'll 'do things' on IP for over 20 years but they've done nothing really. These talks are the first time basically ever that the US is speaking with credibility in terms of actual response/retaliation.

I suggest the Chinese are just waiting for Trump to be out of office, or to give him something political to show for it, and then going back to normal. I would be ideal if the US political org. got together with the EU, Japan, S. Korea, India and Australia ... and made a coordinated, long term effort on these issues. It would actually be better for everyone - even the Chinese, in the long term.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/12/07/674730823/u-s-trade-represent...
A few months ago I was talking at a family gathering and learned that one of my distant relatives has CJD. They're a high-ranking company executive, but their cognition is rapidly wasting away and will be dead within a few years. Another family member that was a nurse in Kentucky(?) said they have a high rate of prion disease due to farmers inhaling contaminated dirt for years.

There are a few comments here about how talking about prion diseases are basically fearmongering. It shook me a bit, though. I always thought of CJD as one of those freak diseases that you hear about in the news, but is such low likely hood that it's basically non-existent. Not so much anymore.
What blows my mind is these aren't really analogies, they are in fact mostly truth.
restraint.
More brutal societies would carpet bomb an entire city that allowed enemies shelter within its streets. We do not do such. We fought with our hands tied by ethics, thank goodness.
A nice thing about Lisp (that is harder to achieve in other languages) is that you can make the text of your program look like it is written in a declarative rather than in an imperative (or a functional) language. (I think that's what is meant when they say that Lisp is perfect for creating DSLs.)
Companies want people that can come in and hit the ground running and are self-starters.

It is always better to go into the interview, meeting, pitch with projects that are shipped or working to demonstrate.

For instance, if you want to get into the game industry, build games.

Same with any field, when you create/build you can rise above education, experience and more competitive metrics.

Created/functional projects, and especially shipped products, are the best qualifications.
OK I'm caught up with you now. Yes, I agree with this approach in such a scenario. I would just caution throwing out stuff like that as a casual note regarding testing without any context like you did. Examples like this should be limited to non-functional testing, aka metrics, which was not called at all originally. And it's a cool idea to run a bunch of canned data through a system to collect metrics as part of an automated test suite!
Newest MacBook Pro design flaw allows 50v to be sent to CPU
I love how the headline is "Google Employees" instead of "35 Google Employees." I guess the latter would make it too obvious that this is just Techcrunch pushing an agenda.
Serious question, are Romero and Carmack still friends? I think they're both brilliant and a great example of a duo.

For some reason the internet paints them as rivals, or that Carmack was the one who succeeded (continuing with ID and now at FB) and Romero faded away and was never really technical (and works at a gas station).
For the content of the article: it's amazing (in a negative way) with how much utter crap companies are able to get away. I get that the US takes pride in individual liberty, but allowing companies that much leverage including forcing employees to relinquish their right to a court of law is abhorrent.

For the presentation of the article: anyone from Techcrunch reading? The site looks like shit on tablets. In a webview after 500ms the site goes blank, only the footer remains. In Chrome, the article is 40% of the screen, the right side is some ad. What the fuck?
For individuals and families it’s going to be a huge deal, but less so for nation states.

Total war is part of it, but militarily guerrilla warfare is mostly meaningless. Compare all US military dead from Iraq vs. one day of the battle of the bulge. These tactics generally extend the fighting, but don’t accomplish that much.

Also, a lot more people where involved than you might think. “From June 2003, through September 30, 2011, there have been 26,320-27,000+ Iraqi insurgents killed based on several estimates.” Yet, “4,424 total deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) and 31,952 wounded in action (WIA) as a result of the Iraq War.”

Vietnam had more US dead, 58,220 including disease and suiside. But, again individual battles in other wars killed more Americans. https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casua...
Out of curiosity - have you ever actually programmed anything? You're angry, which I can understand, and hateful but you're providing zero facts to support your opinion. You sound like a child deciding what's cool to like and what's cool to bash. Naturally, with nothing to back your opinion up. So, do you even code?
my org just moved to FileCloud from NextCloud and it's working out so far. FileCloud is not opensource. but the base functionalities are solid especially sync and user management.
> Aesthetics in C++ is like /\WRITEME: joke\/.

On the contrary, C++ treats user-code aesthetics as a first-class design-decision, moreso than many other languages.

In C++ the whole thing is that built-in types aren't special, including ints and operators. This is a deep concept in the design of the language.

The fact that you can express abstract things like matrix multiplication, compile-time unit-conversions, and compile-time range-checking through operator-overloading speaks to how aesthetic the language is.

> It means that different people prefer different ways of doing things for purely visual reasons

I've never seen any sizable project where visual aesthetics of the API aren't relevant. Java's got chained builders and lambdas, Python's got `@property` and various `__foo__` methods, and any sufficiently large Ruby project's syntax is a DSL wrapped in a riddle wrapped in bacon.

User-defined APIs are syntax, so why limit the tokens?

> A good language lets you choose your architecture, and then write an aesthetically pleasing program to match.

C++ does let you do that. You've pointed to an example where there was little or no intentional thought put into the aesthetics of the API. E.g. `avi_` really could own those methods, and the underscores aren't required by the language.

You can argue that C++ gives you too much power or that sometimes it's non-obvoius how to use that power or that you've seen code where the API designers have taken enough rope to hang themselves. But of course it is possible to write "Java" in C++ and avoid any operator-overloading or syntax-sugar if your team decides it wants to do that.
We successfully use verdigris in production (image processing application with QT/QML as GUI). This allowed using bazel without having to teach it moc.
Authoritarians Export Surveillance Tech, Along Their Vision for the Internet
Late comment, but I have a relative in Japan and I asked about this:

"The empty houses are caused by two factors. Aging population with younger people moving to the cities and the the way property taxes work. Empty lots have much higher taxes than ones with houses on them. So if a house becomes empty because of people dying off, it’s cheaper to just let an old house be abandoned and wait until you are ready to rebuild than to tear it down and pay high taxes. Houses aren’t worth much in Japan. Average houses aren’t built to last as earthquakes and humidity tend to cause deterioration. However the government will take the property if the taxes aren’t paid on it for a certain period. The free houses isn’t really a thing."
Calculating the Risk of College
Getting rid of company-handled arbitration sounds less work for the tech companies?
Previous discussion with 192 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12962776
I'm glad the embarrassing stuff I did at age 19 isn't out there.

RAF: people grow and change.
I think they key difference here is sheer speed. At the time, Ultima Underworld may have been the more technically impressive game in terms of graphics, but the id's focus on framerate and simplicity over graphical complexity had something over Ultima Underworld's slow-paced dungeon crawling, a pace mandated by the 10-20fps that it ran at.

Both are fantastic games, but Doom's speed was a marvel for how good it looked.
Why bloggers should use Readlad
Every journalist has an agenda... remember NY Times' "enhanced interrogation"?
It depends what the issue is. I work on dys. systems almost exclusively and if you can reproduce locally, I can almost always run the project using multiple procs with a debugger attached to each one of them