skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who scored 22% on a multiple choice German test that he had actually studied for (if briefly), I can tell you that German is absolutely not required. There will be a few talks in German and the live translations aren't great, but there is more content in English than you can consume in four days.

(The joke is on me after I found a German girlfriend (not at congress), my German is now almost good enough to appreciate a talk in German.)
I was kind of concerned right off the bat with that numbered list:

1. public information should be open by default to the public in a machine-readable format, where such publication doesn’t harm privacy or security

I'm sure literally everything that they wish to keep opaque will declared to be covered under one or both of these incredibly vague categories and nothing will significantly change. Is there any elaboration in the bill that defines what they can call a matter of privacy or security? Even if there is, it wouldn't matter much because how are people going to tell if they keep it locked down in the first place? And they would not risk any sort of real blowback for abusing this and getting caught. Tell me there have not been far, far worse scandals that resulted in no consequences for the perps and cowed silence from the public. I don't think they're hiding the X-Files in there or anything, but this won't magically cause a more transparent, just, or equitable government unless it has serious teeth and tight language.

And 2. federal agencies should use evidence when they make public policy

Somehow I wonder if the data from the Kansas experiment will be taken into consideration and turned into public policy by this current administration, or if they will cherry-pick evidence selectively to justify only wildly unpopular legislation because someone (possibly an industry with a conflict of interest?) contrives some p-hacked research to back it up. Just because something is scientific doesn't necessarily mean it's good government. It is often so, but I'm always very wary when they trot out a bill with lots of bold language touting justice and democracy, truth, stuff like that. If the US legislature passes a bill called "protect innocent puppies from being kicked in the name of god and freedom" you can be 95% sure that this bill will enable a great wave of puppy-kicking despite its holy name.
Also the next 3 books on the same universe are great: Best Served Cold, The Heroes & Red Country.
Thanks for those, I’ll read through them when I get the chance!
All video games are crippled by player's wish fulfilment trumping any attempt to make genuine mechanics. Everything must be fun in the end.
"Subreddit for (Siri fails)" not
"(subreddit for Siri) fails"
No, I've never used it. Or MySpace, Instagram, SnapChat, LinkedIn, FourSquare, etc.

I did install Android on my 'phone when it was first released, but at the time its keyboard was hard-coded to specific hardware (the G1 had a physical "jump" button that my 'phone doesn't have, and this was required for typing punctuation). I uninstalled it and went back to Debian, haven't looked back :)
Losing the license is a biggie. Can’t tell you how many of the things I watched got pulled from Netflix, Hulu, etc.
Thank you Ian. I just purchased one after reading your article.
>This protects people both ways.

Not really. If the cops want to drag you off and detain you secretly for indefinite amount of time (what the law is trying to prevent), then all they have to do is charge you with some embarrassing crime like "sex with underage minor", to force you to waive that right.
Specifically regarding virtue signalling, im not sure you’re arguing anything beyond meaningless rhetoric. The claim simply amounts to “you say you believe in something, but your actions say otherwise, because you don’t actually treat it as a ‘cause’, but as social political stance”.

See the term “champagne socialists”. It’s really easy to utilize something like “changing the psychology of racists” for virtue signalling. Or any other stance for that matter.

Taking the stance isn’t at issue, but rather stopping there (having the opinion publicly, but not following through in any meaningful manner).
It doesn't seem that unrealistic to me, given how much of the real ecosystem humans have destroyed so far, and continue to destroy. In fact, I'd say the developers could have predicted this outcome with a quick glance at the real world.

You have a good point that the natural world renews itself from incoming energy, but that doesn't save it when it's destroyed at a faster rate than it can renew.
There's an older article that attempts to explain the motivations for this with a more narrative approach: https://tbshamden.com/images/TBScontent/safetreyf.pdf

In addition to the 'welcoming' nature of the food, it points to the cooking style as nicely aligned, with Chinese cuisine almost never using milk with meat, and the mixing of ingredients leading some to a bit of creative ignorance.

>They loved to eat egg rolls in Chinese restaurants because the pork and seafood tasted delicious, but were so minced that they could pretend these ingredients were not there.
Virtlo – Augmented Reality Travel Guide
That review honestly doesn't make a great case.

I have wondered why toasters seem to be such a difficult problem. I have a good one and it toasts evenly but determining doneness for a given type of bread is still pretty much a manual process.
When I asked my friend why be shared something that was clearly fake and he said "some people share things and some people look them up" or some bullshit I decided to unfollow every single person on my feed. Took a while but now when I log in there is nothing, and I basically never log in.

I use the messenger sometimes.
Why would you do web dev in python?
I prefer the static typing of Go. I feel like code is less likely to have bugs and far easier to understand when I've got static types sent to and returned from every function.

The concurrency of Go is the main feature over python. Python is still faster to write. But very often I want several processes running concurrently and pythons async features just don't cut it. It's so easy to understand goroutines and channels.
All I want for this Christmass is an authoritative list of all US federal agencies. I kid you not, there is no such list and the number of federal agencies is uncertain. From Wikipedia:

>Legislative definitions of a federal agency are varied, and even contradictory, and the official United States Government Manual offers no definition. While the Administrative Procedure Act definition of "agency" applies to most executive branch agencies, Congress may define an agency however it chooses in enabling legislation, and subsequent litigation, often involving the Freedom of Information Act and the Government in the Sunshine Act. These further cloud attempts to enumerate a list of agencies.
Microsoft Edge had no trouble dealing with it. I let it rip, with the adblocker off to see if it would crash. Handled it all fine. Then I just told it to close all the additional windows it brought up.

Of course, it did log me out of everything.
Blazor Toast Notifications Using Only C#, HTML and CSS
I started the rootless containers project and have had long email threads with the Singularity folks.

> Which is why we use Singularity[0]. Apologies if I’m missing something, but to me this problem they’re trying to solve, has already been solved. Singularity ‘requires’ root or elevated privileges to create and modify containers,

Well, Singularity came out at the same time as runc's rootless containers support was developed -- so at the time it wasn't solved at all. It required (and still requires for several operations and features) root privileges in order to work (such as suid helpers in addition to explicit root requirements).

It's not acceptable for a usecase where you cannot run anything as root (not even installation scripts). That was the use-case, and rootless runc (and now thanks to Akihiro and Guiseppe, rootless Docker and Kubernetes) in theory can now work without the need for any suid helpers -- though these days there is an increasing usage of newuidmap and newgidmap (which isn't mandated for the rootless runc implementation).

At the time, LXC's unprivileged containers was the closest thing and it had a few (mostly optional) suid binaries -- I wanted absolutely none.

> but running them is done in the user’s namespace with that user’s permission set. And privileges can’t be elevated during the containers runtime as there are kernel level catches that prevent sudo and su from working inside the container.

This last part really isn't revolutionary at all. All it really takes is a syscall and three files to write to. The hard part is getting everything else to work without root privileges.
I got into 3D printing a few years ago with a Select Mini. Unlike a build-it-yourself delta I had bought a few years earlier for around 5 times as much, this thing actually worked! However, whether you buy a DIY or a complete printer, you'd better anticipate repairs, maybe as often as once every few kilograms of plastic. Inappropriate provisions for flexing wires are the worst problems in my experience, particularly because you will find you need some odd and hard to obtain wiring harness to replace it, and then it'll fail in the same way next time.
1. Do you often try to implement data structures like this? In my practice, arrays are almost always better.
2. Beside that, you may argue that I use "Don't have therefore is not required" argument. But it contained partial truth: if you fight Rust program model then you have to do some extra steps to achieve it. Rust borrowing model considers one owner who can share its data among consumers. And this is damn common situation. I written a whole telegram bot with futures, using Arc container only once, to share my http client across the threads.

If you fight GC in Java then you have same troubles: all this stuff like weak pointers, byte array storages, reflection, etc, etc... If you are trying to write imperatively in haskell... And so on. If you fight language ideas, then your code becomes more complicated. The answer here is that you shouldn't have to do it often.
> Our author seems to be quite drastically mischaracterizing the intentions of what he calls the "contemporary left"

The author is a professor at a major university, in a humanities field. As such, he is quite likely to be at least somewhat familiar with the intentions and attitudes of this political group - and while I have not specifically looked at "3rd-wave anti-racism", thought patterns are absolutely a commonly-recurring concern. The burden is on those who take the opposite view to provide evidence to the contrary. In addition, you are using terms like "SJWs" and, most strikingly, "cucks" (a crude and offensive sexual slur that has regrettably entered the present-day political lexicon, roughly comparable to the use of "teabaggers" back in the 2000s), which in fact are not generally found in the article, as if they represented the author's stance. This does not seem to be a case of arguing in good faith.
First of all, I do not use the Facebook mobile app, just the website. But -- I deleted my Facebook account very long ago, but I created a new one in 2016 and it's indispensable. Just a few days ago I posted why https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728223
in a client's web browser... yeah.
I’d delete mine if it weren’t the most reliable way of reaching various friends and family members.

That being said, I haven’t posted to it in years. I just use messenger...
Keep in mind that players like yourself are precisely the reason games like this don't really exist anymore.
Essentially MMOs aren't just one hard problem, they are a collection of hard problems.

There are some excellent game theoretic problems in there, the ecology is just one of them. One of the more interesting experiments in the StarWars universe game was the market economics of things like furs.

What I noticed during my years of WoW playing was that the market functioned very much like the 'in app purchase' market of more casual games. For example you could sell magic reagents which an enchanter could use to level up their skill, this was a quick way for someone to exchange gold for skill points. It created an economic stream for players who could "farm" the correct materials to disenchant to get the most in demand reagents (as I recall Greater Eternal Essence was a big seller).

Success in an MMO is in part a balance of these opportunities where a character can trade time for value.

In the Ultima online case the skins were just worth essentially vendor cash, but without that market force in the middle, the economy tanked. Now if vendors paid less and less for hides as the rate of hides redeemed for cash increased, it would provide a natural limiter on the value of that activity.

A truly successful MMO would provide a way for the MMO owner to tax the activity of the players in a way that generated actual cash for them to pay for servers and developers. Then the game becomes self sustaining.
I learned (significantly more of) Python, which I had previously resisted for a long time due to my dislike of the language (said dislike has only worsened, but it ended up being the best tool for a couple jobs, and it's what my employer uses, so it was a matter of time). One of those Python projects also involved learning about Qt5, enough of the winspool API to send a ZPL document to a Zebra printer, and enough of Python's ctypes-based FFI to glue the aforementioned winspool API knowledge to the program I wrote.

For personal projects, I've learned at least a little bit about how parsers work by writing (a pretty awful) one from scratch (bitbucket.org/YellowApple/otpcl), and I'm hoping to fulfill my 2018 New Year's Resolution by adding a simple interpreter to that project (the parser tests include a half-baked prototype, but I need to flesh that out to actually track interpretation state, be able to run real Erlang functions, etc.). If all goes well I'll have something that's properly Show-HN-worthy by the 1st.
Rental properties, hotels, landscaping, maintenance companies
"he was a bit weird" doesn't even begin to describe things... If you read the original unabridged version of Stranger in a Strange Land it's obvious how it's a product of its time in the 1960s, and Heinlein's own fascination with polyamorous relationship ideas.

In the me-too era much of Heinlein's work is problematic, to say the least.
If they really want to "fix" this "problem", they can try to make the escalator narrower so there is only one "side" possible and fit more escalators.

You shouldn't carry bulky luggage in an escalators anyways.
Just to clarify, are you saying you run Debian on your phone? If so how does that all work? What sort of phone do you use?
LLVM. I've been learning by creating a toy programming language and compiler, implemented in Python with the llvmlite library.

https://github.com/syegulalp/Akilang

There's a couple of included demos like Conway's Game Of Life.

Sorry it's Windows only for now! I'll add Linux support once it's all not quite so in flux.
I started at a new company working on the data pipeline. So I picked up many things related to that. Java, Go, NLP, ElasticSearch, RabbitMQ/Kafka.

My most fun project of the year was learning NLP and implementing a tokenizer for phrase identifier in Arabic, which I don't speak, but the sentence structure is similar enough to english that I pulled it off.
I deleted it a few years ago. Before doing so I unrated myself from everything, unliked everything, replaced all my posts and comments to just an underscore, then deleted each post and finally the account.
Data quantity and quality are key. Both, though. This is why it's foolish to go up against an ML product from Google, Facebook, or (maybe) Microsoft. You just can't compete with the volume and quality of data they can access.

In sectors like automotive, where every brand is competing to try and build the best predictors using only their own data, there is a huge opportunity available for the first two companies to share data with each other. Doubling your data quantity brings a significant improvement to any model, and would put them ahead of any competition. That advantage only grows the more players you add to the sharing pool.

I believe that if humanity is really going to harness machine learning, the concept of a bulk data commons is an inevitable requirement.

This makes decentralized personal data control, homomorphic encryption, and similar technologies incredibly important.
It's a data race because we've run up against another wall on the algorithms side. Find a technique that works better than GBDT for the same type of problem. Other than some minor tweaks described in the academic literature, it's been a while since something really advanced the state of the art.

Small datasets still have massive predictive potential; we just need better algorithms. (As an extreme example, suppose I give you the first 30 digits of pi or e and ask you to predict what comes next. Despite being a small amount of data of low algorithmic complexity, machine learning cannot currently handle this type of problem.)
I'm sorry, this is ridiculous, both in terms of misrepresenting Taibbi's statement and in terms of a general attitude. It's a joke if a statement doesn't actually represent your beliefs. That has nothing to do with whether other people find it funny.
Auckland, New Zealand has gone to the opposite extreme. When I first lived there in the late 1970s there were about 25 municipalities with the central one called Auckland, each with their own mayor and council. I guess it wasn't as bad as the US because schools, police, fire, ambulance are a central government thing in NZ but the local governments do everything else that a town normally does.

Throughout the last few decades there have been several amalgamations. Finally we have one "super city" called Auckland. Its boundaries extend way beyond the metro area so it's kind of inside out compared to other cities.

Now I live in Southern New Hampshire in the US. It feels a bit like Auckland long ago. Lots of little towns, each with their own local government and services. They share some things like the a 911 emergency call center and police and fire do "mutual aid" when something big happens in a neighboring town but it still seems like a lot of duplication. If there is no sign, you can usually tell when you've crossed a boundary because the road surface changes because they have different maintenance schedules.
This is also interesting, Sweden is converting it's two large ferry's to battery electric as well.

https://electrek.co/2017/08/24/all-electric-ferries-abb/

These aren't small ships, 10,000 tons.
* Physics Simulation - I wrote 2D physics from scratch for this game http://noisyowl.com/disks/ and the ability to actually use the implementation of the physics engine as part of how you solve design problems was absolutely worth it. If you're a programmer making a physics game, I'd recommend writing your own physics as long as you need at most one of: gravity, polygonal objects, and rotating objects. I think I might try something using one of these engines for 7DRL this year.

* Unscented Kalman Filters - These are really cool, wow. I'm pretty sure the unscented transform has a lot more potential than just being used with Kalman filters too, someone should investigate that. Also this year I learned that the truncated Kalman Filters I've been developing for the past few years are a lot more useful and powerful than I realized, and I'm interested in exploring more general ways to use those. (Unfortunately Google won't let me publish these though.)

* Vertx server - Web server frameworks generally manage to make me mad, and this is the first one I was actually happy enough that I'll keep using it. Has a few rough edges though - I wrote a multiple database query method by hand, and Vertx's JsonObject type makes it really easy to accidentally create an infinite loop.

* Elastic beanstalk - Is actually kind of terrible? And yet it's so much closer to what I actually want (run my jar on X machines, reboot as needed, never think about it again) than what I've used before (actual servers, ec2, app engine) that I'm also sticking with this.

* Postgres - I mean I've technically used postgres before but I wrote a reddit clone from scratch this year so I know a lot more now. Hey it's as good as everyone says, go figure. Also pgadmin is so bad, wow.

* Peg.js - Parsers have always been intimidating to me and playing with this really cut down the intimidation factor. I'll write my own parsers for anything important, but still use this for prototyping grammars. The idea that you can have a dirty prototype of a grammar is mind-blowing to me though.
Games like what?

Buggy games? Yes the do.

Games with real risk? It requires an aggressive player to make that risk real otherwise there is no point to making a game with risk if everyone is just smithing horse shoes for each other.

I’d argue that games like UO don’t exist anymore because most people don’t want to play a game where you can lose everything.
Huh, this is a tricky one.

I did not delete it, since I do use it for login to many sites and many friends, coworkers and groups that I find relevant use it, however I took few effective steps that almost eliminated its usage:

- turning of notifications

- removing the app from the main screen, and putting it in a random folder (I tried deleting it, but for 2FA I need to have its key generator, so I keep the app)

This is it. I just checked and in the past week, I used it 14 minutes on mobile, and probably around the same time on desktop.

My usage is quite low profile, I tend to post a picture every few months, and check out some groups, but nothing more than that.

Instagram on the other end is becoming problematic as its becoming a main social network for almost all of my friends and it is really easy to get sucked into it.
#IDidTheMath

There are about 129,864,880 books in the entire world. The median length for all books is about 68000 words. It would roughly translate into 250 manuscript pages in average.

If you must know, it would take 247 years for one scanner to do its magic and digitalize all the books ever written.

Ps: Pretty sure I screwed something along the way, would appreciate if you don't roast me for my math :v
Not just theoretical either. Verizon sold out to Frontier. Guess what happened to many of the movies I "bought"? Poof. Gone. No recourse either, unless I want to file in small claims court.
What do you mean? What's the relationship?
> I’m trying to compare/contrast the goals of binctr to existing solutions that appear to do the same or similar thing(s) already, so I’m open to learning something new today!

binctr is a proof of concept that was written almost 3 years ago. These days, rootless containers are being integrated into many tools. Right now, under [1] we have some tooling which allows you to run Docker, cri-o and Kubernetes in rootless mode. Cloud Foundry's default configuration now uses rootless containers.

So really, it's not a choice between binctr and something else (binctr was a proof-of-concept) -- in fact please don't run binctr in production. But runc and quite a lot of other tooling has rootless support now.

Singularity doesn't do rootless containers, it still requires suid binaries in several cases. But I'm biased, having had some pretty bad arguments with the lead developers in the past (mainly for misrepresenting runc).

[1]: https://github.com/rootless-containers