skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem that nearly everyone has, and slowly becomes better, is being willing to be boring. The improv classes and books, particularly the closer you get to Keith Johnstone, all emphasize this. People get paralyzed trying to be creative, and scenes and games stall out, sometimes painfully, when people would be just fine, possibly even overjoyed, with the first thing that comes to your mind. But the first thing that comes to mind might reveal your "true self", the crazy person you don't want people to see that you are sure isn't in anyone else, and so you try to be different, creative, and you're just grasping for what you think other people might find acceptable and special. ... I've taken a lot of improv classes, and read a lot of books, and it's so much more therapy than I expected.
You're being voted down by the Tesla brigade, but you are absolutely right. Given the de minimis SpaceX equity in BoringCo, Musk's use of SpaceX resources without compensation by BoringCo is a flagrant violation of his fiduciary duties to SpaceX's investors.

That's why it's been so important to him to keep his boards stocked with friends and family--an actual corporate board of directors would have sent him to the curb long ago.
> …unless the books are embeddable HTML, it's easy to imagine that your Bubblin formatting would not work well if I try to self-publish to say, my personal blog. So am I not just trading one proprietary file format for proprietary HTML/CSS/JS markup?

That is correct. At a very high-level we'd ultimately need to spec out a web standard to support books natively on web to avoid one proprietary format from another; like the video tag perhaps.

For now (though it is still unfinished, raw and very very early) we have a sister project called Bookiza.js [0] that let's you publish a Superbook on your own website using markdown or haml. :-)

[0] https://bookiza.io
Interviewing with YC as a science based startup
I liked the first chapter of "Fooled by Randomness," but I stopped reading the book when each chapter regurgitated the same points, each more nihilistic than the last. Perhaps Taleb should concentrate on the accuracy of his own predictions:

https://www.businessinsider.com/taleb-every-single-human-bei...

>>> "every single human being" should bet U.S. Treasury bonds will decline.

>>> Short the S&P vs Long Gold, in a 5 to 1 ratio. By gold Taleb means a basket of precious metals including gold.

The second trade would have lost $125k for every $10k invested in gold and $50k invested in SPY.

Did he miscalculate the risk of a black swan event...?
> Even if every gram of radioactive waste were removed from the landfill, where would it go? There are facilities in Idaho and Utah willing to accept it. But those facilities are located in communities, or near them, and those people don’t want this waste in their backyards or their gardens or their rivers or their drinking water either. Even if we box it up and send it in train cars to remote places, it will be there, ready and waiting to kill any of us long after we’ve forgotten where we put it, or what “it” even is.

I know there are a lot of HN readers that keep pushing for nuclear power. This article seems to suggest we're not ready for it. It's as simple as asking for one more failure, which can, apparently permanently destroy large areas of land.

The US government should buy every property and relocate all of those people and give them all 2 acres of land.
There have been dozens of articles detailing fraud and abuse at Tesla, quite a few articles about Boring Co's liberties with the truth and its outright lies to the people in the neighborhood where the tunnel is being built. SolarCity's financials were so bad they went through multiple auditing firms before they found one that would sign off on them.

All in all, Musk's companies have an above-average incidence of ethics- and truth-related issues.
Fun story I heard back in my first year of university. This was over a decade ago, so I can't recall sources.

A paper company was required to use x% recycled paper. This cost more money. To make up the loss, the company had to make more paper. A recycling initiative to save trees led to the cutting down of even more trees.
I’ve always been curious about this.

Who, if anyone, owns the shares that are held in reserve?

Surely they can’t be used to vote, unless they are
held as an asset by the company in the same way the company might hold shares in other companies as assets.

Do they exist on the balance sheet?
It would be interesting to see how this works out over time - perhaps the 'worse' female CEOs bring in their entire networks, which will over time widen the pool of potential candidates, which over time will bring in better candidates, leading to better shareholder values?
No luck figuring out what reason you have in mind. Want to explain?
Python 3, Perl 6 it looks like Scala 3 is heading that way too.
Complete speculation here and I have no idea if it's actually possible, but couldn't you take a high resolution photograph of the DVD and then use software to turn the image data back in to DVD data? Maybe with a couple of different colored light sources at obtuse angles to the disc? It's obviously not a practical solution but it'd be really fast if you could make it work.

It's definitely possible with phonograph records.
the rant does contain a number of interesting arguments, when each is looked at by itself. but for most arguments there is no attempt at actually solving the discussed problem, so we are stuck taking the authors word for it.

a few are obvious and really should be solved. gender neutrality for example. given todays climate, that is a real problem that other languages like english and german are dealing with now, and esperanto will have to follow suit.

but most others are more an issue of the perfect being an enemy of the good.

sure, those issues could be fixed, but is it worth the effort?

from an idealistic perspective maybe yes, but as long as english dominates, and there are no viable alternatives to esperanto that actually are better, the whole argument is rather moot.

either solve the problems and come up with a better solution, or put up with what we have.

everyone else is putting up with english, so surely dealing with the issues that esperanto has can't be that hard.

for certain, a better language is conceivable, but i'll rather use esperanto despite its few faults than wait for that perfect language that may never materialize. and if it does, then knowing esperanto will make it easier to judge said new language.
Highly Efficient ZirohLabs Homomorphic Encryption on String DataTypes
I'm just eyeballing it, but it seems like linear trend line of the nowcast (blue line), would be very close to the official forecast (red dot).
Deseret us a bit too frivolous graphically, and not consistent enough.

Also, English has many pronunciation variations, and links between many words may be obvious in writing but not as much in sound (breath / breathe). English needs something more of a morphology-based writing system, not a pure phonetic representation (like Spanish).
Right, exactly!
I think some of this is likely to be a product of the times. The vast majority of early programming languages were not friendly to recursion. It wasn't at all uncommon for functions not to be reentrant, and to rely on self manipulation to set the return stack, if I recall.

Even today, for many "systems level" programs, you have to take extreme care around recursion, since you are likely to blow the stack limits. (That is, you can't just use recursion freely, but instead have to prove the maximum depth that you will trigger it.)

That is to say, I don't see what makes this different than how most others view recursion. If you can afford to do it, then you should do so. If you can't, then you should be ready for a lot of his other tricks. (Threaded trees being my personal favorite, at the moment. DFS with no stacks? Crazy talk! :) )
Strokes allow for much more graceful degradation when you have to use a pen and paper.
Where are you based out of?
Your rips are full of errors unless the drive you're using has C2 (many do), even then-- you've got a few errors.

The only way to get an accurate rip of audio data is to compare it to a known good source. This is why Accurate Rip exists...

Source: I've ripped 4000cds :)

EDIT: This applies only to audio tracks. Data tracks don't suffer from this issue.
That is actually an issue they've acknowledged and tried to address. People also tended to see percentages and think they reflected vote percents.

To address this, for the 2018 election cycle 538 started displaying their odds as numerical ratios (5 in 9, for example) to try to reduce the aura of certainty.
In the town I went to primary and secondary school, the tap water fizzed and tasted terrible.

I think nice, reusable containers are key. Everyone in my household has two water bottles. Maybe one gets replaced a year, usually because it got lost. Even then, you need a decent filter or other way to get non-gross water. Fortunately, we are now on a well and the water is fantastic.
Consider that you'd be trying to photograph 100 billion bits of pit and land. To capture it properly a terapixel image might work. Nothing can do that in one photo, or short series of photos.
Well, its a line that everyone has, and its probably a little bit different for everyone. Plus I think there are real concerns about googles extremely cozy relationship with the all-seeing-eyes nations.

Beyond that, though, the early internet was very progressive and I think a lot of people saw google as a chance to show the world the good things that technology was capable of. I don't think anyone would argue that some curation is a great thing.. no one wants to find dentists in kansas if they live in montreal of course. I would honestly prefer that breitbart and publications of its ilk be filtered out of my results... but where is the line? Up until recently google was scanning people's emails, which seems a bit dystopian.
No. DVDs are much higher density than phonograph records.
There's no such thing as "the" statute of limitations. There may or may not be a statute of limitations governing each possible legal action. I count at least three: criminal copyright violation (U.S. v. NoblePublius), civil claim for copyright infringement (MPAA v. NoblePublius), and breach of contract (Netflix v. NoblePublius). Possibly others, e.g., if the DCMA has a separate criminal penalty for circumventing the copy protection.
No solution that involves plastic is a solution.

Plastics can cause diseases by contaminating the food and drinks they contain. Let us keep this aside for a moment.

Recycling\reusing requires a lot of infrastructure and political will. This may work well in Western nations. What about the third world? I can assure you it will not. Third world polluting the waterways will have consequences for Western nations too. Pollution may begin as a local problem, but it always becomes global sooner than later.
Agreed. The more I read the more I got embarrassed for the author, mainly because his points were so ridiculously flimsy. I thought this was one of the worst:

> Because FiveThirtyEight only predicts probabilities, they do not ever take an absolute stand on an outcome: No ‘skin in the game’ as Taleb would say. This is not, however, something their readers follow suit on. In the public eye, they (FiveThirtyEight) are judged on how many events with forecasted probabilities above and below 50% happened or didn’t respectively (in a binary setting).

Saying "this is not something their readers follow suit on" - only if you're a reader who doesn't understand probability. In fact, Silver is constantly trying to get across how likely < 50% probabilities are with his football analogies (e.g. "a team down by 3 at the half actually winning") to emphasize how likely something like "20%" actually is.

If anything, I love Silver's reality-based approach exactly because he does acknowledge that all he can do is offer a best estimate based on available evidence, instead of saying things with false-certainty and then basking in self-proclaimed genius when luck happened to run in his favor.
Blocked in China:

- Google search
- Facebook
- YouTube
- Wikipedia (Chinese)
- Twitter
- Netflix
- Instagram
- Tumblr
- WhatsApp
- BBC
- New York Times
- Bloomberg
- Reuters
- WSJ
- TIME
- The Economist

Not blocked:

- Amazon
- Ebay
- Yahoo
- LinkedIn
- Bing
- Apple
- MSN

https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/102051772640034406...
Either McAfee was being facetious in that tweet, or he was smoking something good.

It's one thing to believe that Bitcoin is the future, it's another to believe that "Bubbles are mathematically impossible in this new paradigm. So are corrections and all else."
That's all fine but a comment that "capitalism [is] buying shit and lying about it to sell it for higher" is obviously unsubstantive. Unsubstantive plus generic is a bad combination for thoughtful discussion.

I don't think it's hard to see what we're trying to avoid here.
This sounds like a fun DIY project to attempt.
> 100% means the event is certain to occur

Actually, 100% means the event is "almost certain". That's not an accidental choice of words; it's a technical term which conveys important meaning about how we reason about probability.
Becuase they aren't actually giving away money, they are buying influence / brand stature.
Yep, that's Korean. Hangul groups all the letters in each syllable into a compact square, but the square can also be easily decomposed into individual alphabets when needed.

People who propose new writing systems would benefit from studying existing systems a bit more. The Latin alphabet is not the only game in town.
Huawei publish private key on GitHub?
Wait until Boring Co is bought by another Musk company like Musk did last time with that failing solar company.
Peripherally, I like using nuclear reactor design analogies for Aleatory vs. Epistemic.

Aleatory is the inherent randomness of a system. You can characterize it but it's often hard to reduce. For example, how much boron impurities are mixed into your steel at the time of manufacture.

Epistemic is things that are knowable but you don't know with much certainty (because it's hard to measure), like the probability that an incident neutron at 1 MeV will inelasatically scatter off a Uranium-238 nucleus and emerge at 200 keV in some direction.
Eels. My hovercraft is full of eels.

http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm
They are not less "capable". They are systematically discriminated against at every stage of their career.
The political battle against Pichai made a success. So now the public support can be tuned down and Google can move on to do the only thing they could do in their current situation: building tools for the chinese gov to enter the market. They'll probably do the same thing behind closed doors and without the public Google label on the final result. Maybe baidu will suddenly provide better search results or something.

That's how this world works, and it's not like they really have a choice in that matter.
That's so crazy that I don't even know how to respond to that. How would that part of the university education be useful to a software engineer? And how would it be even more useful than actual CS classes? Is this the nebulous argument about how humanities education makes you a better-rounded person somehow? You have to be trolling, right? Math and CS education make you a better engineer in much more specific ways than learning military history or 18th century English literature or art history or any of the other geneds I had to take.
On my Firefox for Android, this is unreadable. I had to use Firefox on Windows to see what is this all about.
Removing a recursion in Python, part 2 (implementing continuation passing style)
I was going to post some comment about how the comments here were all overly negative for what was obviously just someone having fun. Then I read the comments in 2012.

Jesus Christ.

In any case, it's sad to me how when people on HN see someone having a bit of fun or messing around, their first instinct is to knock it down.
> This is terrible for screen readers and the like which are unable to read or understand these unicode characters making accessibility a real concern

Yes, Firefox for Android doesn't render it properly.
SF is a little under 50 square miles with a population of around 900,000
I've worked on projects that took over an hour to compile. I would not like lower performance for CI. Many workflows require successful CI runs before one can merge for example.
I really do think Haskell is a wonderful tool, but:

"Haskell, at its core, is simple: it is just a polymorphic lambda calculus with lazy evaluation plus algebraic data types and type classes."

In a different context, I would have interpreted that as a sarcastic parody of Haskell evangelists.

Really, I feel like everyone who is going to read that article will either already know that, or will have no idea what that sentence means.
It's worth noting that those problems are entirely caused by drives acting like black boxes, not the CD format itself.
Amazing. Driving through the Penninsula is already a total nightmare. Took me 90 minutes to get from San Bruno to San Jose last week. The drive back to the city took 35 minutes in the late evening.

How people ride these shuttles, drive, and deal with these commutes blows my mind. It’s only going to get way worse. Most expensive traffic jam in the country. No thanks.
Yes, but when they would settle the rules of the bet, Taleb's confusion between nowcast and forecast would have to go away and what they would use to base their bet then? Losing an argument is as bad as losing a bet. I don't think Taleb want's to acknowledge that he was picking a fight for nothing.

Note: I'm don't think Taleb has a wrong idea. It's just that he attempt to fight with Silver over it is based on confusion. Taleb has written important and interesting books and papers. He has always been very opinionated and aggressive. His feuds don't produce debates that are worth following.

Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach, Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quantitative Finance. 452 (1): 1–5. doi:10.1080/14697688.2017.1395230
https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06351
>The only way to get an accurate rip of audio data is to compare it to a known good source

That's the only way to confirm you got an accurate rip. It says nothing about how to get the rip in the first place. In my experience, "full of errors" sounds exaggerated. Most of CDs can be easily ripped in 'burst mode' (in EAC) or equivalent in other software and you still get same (exact CRC32) result from AccurateRip DB with no C2 involved (I disabled it), as soon as you set the offset correctly.

Disclaimer: I didn't rip 4000 CDs, only hundreds.
I don’t have the background knowledge to properly understand the math in that paper. But I do know that you can’t simply set bounds a priori on how much a probability can change after additional information has been gathered; no matter how pathological the swings, you can design a system, and a series of observations of that system, that would make all the forecasts (i.e. conditional probabilities) correct. Thus the paper must be making additional assumptions. As far as I can tell, those include at least that the electoral process can be modeled as Brownian motion, which is a martingale, but is not the only type of martingale; in particular, I’d expect random motion to be a good model of typical polling drift, but a poor model of sudden polling swings caused by news events (which in reality are a large change caused by a single random event, not the sum of a series of small changes caused by independent events that just happen to mostly point in the same direction). I am not sure whether the assumptions also include an estimated value of `s` or volatility; the paper doesn’t seem to explain how it’s calculated, but maybe it can be derived from the raw polling results plus the assumption of Brownian motion? In any case, the paper says nothing explicitly about what data was used to produce the “rigorous updating” graph. I’d love if someone could explain this to me…

Subjectively, it’s hard for me to believe that an unbiased forecast would truly be so utterly noncommittal until just before Election Day, or indeed that there’s enough data to answer that question, especially seemingly from just one election result. But my subjective impressions, of course, could be utterly wrong. I’m very curious whether or not this is the case.
Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context.

is there any evidence for that?

anecdotal evidence in english for example suggests just the opposite: light -> lite, etc

however learning a language as a child growing up, vs as a second language later are quite different, and the dynamics that affect language change are hence very different too.

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/m.html explains how esperanto is unlikely to change, and also why that would be a good thing.

back to your argument, i don't think the words with different pronunciation would be lost, but certainly the language would be harder to learn.
As one usually does when preparing a meal.
I do video effects work and I'd suggest this could be very useful even with jitter, if you allow expanding the selection. A lot of time is spent creating "garbage mattes" for green screen footage, basically just roughly rotoscoping out the background so you can do key removal on just the important bits. So you could even massively downsample the video for your processing and still have a good enough matte.

Although, with your tech, and the more limited problem space of green screens and poorly lit green screens, you could probably make a pretty amazing tool to do the entire green screen removal.
> prefer my books as epub so they work nicely on my ereader. I also require that they be able to be downloaded as files

hi Sonica, CTO & cofounder here.

i'm sure there are a number of nuggets in the epub standard to pick up! it's just that it is too much friction for people to download a file, navigate to the file on the disk and wait for it to open before they can start reading the book.

we do have a dry no-javascript no-frills mode for books on Bubblin right now, if that helps. we've written an essay [1] discussing some of these concerns and will be happy to engage/implement in a more accommodating fashion.

[1] https://bubblin.io/concerns
As long as you dump the encrypted key, you can reliably trust that there will become a way to decrypt it later.

> In the event that a key is compromised and published online, or used widely in any way, that key is depreciated and all Blu-ray’s from that point onward contain keys that cannot be decrypted with the compromised hardware key.

If someone merely provides a title key decryption API, is there any way to figure out which device key they're using?
I originally had the same reaction as you, but reading the parent's comment charitably I believe he's getting at "the population of the entire Bay Area is actually comparable to the population of just NYC proper with it's much tinier (relatively) area)."

In other words, some people tend to think of NYC as "huge major East Coast city" and SF as "huge major West Coast city", but the sheer enormous density of NYC makes it actually on a whole other level than SF.
http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/m.html gives a better definition of a dead language: one that does not naturally evolve because it does not have any native speakers, but only second language speakers.
The website states “was created thousands of years ago, and is optimized for writing, not reading. About time for an update, no? Dotsies is optimized for reading.”, and other claims on the website, and people are not instantly convinced just because it’s free.

Positivity is fine, but blind positivity is not helpful for anyone..
A breaking release over 7 years ago, doesn't mean that having no (as far as I know) breaking changes for the last 6 years is any less impressive.