skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The evidence of the negative health effects of smoking far outstrip those of social media in both quantity and impact of those health effects. I'm not sure we're even in the sent ballpark right now. I'm not sure even the same game.
No, in 2014.
Bunch of yellowbellies.
You’re assuming that we can’t make better robots.

For the same amount of money as sending humans to Mars, we can develop better robots. Those robots will also be useful on earth of course.

From HN in 2014:

Someone dying is devastating. Trying to conquer space a handful of people at a time is the slow and dangerous way of accomplishing this task. We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly.
In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe.
Again, I think a single-cause model is unhelpful for this. It's an approach used to push an argument, not to understand.

This strikes me as particularly dubious. Trump won because of some decisions made before his grandfather came here? Sure, I guess, if you want. But it's not the only way to analyze it.
Successful colonization?

Huge, absolutely huge. We are resource constrained on earth. We are at risk of extinction from a huge number of not-that-small probability events. We could all do with some inspiring things in our lives.

It's so huge it's hard to quantify, because it starts bringing in to question fundamental values. What do you think we, as a collection of smart and capable people, as a nation, as a civilization, as a species, or otherwise ought to be trying to achieve?

The maximum happiness for the maximum number of us possible? Gaining access to another planets resources and a defense against extinction events is almost certainly a step in the right direction?

The most impressive legacy possible? Colonizing another planet seems to be our best shot at that.

Making the next generation proud of us? Well, I mean, look at things we admire the previous generation for. I think the moon landing is up their and it's a hell of a lot less impressive.

Minimizing human suffering? Well yes, then I suppose you don't want to colonize mars, instead you want to start a nuclear war or burn a lot of coal or something.

Maximizing some reasonable average of human suffering and happiness? Well, that's a vague goal so it's harder to argue to, but the benefits are clear, both in longevity of our species and happiness of the members of it. I think it's pretty clear that inspiration and achieving grand goals is very important to human happiness.

Of course, the first thing I said is the issue. What's the expected utility of attempting colonization. Colonizing mars is pretty unlikely to succeed, so it's far lower than the utility of a successful colonization. Still, I think supporting SpaceX is probably a worthwhile investment for our species/civilization/nation/... currently.
Sad to read these comments. Like many others, I viewed pinboard as a rare gem of a service that just worked and had the perfect balance of features: minimalist UI, zero bloat, no ads, nice API, sustainable business model.

I've got thousands of carefully-tagged bookmarks in there, and add more every day. I dread the idea of having to switch to another service, and after evaluating several others—haven't found any that come close.

What are people here switching to? Or am I an out of touch old geezer for even thinking that saving bookmarks is a useful thing anymore...
It's the low purchasing power of the customer base, and a higher proportion of theft, shrinkage and vandalism in poorer neighbourhoods eroding profits further. Profit margin on grocery items isn't high to begin with.
No but I've been using it much less in recent years. Extract the positive utility, while ignoring all the mental junk.
Only if you accept that premise to begin with...
Just as addicting, though. And it's just as much of a customer retention strategy as it ever was.
> Let's not become the 'no fun allowed' society.

i might draw the line at addictiveness. But then caffeine is also mildly addictive...
It sounds like a SFW version of the old shock-sites like GNAA NIMP/LastMeasure, which would basically do the same but the content was far more NSFW.

(For... suitably small values of SFW?)
> Shouldn't payment processors, and sites like patreon that hang off them, which ONLY bow to the law, and nothing but the law, be a huge, un(der)served niche right now, steadily becoming bigger?

No, it's not a niche at all. Payment processor and patronage sites are markets, and to the extent incumbents in those markets exclude certain distinct submarkets, there is a niche serving the unserved submarkets. But serving all submarkets allowed by law isn't a niche, and overlaps significantly with what th incumbents serve.
Dr. Aldrin's intellectual contributions to manned spaceflight are unfortunately overlooked. He was known as “Doctor Rendezvous”, and he didn't just fly orbital rendezvous missions, he actually helped invent the techniques and then got to demonstrate them on orbit.

Buzz is my hero. He does not deserve to be in Neil Armstrong's shadow.
Instead of just a nicotine company that kills people, less effectively but all the same.
> far less damaging

E-cigarette vapor disables key immune cells in the lung and boosts inflammation: Effects similar to those seen in regular smokers and patients with chronic lung disease.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180813190148.h...

E-cigs shut down hundreds of immune system genes—regular cigs don’t

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/e-cigs-shut-down-hun...

Widely used e-cigarette flavoring impairs lung function

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180523172310.h...

It may turn out that e-cigarettes are, on the balance, safer than cigarettes, however it's way too early to make that claim with any level of certainty. Realistically, we're probably going to find out through long-term longitudinal studies in a few decades.
According to Wikipedia: "The goal, as presented by NASA to Congress, was to provide a much less-expensive means of access to space that would be used by NASA, the Department of Defense, and other commercial and scientific users." [1]

So yes, if the goal was for it to be cheap and it turned out to be expensive, then it was pretty clearly a failure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Concepti...
> Few people are willing to call the shuttle a failure

Almost everyone calls the shuttle a failure
From what I can tell, incremental computation is starting to be used in practice:

Jane St has an OCaml library called Incremental:

"Data Driven UIs, Incrementally" by Yaron Minsky at Strange Loop 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3xX37RGJKE

This talk has a pretty impressive live JS table demo! It looks faster and nicer than most JS UIs I've seen.

-----

And the Skip language was developed Facebook. Apparently they started to use it for some production stuff, but somehow they decided against it and spun it out:

http://skiplang.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18077612

Julien Verlaguet - Reflex: Reactive Programming at Facebook -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGkSHE15BSs

Reflex was an earlier name or earlier incarnation of Skip.
Model is cheap, data is HARD.

Plus investing is data is much more predictable: the outcome is always going to get better, though the margin will be diminishing, but better is better.

While modeling is not, hiring 100 machine learning 'experts' will not solve the problem 100 times better than 10 of them. On the other side, 100 labelers are surely going to provide 10 times of throughput provided the same upscale.
> ... to actually kick start off-planet habitable zones that we'll reap the benefits years and years into the future

I think it's hubris to think we'd even get close to getting that correct.
> vaping/Juul has undone a decade of progress in reducing teen smoking

How much of that reduction in smoking is because of teens who would otherwise be smoking but are now vaping instead?
+ Relative to the current state of US passenger rail service, there is a plausible argument that the 1950's were better. Relative to the current state and common imaginary future states, 1950's rail is less plausibly a good model for transportation infrastructure today. The economics make a fine grained network with an acceptable level of service untenable...heck facts on the ground suggest the economics make a course grained network with an acceptable level of service generally untenable. A course grained passenger rail network with tenable economics is the exception.

+ A fine grained passenger rail network still requires about all the roads we have now. The local restaurant needs a pallet of french fries not a boxcar's worth.

+ Neither of the example compacts has executive authority over the participating states. Advocacy and study, only. They only allow states to coordinate efforts with respect to federal programs. MIRPC can lobby for continued Amtrack support [1]. It can't obtain right of way and lay track.

[1]: http://miprc.org/News/miprc-to-congress-fra-amtrak-sustain-t...
Check https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/aura-speeds-simplifies-al... There's a discount going on currently.

I wish I could afford one. Digitized versions of books in Indian languages are almost non-existent.
Thank You for Smoking
15 Christmas demos across 12 different vintage platforms
Pretty much anyone can quit caffeine in a week, easily. Nicotine is not in even in the same ballpark in terms of addictiveness based on my anecdotal experience. There's absolutely no way I am OK with something as addicting as nicotine being marketed to children. Teenagers are children and I'm happy the government is pursuing vaping such as it is.
Mars is not Earth II.

If you want to argue for a backup planet, you should invest your resources into long term hibernation biology and then send the humans to an actual Earth II in another part of the galaxy. If you truly believe humans are at risk of extinction and need another planet, finding an actual acceptable planet to colonize is a better idea.
Serial Swatter/Stalker Mir Islam Arrested for Allegedly Dumping Body in River
I like the 3D datasets in these papers since, like a scientist in a lab, you can setup the experiment and explore the domain. Adding time in would be cool too (e.g. Are the blue and red ball going to collide in 10 seconds?)

It also helps to be able to show you can answer some of these questions in principle with your model. It gives you hope that it might be able to cover real world images.
This is actually hilarious, and I believe a proper relief from the hyper-reality.
In other news, Altria (Philip Morris), the giant tobacco company, has just spent billions to invest in Canadian legal weed. Ugh. This is the exact sort of thing that a bunch of hardcore legalization activists predicted in Canada 20 years ago. I can't imagine the product will be very good, but it'll have the best marketing imaginable, within the legal limits.

https://business.financialpost.com/investing/altria-to-inves...
The article is pointless, I thought there would be interesting technical reasons why sending humans would be stupid but it's simply that he thinks it's cheaper to send robots.

We go to Mars because people with the means to send people there want to. It's as dumb as wanting to cross the ocean to travel to a new unexplored continent.
Imo, those are valid points but still not worth giving up your privacy to Facebook for. I’d rather keep my data to myself until a non-ad supported version of either FB or some other platform comes out
Introducing Neuromodulation to Deep Neural Networks to Learn Adaptive Behaviours
Seems relevant to the drone discussions here
Notably, Altria changed its name to escape from the absolutely abysmal reputation of its previous name, Philip Morris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Morris_International
I think the parallel to Antarctica "colonies" is the closest thing to Mars colonies Antarctica is nearly inhospitable in terms of food production. There currently are about 5k people there in the summer session but it's mostly science based work. Certainly the is a lot of new science we could do on a different planet so I think that would be a big motivation
I don't understand the cost argument. NASA is allocated less than half a percentage point of your federal budget. $20B is nothing to the United States Government. You could double their budget and DOD would still be spending 16x more.

NASA is cheap. Direct your ire at Rockwell, not NASA.
Are you speaking of completely irrelevant topics? Is astroturfing for “Juul” (what a stupid fucking name) more important than making a meaningful contribution to the present discussion?
With 7 billion people on the planet and that number only growing, it seems likely that we either find more room for people somewhere or face a massive population die-off event at some point. The humane answer is look for more room to put this burgeoning population of humans. The other answer is likely a case of hell to pay for most people on the planet. Even those who survive will likely be facing serious hardships as a consequence.

And, I mean, why the hell not? We're all just dust in the wind anyway, dancing on this earth for a short time. If some folks think going to another planet is cool and are willing to endure what that takes, why should that desire be deemed invalid?

From what I gather, space programs are a unique combination of highly inspirational and requiring tremendous rigor and have, thus, fostered innovation the world would otherwise have never pursued. I imagine that has sufficient value to offset the high costs of space exploration, though I'm not actually willing to look up sources and try to prove that.
For what it's worth, I agree. Siddhartha is said to have been attractive, there's no reason to think his analogues like Muhammad or Jesus weren't.
* Kubernetes
* Angular 6
* Erlang
* Elixir
The first I picked up partly because I was interested in what it would take to containerize some of my existing apps (TL;DR conclusion: we lack libraries/frameworks to properly work in ephemeral environments, where the continued existence of a service at a node is not guaranteed). This is my favorite tech of the year because I realized there is so much that yet needs to be done on this front.
Angular 6 I picked up because I am backend dev who uses Django as his web framework of choice, so I like the "batteries-included" approach of Ang6. 3 & 4 just because.
People have commented that they have missed out on friends 50th parties and even their death due to not being on Facebook. And therefore not being on Facebook is a big decision with consequences for your life.

However I think if you are not on FB, and you don't want to miss out, you need to do some old fashion stuff, like call your friends on the phone if they are long distance, or meet with them in person if they are local. And you'll have to do more of that to not miss out on stuff. You might then have to be more fussy about who you class as friends.

Even given all that I think it is worth giving up FB.
They're going to be large for a while. In time they'll shrink down to something more reasonable.
Just look at the chart? It’s pretty obvious that smoking is consistently declining, while vaping started at a low point of smoking.
"after many years of working primarily with Java & Spring in large "enterprise" systems": thought you would choose Scala next :-)
I was going to mention you by name when I was posting that, thank you sincerely for your hand in UO and SWG!
Nobody intentionally starts smoking, either. Nicotine is very deceptive; once you realize the dependency, it's very likely too late.

Frankly, I'd probably still be smoking if tobacco use didn't have the social stigma it does today. This -- oddly enough -- is why I never touched vapes (no disincentive to quit!) and why I think Juul/Juul-like products are going to create a new epidemic of nicotine addiction in this country.

This is just Altria -- Phillip Morris -- playing the same game they have been for generations. I really haven't the slightest idea why we're just sitting back and letting them do it again.
You often need that first person to stand still.

I now take it upon myself to be the first person” sometimes. If I see a long line forming to stand, and no one is walking at all, I will stand in the “walking” lane.

After that I see a lot of people with relief on their faces when they stand behind me.

I guess it also helps that I’m bald, Asian guy with a long beard. so maybe they think I’m a bum. Otherwise there were times I’ve seen people admonish the standers.
nih.gov is also quite good for health data.
Parent comment represents another use of Facebook in 2018 that exists somewhere between deleting and using as intended. What was it about the post that made you feel the need to attack the author?
If you look on the graph on the tweet linked [0], very little. There's a very clear and consistent downwards linear trend in terms of cigarette use since at least 1997. Admittedly, cigarette usage does appear to have gone down faster since ~2013 (which is around the time that vapes became well known [1]). Is that caused by vapes? Maybe, maybe not. But it's clear that more teens are exposed to nicotine now that vapes are available than if vapes were not available.

[0]: https://twitter.com/themehakvohra/status/1076433054099492864

[1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=v...
Are you twelve years old? You want to have fun fun fun. Me no like the no fun society.

Any company connected to big tobacco should be erased forever.
Although I agree with you in general, I feel like I have to raise some points...

Unless I've missed something, the evidence for red meat being a carcinogen is actually still up for debate and it's nowhere near conclusive. I've skimmed some sources making this claim, but I wasn't convinced by their research methodology.

I've discussed the weed issue enough times that I luckily have this article [0] in my bookmarks, which analyses our current knowledge. I'm not aware of any more modern article which does the same in-depth analysis on the state of things. I won't claim that weed is a magical drug without any kind of side-effects, but the research on its impact still seems fairly young. My key take-away from the linked article was that young people should probably avoid regular usage, maybe aside from trying it out once or twice.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4604177/
Also deleted it in 2010. It's possible I've missed out on something without knowing but I'm happy with my life nevertheless.

If you only get updates about someone from their social media, you don't really know them. They're a stranger you know far too much about.
Ubiquiti access points and switches, pfSense router.
If walkers are allowed to walk on the left whenever noone is standing in front of them, then I will naturally tend to avoid standing on the left. Unless the left is already blocked by other standers.
If they weren't going to switch to cigarettes as soon as Juul gets banned I'd agree.
I've heard that the median is a magnitude of order less than that; most of the bonus is going to management.
If a major exploration blew the budget but achieved its primary goal it could still be considered a success. But it must achieve its goal.

However, for the shuttle the lower price was the #1 goal which it failed to achieve. So it is a failure. Sorry. And that overfunded failure held back other options, because it is hard to compete when the competitor has many extra billions for development.
I learned how to podcast. Editing, writing, narrating, interviewing, sound design, publishing, and marketing were all things I had to learn to accomplish this. Some were technical others weren't. Glad I got into it. It's been a dream come true.
Yep. Minneapolis recently experimented with requiring all stores selling food in the city to stock some "fresh/healthy" foods. It's been a disaster; it turns out that the reason these products weren't being stocked is because people don't want to buy them. Force stores to devote some of their limited shelf space to expensive, perishable items, and people still won't buy them, but now the prices on all other items has to go up to make up for the wasted expired food that gets thrown out.

These sorts of policies hurt the poor, and to a lesser extent, small businesses, while helping no one. And yelling about Dollar General is going to have the same result (if it has any impact at all).

> Once we start choosing good foods, stores will have no choice but to start selling more of that. Let the backlash begin!

Yep.
For those who haven't seen it: https://www.technorms.com/assets/sshot-624.png

I hate the dumbing-down of browser configuration (and UIs in general) too, but given the actual people who make the decisions on what browsers do, it's not surprising --- turning the userbase into obedient ad-clicking dummies (and preventing them from learning about e.g. the world of disabled JS) is the best way to monetise them, after all.
What do you think the motivations of the people he has offended actually are?
No. I know that there are many, many compelling reasons to, but doing that would effectively cut out my lines of communication with my immediate family (we use WhatsApp and Facebook almost exclusively), who lives in another city, and I'm not doing that any time soon.
I agree. I think many of us throw around the word 'friend' too liberally.
Not at all. I'm from Jamia Millia Islamia, a central university in South Delhi. I got into Jabong and saw a merger thrice. Once into the hands of Myntra, then Flipkart and then Walmart.
It's not clear we need a Earth II with our current level of technology. We can now make water, oxygen, fuel, metal, robots, and so on. An earth II would obviously be more ideal, but there isn't any available.

Interstellar travel is certainly a very very high risk concept all by itself. We don't even have the ability to send unmanned things to another star, nor do we have the ability to have humans hibernate for any period of time on earth, nor do we have a clear path to either of those technologies.

Moreover we don't know where any earth like planet is. Even if we nailed interstellar travel, chances are we'd arrive at another star system and discover that we didn't have the things we need to colonize the planet (do we need to live in domes? Or floating cities like on Venus? Deal with hot temperatures? Volcanoes? Is solar power available in high quantities or not? Assuming we are looking for somewhere with an atmosphere, how strong winds do we need to design for? What chemicals do we need to be equipped to filter? And so on and so forth).

Nor is extinction the only goal we are talking about here. We also benefit immensely from communication with more people. We can communicate with mars, but not people on other stars. We benefit immensely just from the inspiring achievement, which we don't really get if we (and our children) won't live to see the success or failure of the mission. And so on.

Successful establishment of a colony on mars is of course not without its own challenges. I think the risks I mentioned at the end of my previous post will mostly be about what it takes to establish a colony once we can get their, not the getting their. But the chance of success is obviously far higher with current/near future technology, and the value of success is greater.
Funniest Coub Video Mixtage №189 – Epic Jokes Compilation Videos FunnY Cube
ROS: Robot Operating System.

I had been aware of it in the periphery, but never “dug in” till this year. This was the year I helped to lead an autonomy competition at work, where using ROS was a key component.

Finally have st least a first order approximation of its strengths and weaknesses.