skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You seem to completely completely misunderstand the claim. 1% ~ 2% of the variance of what?

You haven't shown it is 'preposterous' at all. You haven't shown anything. You have presented a single outlier and interpreted it poorly.

A meta-analysis of broad statistical analyses of a large number of people controlling for genetics and shared environment that looks into house after house after house and concludes that on average 50% of the variance of individual psychological traits is genetic, 1% ~ 2% is attributable to shared environment and the rest is attributable to non-shared environment isn't magically negated by one outlier appearing.

For starters in both cases the girls share 50% of their DNA. Your data point just isn't making the case you think it is. To figure out the variance attributable to shared environment you have to get a statistically significant result with the right controls in place in a well designed study. And then that has to be replicated across many studies to be considered reliable.

It doesn't make the case that siblings turn out much more similar than that in the general population due to being raised in the same home and/or going to the same school. The claim doesn't even suggest that you will never see a household where two siblings are very similar.

It's not at all obvious that if Richard Williams never handed them a tennis racquets that they wouldn't have won Wimbledon. You can't possibly make the claim there was a ZERO percent chance they wouldn't find tennis on their own or through school or through friends and get interested in it and become good. Or that they wouldn't find some other sport. Generalize the thought experiment across many many pairs of sisters where their father tries to coach them in something and what do you find? Does the conclusion you draw from a single data point have predicative power as it relates to what you would expect to see in the general population?

Is it equally as 'obvious' that if Roger Federer's parents never turned the on the TV where he saw tennis and became obsessed with it that he would never have become a tennis champion? His sister is a nurse too, not a tennis champion.

Robert Plomin, in Blueprint, makes the case that what our parents and schools do for us pretty much comes out in the wash as we make our way into adulthood and that throughout our lives our individual choices shape our environment greatly based on what we choose to spend our time doing and what who we choose to hang out with. And he states that our genetic propensities nudge us in the direction of making the choices that shape the environment that in turn shapes us. What parents and schools do has very little predictive power as to how their life will turn out.
It's not really a fine line. There are specific, protected people-features you can't use to discriminate. Saying stupid shit isn't one of them. Race is.

Those laws don't exist because we don't agree with their reasons. They exist to protect people who have been categorically repressed for hundreds of years.
I am genuinely curious as to the author’s proposed non-violent means of settling with Al Queda et al, but he doesn’t go into any details. If you listened to OBL’s speech after 9/11 what he was most upset about was the downfall of the Caliphate in Turkey some 80 years previous. Similarly ISIS mission was to provoke a war with “Rome” to fulfill the prophecy of the 13th Imam (I may be hazy on the details). There’s literally no peaceful solution that any Western government could offer them.
I never get robocalls in Europe - what's different here? Why does USA have this huge problem with spam calls and most of Europe doesn't? Is spam blocking on OS level really the right approach to fix this problem?
Why hasn't there been a class action against carriers for failing to do anything about this problem?
Nothing about that statement suggests that anyone watches an uninterrupted minute of anything.

If I say I drink 2l of water a day, it's not a reasonable interpretation that I'm quaffing 2l in one sitting once every 24 hours.
I don't know where you get that idea. The current problem with fusion is not that it isn't economic, it is that it is not yet at the stage where it produces excess power that can be used.

The electric cars 100 years ago were functional as a form of transport.
Huh. Based on the OP article -- it appears that QVC places all risk (returns) on the [consigner] (interestingly the conjunction of {contingency}+{Signor}) -- and as such it would seem this is where QVC's limited risk is found...

Basically the equivalent of todays "Gimme your content and I shall provide EXPOSURE via my instagram followers"
I think the biggest difference between Ada and C++ is that much of the functionality in C++ is implemented in the form of libraries vs. something that is built into the language itself. Character strings is the most obvious example, but there are many others (such as concurrency primitives). Personally, I am not sure which way is better: on the one hand, a good language should, indeed, give the programmer powerful means of abstraction; on the other hand, it might be beneficial if the language grammar could somehow directly absorb, in time, things of unquestionable value - so that the construct's syntax could be simpler or more natural, or, perhaps, so that the compiler could employ better optimization techniques.
>"I believe people should be able to fly nazi and confederate flags on their private property."

The people doing this are advocating for violent ideologies, that have as their foundation extreme racism, including the oppression of minorities and violence against them, literally to the level of genocide.

They don't stop at just putting up flags. They organize, march and perpetrate violent attacks. They invade subcultures and infiltrate their ideologies into them. They plan for the creation of a fascist white ethnostate. None of this is exaggeration on my part.

How do you propose we stop this tide of hate-fueled ideology? The "marketplace of ideas" approach does not work, they simply use the exposure to further spread their viewpoints, feeding on the controversy.

How can we fight these ideologies, if not by exposing them and deplatforming them, and constantly keeping them on the back foot?
DWANGO
I don't want to send all my calls to google
I think that anti discrimination laws should apply to companies if they are de facto monopolies. Unless there is reasonable competition, like in a case of a cake shop that doesn't want to sell to gays, they should give their service to everyone regardless of their views, race, sexual orientation or whatever other characteristics of the person.

The government should also understand that it is not the company responsibility to foster good behaviour, they are just a platform and if someone do something against the law, like inciting violence for example, the government should deal with them personally and do it with the right authorities.

The problem is that the left decided to neglect the law and the proper authorities completely and rather impose some Stalin/Mau style "people committees" to run things. It manifests in things like title IX, it manifest in the demand from facebook to be a nanny/censor and it manifest in the demand to let illegals into the country rather than just changing the immigration laws to allow everybody who wants to come in, if that indeed what they want. It seems like the left wants to circumvent the law rather than working in the confinement of the current proven system, this will lead to anarchy and civil war.
Colin O’Brady Completes Crossing of Antarctica with Final 32-Hour Push
The line isn't very fine.

There's a clear difference between traits that you were BORN with, and things that you CHOOSE to say.

To put it more simply for you – it's difficult for someone to change their skin colour. It's not really that difficult for them to not say racist things in a pub.
Ah! My bad. I didn’t think you would actually be attacking me personally. I guess that shows how naive I actually am :). Thanks for sharing your deeply considered opinion about me. I clearly don’t have the rich life experiences that you have, especially about this topic.
So my question is, given the cylindrical Earth thought experiment (which I do find quite compelling), why bother with the weird drive train involving the wheels? Putting sails of the right proportion on a propeller shaft should be enough.
Yes, a society* enforces certain choices, but not every choice. "Everything what is not expressly forbidden is allowed" still applies.

* Yes, "society" here works through state. But without a reasonably wide consensus in the society, a norm cannot be effectively imposed: most people would break it and be sure that everyone around won't mind. (Manufacturing such a consent, if it's not yet there, is another business.)
I actually would like a regulatory solution for this.

Mandate a way for me to say whether incoming calls were spam. Require my phone company to pay me money every time I get spammed. Allow my phone company to, at their option, proactively block calls from specific upstreams and/or pass the charge to the specific upstreams.

Now from those incentives, the fines will naturally follow the upstreams to the source of the spam, and provide motivation for them to clean their acts up. Voila! (And if telephone companies decide that they need a more secure protocol to make spamming harder, that's up to them.)
"Scheme" implies a unified/central schemer, though. We can already call it a fad, or a mania (a la tulip mania).
If all humans can be misguided, any principle which accounts for it will be universal. If someone else could know better than you, you can also account for that in a way that other people could be equally well served by.

So there isn't anything contradictory or inhibitory there. Perhaps you are not seeing the generality implied by the term "universal?" The contrapositive here is to not act in a way that assumes other people are incapable of, unworthy of, or disadvantaged by following your example. There is nothing here that implies one can't be humble or liberal. To put it in less gentle terms, the point is that if you don't intend for other people to emulate you, then there is no point to your life in human society.
It's about as ambiguous as whether you are a secret racist. This guy is arguing directly against out-and-out unabashed racists in the conversation. How much more anti-racist does one have to be in order to make it not "ambiguous" in your eyes?
You could have an exception for people in your contact list.
I use an app called WideProtect. It's not free, but it's also not a subscription. It lets you do exactly what you describe.

As a side note, CallKit on iOS doesn't support wildcard blocking, so WideProtect literally adds all the possible numbers within your specified range to the blocking database. This doesn't impact performance as far as I can tell (maybe calls ring another 100ms after they would normally), but there seems to be a delay of a few minutes after installing for it to show up as a block extension under Settings.
Per: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SDbnM1nxLZNuwD8fQkIigUve...
They're doing so in January, along with the source code.
Maybe there's a pattern to when you are around your phone, and when you aren't. Most of my robocalls are during the day - when I'm at a desk, with my phone. In the evening when my phone is away from me appears to be a less popular time to call.
That sounds very useful. But with one exception. As tempting as it may be, my ex should still be able to call me.
I'm not an expert, but I would guess that regulation around these kinds of `nuisance` calls is tighter outside the U.S. We (in the U.S.) have a National Do Not Call Registry[0] but I don't know how strong the enforcement of violations is. With scammers, I think much of the problem is that they're using VoIP and other technologies that make it difficult to pin down exactly who is making the calls, and from where.

[0] https://www.donotcall.gov
It's not just robocalls, but any app that uses CallKit. It annoys me to no end that apps like WhatsApp can take over my entire phone with a call and I am unable to disable that like I can with notifications.
Yes! I would even go so far as to say if the caller isn't in my phonebook let them go to voicemail. Or at least give me the option in settings. If I don't know who's calling they're getting my voicemail 100% of the time.
Repetition in sed would be written \{1,2\}, it's unwieldy enough that it's rarely used.
no, I think OP is on to something here
I abandoned PIL/Pillow a couple of years ago for OpenCV (a lot faster, and loads 16/32 bit int/float TIFs without problems), but I remember there were a couple of "utility functions" whose job was to translate from PIL.Image into a numpy.ndarray and back. I guess you'd convert every frame from the corresponding ndarray, and then save them into a list to build the GIF in memory.
Surely you see the difference between the "sounds crazy" of predicting a market collapse, and the "sounds crazy" of saying we should deport or execute all Muslims (as a for example).
That's a T-Mobile feature, not an Apple feature, and you can change your settings to block the calls instead of just ID'ing them.

https://www.t-mobile.com/resources/call-protection
> “These recent expulsions seem more readily explained by political bias”

This reasoning seems weak. It might me political bias, but it might also be about hate speech. In order to claim this is purely about politics, one would need to show that hate speech is evenly distributed among political ideologies while unevenly punished. In this climate, that's not a bet I would take.
I’m sure this is a great idea at some San Francisco start up full of unicorns who can do everything backed by endless venture capitalist cash.

I have spent a good chunk of my career at a Fortune 10 energy company.

We hired people who specialized in working with SAP, Oracle databases, MSSQL, messaging (think MSFT Lync), email infrastructure, physical servers for web apps, Cisco, desktop provisioning, application development, mobile device management, ticketing software, etc. etc.

It’s very hard and very expensive to acquire the right talent to manage a particular technology, administer it, support it, etc. Every vended software we work with has some company that looks at our name and comes up with some outrageous cost for a few licenses, dev seats, or whatever their business model is.

Acquiring the right quality talent is even harder. You bring them in. You try to teach them about your business so they feel valued and part of something big. They don’t stick around. They want to be at the Googles and Amazons of the world. They leave.

In this scenario, I’d rather use SQS than try to interview, hire, train, and make the hardware/software investment in running an SQS equivalent service in house. I don’t want to hire DBAs and build that profession in my org. It’s not our core business. My customers in the business don’t give a shit about it. They want something fast, reliable, and dependable.

Fundamentally, this argument of just do it yourself to save money is short sighted. There are a lot of factors. If you believe hiring Some internal teams is always cheaper than using managed services, you’re in for a world of hurt.
imo the best way to combat this is to answer the call and waste as much of the scammers time as possible. Call spamming only scales because most people ignore or hangup immediately. If you waste 30seconds of a scammers time thats 30 more people they cant call. And that 30 seconds costs THEM money. I just answer say “hi” to start the recording and leave the phone on my desk until they hangup. Perhaps i dont completely understand the backend but if more people wasted the scammers time it would quickly become too expensive for them to continue.
I have heard this suggested in all seriousness.
I didn't say pension funds are scams, but that pension funds make their profits from trading against non-knowledgeable people (like GP implied bitcoin traders do)
You could always say if you can guarantee me a certain amount of work per year then sure we can talk about a fixed rate per hour.
> It is a phone. If you need uninterrupted productivity, use any other type of personal computing device.

Phones have stopped being just phones for a while now. Modern smartphones are full fledged computing devices and are a key productivity tool for many users.

Personally I hardly even use the phone feature to justify calling my device a phone. I make maybe one or two traditional phone calls a month, as most of my day-to-day communications is done over the Internet.
shameless self-promotion
https://github.com/cztomsik/node-webrender

(not production-ready but it might be soon good enough for really quick GUI prototyping using subset of web technologies - javascript + react + flexbox + styles)

HMR & react-devtools are already supported.
It's not. Robocalls are one of those things that really upsets a small subset of people either because they are overly sensitive to robocalls or that they are a member of that unlucky subset that does receive a very high amount. Like most things in the social media era, the grievances of a very vocal minority appear to be a larger group than they actually are.

For example, the title of the article tells us that robocalls are "killing us".
I tried to read it previous year and found the books incredibly boring - most of the characters are exaggerated and flat, the story is really nowhere to be found after 300 pages and the use of English language was simplicistic.

I only got through ~300 pages before giving up though, maybe a plot arises and takes the lead but I never reached it.
This really is the only way to root out the problem. The carrier networks have to hold the upstream VOIP providers accountable, so the VOIP providers hold their customers who create random spoofed phone numbers accountable.
I've seen that, but doesn't it take SMS/iMessages with it? IOW, I won't be notified of messages no matter who sends it? Regardless, it's just phone calls I want to block, I don't get enough spam SMS to care about who is sending it.

I guess I'm going to have to fiddle around with when the wife gets home and gather some empirical evidence.
"[...] all contentious speech or behavior will put the speaker or actor at risk of serious financial and social sanctions, and strip them of all defense,”

Thing is, a lot of self-described "contentious" speech is putting other people at risk of serious financial, social, mental and physical harm.

I believe in free speech and I believe that you can't successfully fight ideas by burying them, but I am also aware that I can afford such beliefs because I am largely free of said risks thanks to my social / biological / demographic circumstances.

That said, time and time again I find that most of the people who end up in this kind of complaints are just agitators, racists and assholes who have found in the internet a vehicle to amplify their hateful voices. Labeling it as "hate speech" may be subjective, but so is not labeling it as such. I have no doubt in my mind that it's what they practice.
The Netflix Data War
Check https://terrainformatica.com/2018/12/23/sciternode-versus-el... and discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18746408

In principle that is doable. Not sure about 100% compatibility as only WebKit (particular version) is 100% compatible with WebKit (particular version here). Edge is gone in that fight. Mozilla is standing but is not 100% compatible.
Not sure how he got 2500 but there's a long term log graph here and if history repeats you might expect the low to be about 2500 to 1500 and occur about 6 months to a year from now https://cryptoslate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/chart.png
I don't like the framing. AlphaZero is just a very refined and efficient form of brute force. Precomputing weights obtained by brute force doesn't make the overall enterprise not brute force anymore.
>You say that you're not trying to dissuade people from their principles, but the implication of your argument is that Dr. Kuipers' approach is too naive.

No, you misunderstand. I don't think his approach is naive. My response was about consequences that take on a life of its own regardless of principled intentions. We have to separate the intentions vs consequences. Let me emphasize:

1) if one's moral principle is to not help the military, then one can stick with that principle

2) if one feels morally consistent by not accept funding from the military even if it causes some financial hardship or sacrifices, that's fine too

People have to do (or not do) things that keep them from losing sleep at night. If one has good intentions, then personal actions have to be consistent with that to maintain a clear conscience.

My entire comment has to do with consequences highlighted in this statement: "This was not what I wanted my life's work to support."

My point is that if the work has wide ranging applications, it _will_ support agendas you disagree with even if you don't take funding from the groups you oppose.

I was sensitive to that "life's work support" sentence because I'm working on a tool to let people anonymously match private data with others that have the same private data. The original motivation was letting people like-minded people discover each other without having public knowledge of it be used against them in denying future employment or denying health insurance.

However, one of my dilemmas was that it could also by used by the government and terrorist organizations. Even if I don't accept a check directly from the Department of Defense, it is inevitable they will (mis)-use the technology for purposes I don't agree with.

I think it's responsible for people to know that not accepting money from a group you oppose may not accomplish what you hope. If you think it's better to not know that, please explain why.
I don't think your argument here really follows.

DVDs have DRM, streamed content has DRM, and yet neither of those markets have monopolies.

The fact that Amazon has a proprietary format has more impact on market structure than the fact that the format has DRM.
For decades Walmart, the largest retailer in the world, exclusively sold censored music albums, yet nobody rioted over that, we all just knew not to buy our CDs there. I don't understand why people all the sudden believe they have a God given right to spew their garbage all over every platform in existence.... that's something very new.

EDIT: Source: https://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2008/04/29...

>MUSIC: Wal-Mart does not carry music that has the “parental advisory” label which warns parents about explicit lyrics. We carry some "edited" versions of music that have been provided by the artist or the music label. Wal-Mart does not edit music. Our role is simply to provide music selections that we believe our customers want to buy.
I suppose you're right, but how many stories are the direct result of corrupt government? Not this one it seems. I'll try to keep the comments more relevant.
I agree there’s a lot the carriers could be accomplishing in flagging “inauthentic” behavior of network participants, the root cause of SS7’s lack of authentication and encryption will remain and the problem will fester. Yes, carriers are definitely on the hook for making things better too.

That said, the decisions in Apple's client side software are atrocious for the considerations of 2019.

Aside: No idea why my post went from #1 on HN to the third page in under 30 minutes, I thought we were having a fruitful discussion here
> And disrupt they do, at a massive scale. Several billion fake calls are received each month in the US. Reports show this is a global problem, with Brazilians averaging 37 spam calls per month. Actually, I’m getting a robocall as I type this very sentence, my second today.

Is there a reason this isn't as prevalent in the UK? I get maybe 2 calls a month like this. Are robocallers in the UK more likely to get in trouble maybe? Putting this on Apple isn't addressing the core of the problem.