skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Article says they are using an "older method" of gene editing. Well no wonder then, we know that older gene editing methods have a lot of off target effects, crispr cas9 using base modification (instead of deleting whole DNA stretches by splicing) is very safe. This is a FUD article.
Came to recommend the same book. However,if your friend is a newbie to programming I doubt he will gain anything from reading such an advanced book.
A new study proves parachutes are useless
It’s interesting... I like to think that we have freedom to make decisions within the “hard bounds” of the system. I don’t think the existence of “hard bounds” indicate a system’s lack of potential for free will to exist. I do think “bounds” can limit an agents Choice, but not their ability to make a decision. Our current existence/system appears bounded in some aspects and unbounded in others. As we learn more, ideas and perception will be adjusted.
Another example would be King Charles Spaniels, which are overbred to have tiny heads and big cute eyes - and are at high risk of seizures from compression of the brain by the skull :-(

I have shepherds and there's a big philosophical split between shepherd owners who want 'working line' dogs and those who want 'show dogs' that are significantly more likely to have health problems. Dog breeding is a very poorly regulated market and the outcomes are just as depressing as you would imagine.
$ pip3 install foo

Or pip3.6 etc

--user is useful also
No.

We had someone locked out of their email while using Google's paid company mail service (App engine, I think it was called). Several days with no mail and no useful support taught me that relying on Google can leave you with no recourse.
If your company is actually growing, you should not sell shares. They will be worth more later and the optics are bad. Much better to adjust your salary/bonus to address personal cashflow issues.
Pretty likely the same thing was said about that older method.
FWIW, This same type of event DID demotivate me and a lot of my co-workers who were early employees at a startup (now 1000+ person company). The company raised a round and the founders sold off some of their shares. We knew because they bought nice cars/houses after the event. Our shares got diluted.

From our perspective, it seemed like a slight vote of no confidence in the company and a little unfair to us that we didn't get the chance to sell shares whereas they did. You lose a bit of that "we're in this together" vibe that makes it organically motivating to work at a place.

Just my 2c, but consider arranging a situation where employees can sell up to a percentage of their options as well. A small percentage makes the eventual payoff palpable and will reduce resentment. You'll likely need to sustain the high levels of motivation for your fast-growing startup to continue it's success.
To be fair, I don't think the cat even knows that, considering their habit of scratching at the door, then staring outside for 30 seconds before deciding to stay in.
It would be a cool feature if one could flip to the second or third most mentioned. Perhaps a different visualization of this data would be beneficial.
If you can live the life of great wealth, without actually amassing said wealth, why bother?
Risk balance. Founders are essentially non-diversified investors. All of their wealth is tied up in a single investment. It is very sensible to take at least some money off the table after initial value has been built to ensure that you don't end up in poverty if things go South. Doing that reduces the chances of things going South because you have one less thing to worry about.
> Even today Python 2 is far from dead

It's not dead, but as of now, it's mostly relegated to legacy code and a dwindling number of holdout programmers who refuse to adapt based on some misguided principle. It was a long and painful process, but existing libraries are dropping support for Python 2, and new libraries are created daily that will never support Python 2.

That said, I still regularly interact with people who are new to Python but have been indoctrinated somewhere with the belief that they must use Python 2.7. They've heard it's more stable, faster, or Google uses it. We discuss some of the actual tradeoffs, and they're quickly disabused of the notion that Python 2.7 is a good option for new Python projects today.

But I totally agree, some Python 3 additions (I'm looking at you, asyncio) have been handled in an unfortunate way.
> many-GB computers

Most computers nowadays have 4/8GB, it's not that much memory compared to how much Electron uses.
Replace with any corrupt elected government then.

> they are bestowed with power to fulfill the will of the people

Bestowed with power != using it properly.
A few years ago I had an encounter with a guy on Quora who was claiming to have invented a way to reverse SHA-256 used in Bitcoin because you can use a SAT solver to do so.

He claimed to having done so.

I was not entirely sure if he had a condition or if he was just trolling. He was technical enough to put the arguments in a way that essentially looks absolutely plausible for someone who is not familiar with the problem.

He's still a puzzle to me.
Oh boy, this is cool!
Jeff Vogel from Spiderweb Software gave an awesome retrospective on 24 years of creating old-school-style fantasy RPGs at GDC 2018:

"Failing to Fill: The Spiderweb Software Way" https://youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs
The fake gauge readings have been going on for a lot longer than that.

When Cadillac first put electronic fuel gauges in their vehicles, I think around 1984, customers would complain about the fuel mileage. So for the next model year, the gauges were reprogrammed from a linear scale to a semi-logarithmic scale. All complaints of mileage stopped.
A walk through of PDF's history and file format, check out Chas Emerick's 2018 Red Monk tech talk:

"Building 100 year systems in the shadow of PDF".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EPn6plqkEs
Do we even know he was a real person and not combination of 2 or 3 men with similar fate?
This is great advice, thanks! In practice, do collaborators also need to have it installed?
Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System – NeurIPS 2018 [video]
pub/bar sorry
How did you (how does one), get into your line of work ?
I thought defense would be another likely user. Chaff would use huge quantities of it.
Yes, but it still feels hacky and only supports R markdown.
If the "was it worth it?" bit is the focus of the piece, that's actually helpful and informative.

Not all title additions are bad.

Edit: not really the focus, it's more of an outline of an overview of what happened. But still.
The way I usually put it is that Python 3 shifted its priorities.

Previously, if you were a UNIX-y scripter writing UNIX-y scripts on your UNIX-y OS, the fact that Python just kind of pretended encoding issues would never exist was a help to you. It adopted the same "everything is ASCII, or at most UTF-8 in the ASCII range, and if it isn't I'll break in cryptic ways" approach as most other UNIX-y scripting things.

If you were doing anything other than UNIX-y scripting on your UNIX-y OS, this easily became a huge nightmare in Python 2. Django went through a massive rewrite early in its history precisely because of this, to ensure that encoding/decoding happened at the boundaries and everything you'd work with inside a Django app was already a Unicode string. And I remember what it was like trying to work on the web before that approach, and what the work to fix it was like.

Python 3 decided to make the UNIX-y scripters actually learn what a horrid mess UNIX is with respect to locales and encodings and filesystem paths, in order to free the rest of the Python community from the nightmares inflicted by prioritizing the UNIX-y scripters to the exclusion of everyone else. So yes, you have to do more work. Yes, you have to learn that a file path is actually an opaque bag of bytes that may not be in any actual encoding and thus can never properly decode to a string. Yes, you have to learn to use fsencode() and the surrogateescape handler in order not to blow up your scripts.

But I'm OK with that, because it puts the workload on you when you're using such a system, rather than magically trying to fix it for you at the cost of everyone else's sanity. It also means that you have to learn to write those scripts correctly. Which is more work than what Python 2 required, but not the world-ending apocalyptic horror it's usually presented as (and is, again, mostly the fault of UNIX-y systems doing their old UNIX-y things, not the fault of Python).
Employees are as well.
The designers of Java wanted to support arbitrary Unicode characters in source code -- not just in string literals, but in identifiers as well.

In my experience (although not with Java; maybe its users would make more use of the feature, but I doubt it) even developers whose native language is not English but something very different like Chinese or Japanese will continue to use ASCII-only identifiers, and only write things like string constants or comments in their native language (which may mean using high bytes and a non-UTF8 multibyte encoding.) What the identifiers mean may be Romanised foreign words, but they're still written with [A-Za-z0-9_].
Anyone interested in this should check out the podcast series Historical Jesus from Stanford:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/historical-jesus/id38423...

tldr; there probably wasn't a Jesus and there is no evidence to support his existence.
Sorry, I definitely didn't mean to mock you! It's just that lately, I feel like I might just forget to get dressed and that's why I'd like to use voice assist to build a to-do list. Too many things going on at once.
You don't have to look at many URLs to see how hard that would be.

Not to mention "unless it misleading or linkbait", which is not something code can take care of.
One thing that neither this nor the previous HN discussion linked below seem to clarify is whether the defendant sold the cheats for use in cheating in GTA online or whether it was provided for free, presumably for use in single player. If it's the former I think this case isn't particularly controversial. The dev that sold Glider (WoW botting software) was persecuted for it and I didn't see much controversy surrounding it. It makese sense to me, too. Cheats in an online game degrade the experience for other players.

If it was provided for single player use, though, and especially if the developer didn't monetize it, I think it's an overreach. Altering one's experience in a single player game does not affect anyone else's experience. I can forsee this becoming more of an issue as more and more single player games introduce loot boxes and microtransactions. For example, Assassin's Creed Origins sells lootboxes for crafting materials and EXP boosters. I felt that my progression was slower than ideal for my enjoyment, so I whipped out CheatEngine and modified my EXP and crafting resource values. Did I defraud or steal from Ubisoft? I don't think the answer should be yes. It seems disturbing that publishers could persecute someone for merely using the software they paid for in a manner different than what was intended, even if no other customers are negatively impacted.

But of course, it is worth restating that is the cheat developer sold the cheats for use in GTA online I see no issue here.
That's hardly secretive or unexpected, though - everyone knows cosmetics contain glitter
> From our perspective, it seemed like a slight vote of no confidence in the company

It is. But it is not a bad thing: founders have very little besides their shares in the company in the world. Banks won't touch them when they apply for a mortgage or a car loan. Employees have safety nets that founders have to do without. Reducing some of the risk to sleep better is actually good for the company.

That 'vote of no confidence' is always there, start-ups are risky by nature. It's perfectly ok to de-risk a bit after carrying the vast bulk of that risk after some time has passed.

> and a little unfair to us that we didn't get the chance to sell shares whereas they did.

So, found a company yourself. See what you feel like after you've been slogging for a decade or so without any net. It is always super easy to berate the position of someone else when you yourself are taken care of.

> You lose a bit of that "we're in this together" vibe that makes it organically motivating to work at a place.

You lost something that you never had in the first place. Founders, employees and investors never have exact alignment of their goals.

> Just my 2c, but consider arranging a situation where employees can sell up to a percentage of their shares as well.

Employees typically have so little stock that this makes no sense, but in the few cases where employees have a significant amount of stock it might make sense.

Also, in many companies employees do not hold their stock directly, but as options and those options may not have been exercised yet.
Which Arthur C Clarke books would you recommend? Is there a preferred order?
> ... didn't make it very clear ...

Until I saw this subthread, I had no clue that he didn't design and build it. I don't recall any reference, even to a partner.
> I am speaking from a modern left-wing position, specifically the libertarian left, which is the strongest left-wing current today.

The strongest left-wing group today is the Communist Party of China...
> My understanding is that there are not very strong theoretical underpinnings to most of the machine learning techniques in use today.

I wonder how come this is the case from looking at ArXiv, it seems there are plenty of low-hanging fruit relating to the Foundations of Machine Learning.
Quora pays thousands for posting questions
Inside The Fake Science Factory from DefCon 26. First you'll laugh. And then you'll weep for humanity!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ras_VYgA77Q

Also really dug Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy. Outlines the rollout of a possible new engineering platform consisting of free energy, satellite internet, and AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA

Keep the links coming, please. Terrific counter-programming for holiday down time ;)
Employees have employment contracts, can apply for mortgages and credit to buy cars. Start-up founders tend to have a hard time with those things, especially if they went heavily into debt to be able to fund their start-up in the early days.

It's not rare where I live to have founders rent crappy houses and employees buy their place because banks will not touch founders from a risk perspective.
you might like this article: http://www.adamgopnik.com/what-did-jesus-do
I agree that our primary schooling in general is suboptimal and inconsistent across regions. Where I disagree is that we are happy about that at a population level or somehow intentionally undermining education because we enjoy being ignorant (disregarding religious nonsense). In fact, if you look at where people decide to settle, school district quality is often a strongly weighted parameter.
The polity was fractured like this before TV and radio.

Mostly the lesson over time has been that people don’t want to agree about anything with their rivals until absolutely forced to. The content of the argument is less important than the medium of argument.

Network TV didn’t create a realm of common facts exactly but a single forcing factor that compelled resolution because the system could not sustain a lot of competing ideas.

Of course this meant that better ideas would survive, and that very often meant good ideas that worked in reality—-though not always.

Now you have to show an idea is better by implementing it at a smaller scale and growing it rather than winning all at once at a national level.

It’s all doable but it is harder and takes longer. It is possibly lower risk and more dynamic.
No? Honestly kind of surprised Avengers: Infinity War didn't cross your radar. That movie was huge.
No one pays employees enough to buy houses; it’s pretty surprising that you don’t have to make a successful exit to earn that much as a founder.
Probably looked more like Osama bin Laden than white Jesus.
In addition, it's short sighted to imagine that genocide is not part of a countries' dangerous break down that will have serious impacts beyond its borders. Indeed, the mere flow of refugees alone destabilizes other nations immediately and obviously.

Not to be machiavellian, but it is a practical as well as moral issue.
The way to manage this is to make your code more modular, to factor out subcomponents, to share and have them critiqued separately. For example, in machine learning frameworks, autograd is a separate package for automatic differentiation. I actively post questions and answers for subcomponents on Stack Overflow.
The DNA doesn’t, no. But what does DNA do? For one thing, it contains instructions for constructing proteins. Proteins which you ingest with the DNA as part of the food. GMO foods have been shown to produce malformed proteins, and some of them appear to have harmful effects when eaten. And that just scratches the surface. https://responsibletechnology.org/gmo-education/health-risks...
No, although typically the opposite claim is made. That people named “Joshua son of Joseph” lived at that time, that various revolts and religious upheavals occurred is pretty certain. That one guy fitting the rough description of Jesus was behind it is not. The history of Christianity doesn’t really start in earnest for hundreds of years after the supposed death of Christ in any case.

People today can’t even agree on the details of Elvis’ life... now imagine if Elvis had lived a few hundred years ago, and we’re all working from quaternary+ sources. Then fast-forward a thousand or so years of very intentional document editing and re-editing, translations and re-translations, and all of the incredible wealth and power hinging on it for centuries.

How accurate would accounts from those times be expected to be?
> There are two sizes of problems -- mine, and yours

So if you drop a penny and I break my arm, you'd care more about the dropped penny, and when I say "ouch" you say "not now, can't you see I just dropped a penny"?
It's not a perfect analogy, but I think CRISPR is a bit like a regexp-replace edit function being used to hot-patch your live system memory. It has an extremely narrow pattern-recognition buffer, and you are gambling that you found a sufficiently unique signature at your edit point(s) so that it doesn't also corrupt unrelated parts of your system image that happen to match the same pattern.
I get your point but Stalin was not an intellectual and has never been considered one, not even by the Intelligentsia and much less by western intellectuals. It's not a case of good or bad, the man simply wasn't very bright. I welcome you to read any of his writings, he was a historicist and a refuter of science (Lysenkoism) much like his peers.

To understand Stalin's "success", you must first understand Russia and its history.

The idea that we can just profile Stalin/Hitler and what not, then try to find people that fit that profile to keep them away from power is at best naive and at worst dangerous.
I really enjoyed this book on the topic:

“Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is a book by Iranian-American writer and scholar Reza Aslan. It is a historical account of the life of Jesus and analyzes the various religious perspectives on Jesus as well as the creation of Christianity.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealot:_The_Life_and_Times_o...
The bottleneck to making more money isn't directly employees, it's leadership. Market wins.
Everything I learnt from age 5 to 18? Very close to nothing — and I was a good student who graduated to one of the best universities in the country. I could read before I arrived at school, and I only started to educate myself when I left. I could learn more in six months than I learnt in ten years in school — no exaggeration. Generally it is only the intensely schooled, who have done all their learning within its confines, who make completely absurd claims about the efficacy of institutional education. People who can do many things very well usually understand how destructive schooling is of genuine growth. Again, kids do learn in school, but it is despite being there, not because of it.
Nope, pip2, pip3. I upgrade all the time no problems, lin and win however.
If the boilerplate is the horrific part, well that's just Java isn't it? The meaningful functions are straightforward and do what you expect. Describe the level of the first radio that returns non-zero starting with the most advanced technology. Or in the case of CDMA/EVDO, the lowest level.
> What’s the point of having the right to vote and having people represent us if we’re not aware of what they should be dealing with wrt foreign policy, say?

The corollary would be to ask, if the common citizen must keep abreast of all events anyway, then why have representatives at all? Why not a direct democracy?

Ostensibly the purpose of a representative democracy is that the elected official would become an expert on the subjects for which he dictates policy. If he isn't doing that, then no matter if the populace is educated or not, policy will suffer.
Trust me if it’s organized by the real Chinese hackers your stupid system will be compromised years ago
There's a whiff of unqualified reservations to the style, yes.
In my company (medium size, 400 people or so and 300+ devs) code reviews are unheard of, everyone commits to the trunk. And I think this is the case in most companies.

I'm not happy, not even a bit, with this. But it's the status quo.