skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I'm not thrilled Mozilla ran an experiment placing ads in the browser, I am confident that anything they release will be easy to disable via about:config or some other configuration.

However, looking closer at this situation there is a bit of a troubling fact that `experiments.enabled` - the configuration directive used here - doesn't appear in about:config but certainly is being used:

https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-esr45/source/browser/experim...

Looks like someone filed a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1517147
the difference may not matter to you but it's not an ad because it's not a paid placement. no personal info is shared up front either.

obviously you'd share info once you click on it. i don't like ads either, but this seems better than the standard track-you-out-the-wazoo ad.
Unfortunately Open Cascade leaves a lot to be desired in terms of robustness and accuracy compared to e.g. Parasolid.
Paid placement is just one model of advertisement. Other well known ones are paid per impression, per click, per action. This is obviously the last one.

I guess Mozilla is confident enough not many people understand what CPA ads are to claim they are not ads.
Not really. It's a difference between necessary and sufficient. Decentralization might be necessary component, but what is lacking is proof or argument that it is also sufficient for this change to happen.
Software is eating the world and it's almost finished.

Decentralized software decentralized world
> People who come to the US almost universally accept American values after a generation. And considering large proportions of the US believe LGBT people don't deserve to get married or adopt children, and several trans women were savagely beaten last month in my city by some white-bread born in america nazis [snip]

You aren't making your own case very well.
Because proponents have never demonstrated a viable path to linking those. It always comes back to depending on the state (e.g. courts, police) or reinventing banks, with huge hand-waves about how the details could possibly work for a non-trivial scale.
I grew up in a rural area near Sacramento. Culture is your big problem; when I was there, reading in public was "gay" and grounds for a (light) beating/physical humiliation.

Of course, I was in high school at the time, and high school is terrible everywhere; I'm sure it's different for adults. But, point being, at least in the '90s, it was not a place that encourages you to study or engage in intellectual pursuits.
An employer profitably exchanges wages for labor. That profit is the economic value. If this weren't true, then all businesses would be bankrupt.

By definition, non-owner employees are insulated from that economic value. It's unclear, then, why you'd prefer their assessment over that of someone looking at the business as a whole.
I wouldn't read too much into this. The authors don't want to release neither the report or even which the 43 use cases are: http://merltech.org/blockchain-for-international-development...

> The purpose of this blog was NOT to address the use of blockchain, or any DLT, for digital crypto-currency or even financial applications, nor was it to disparage, debunk, or dispel ANYTHING. We were, and remain, technology neutral. If anything, we would say that more testing is warranted, but would advocate that the results of those tests be publicly and fully available.

> There is no report. The only product that resulted from our research process is this blog, as Linda Raftree correctly pointed out.

> A “use-case” is very different from a “case-study”, the former being more conceptual and the latter requiring significant data for research purposes.

> Regarding sharing the list of the 43 use cases, Linda was also correct that the purpose of the this blog was not to “name and shame” and doing so risks distracting from the work we felt has achieved its goal, to motivate conversation around these issues.

Two projects are linked from the blog post:

https://exonum.com/napr

http://www.amply.tech/

I have not heard of either before.

This tells us nothing. Basically they have randomly picked 43 out of thousands of projects and won't even publicize which these projects are, or the methodology they used.
do you mean literally phone calls? if so how are you doing the speech to text?
Is there no service that uses automation to make custom-fitted shoes yet? This seemed like such an obvious thing to me several years ago when 3d printing and the like started becoming a fad, and I figured there would be a startup that did it (or one of the big companies would work on it). But if anyone is doing it, I as a consumer haven't noticed yet. What gives?

I can't see cost being an issue - when you look at how shoe construction works, it should be straightforward to tweak the shoe shape for each shoe without significant increase in manufacturing cost.
Agreed. What's more, this is exactly what the 'left' wing political parties should be doing about now. They always say they can't get young people to vote. They always complain about losing to their opponents or what not.

Well, maybe actually saying they'll fix copyright laws, throw large corporations to the curb and actively fighting to reduce the term to a reasonable length may help with that. Show they're not corporate shills, and do something that younger people may actually support them with.

Is that enough on its own? Hell no, there are tons of things these parties need to do to win trust back. But it would be a great rallying point for them, and get a decent amount of support from internet folks and younger people.
I'm probably in the minority but I don't really understand the obsession with fiber. I have about a 25 Mbit connection at home and that's fine for remote work most of the time. My cable is sometimes a little wonky on video calls but that's not the end of the world. [And TBH people calling in from our offices have their own problems off and on as well.]

Marginal DSL like my dad has--maybe 1 Mbit--is indeed something of an issue for my working from his house. (Also marginal cell coverage.) On the other hand, I know someone who works remotely from home who just has a satellite connection.

Yes, having an internet connection is important. But I'm far less convinced of the incremental value of high-speed fiber.
What condemns nuclear is the stubborn lack of improvement it has shown.

Solar and wind have shown impressive and sustained improvement along so-called "experience curves". The cost of each has declined as a power law in cumulative installed capacity. This decline has been sustained while they've declined in cost by orders of magnitude (PV has improved in cost by more than a factor of 200 since the 1970s.)

Nuclear, in contrast, has been largely free of such sustained improvement. If anything, costs have increased with experience -- negative learning. The complexity and scale of nuclear appears to be such that learning effects are cancelled out.

And no, regulations are NOT the reason. That's the increasingly lame excuse nuclear fans confabulate to deal with the cognitive dissonance of their precious technology not actually living up to their fantasies about it. And as I've said elsewhere, if your complaint is that government doesn't let reactors meltdown enough, you might as well hang it up and go home. You are not going to win that one.
Well there is "privacy" in the sense of people not accumulating dossiers on you and then there is "privacy" as the "right to be left alone".

I see pop up messages that have to be dismissed as harassment, pure and simple.

Firefox has a chance to show it is different from Google but it harasses me just like Google and refuses to hire developers in the same 99% of the world that Google won't hire developers, why should I expect Firefox to be any different from Chrome?

Long-term the answer for us is a migration away from "The Google Platform" and towards Gopher, telnet BBSes, and anything else where hipsters fear to tread.
FYI: I've collected the best of tweets from two top crypto / blockchain critics. See Best of Bitcoin Maximalist - Scammers, Morons, Clowns, Shills & BagHODLers - Inside The New New Crypto Ponzi Economics [1] by Trolly McTrollface and Crypto Facts - Decentralize Payments - Efficient, Low Cost, Fair, Clean - True or False? [2] by Nouriel Roubini

[1]: https://bitsblocks.github.io/bitcoin-maximalist
[2]: https://bitsblocks.github.io/crypto-facts
our society is doomed when a 90 year old man refuses to bow to the moral authority of the press on matters of science
Japan: Stop Slaughtering Whales
That world doesn't exist anymore. Computers in the 80s was far smaller a field and had less societal impact. Today, pretty much every human in the developed one has access to a computer (a cell phone). The ecosystems are lot more closed today than they used to be.

I like what the other person posted (webpage) but it isn't obscure. I'd say compiling your own Android image and putting it on a phone.
I don't know your country's law but trademark is just the trademark. Trademark holder can't stop people from using the trademark word. They can stop calling the fake thing as the trademark word because it's not the thing trademark word refer to.

If it is indeed the Mickey Mouse from Steamboat Willie, then it's the Mickey Mouse.
Did not expect such a positive post on Sweden given the negativity floating around these days. I made the decision to move back from a higher paying position abroad a few years ago, and most of it due to the points you bring up. Plus I'm Swedish so I can deal with the weather. In the end, a lower stress existence is more important to me than maximizing my earnings.

A lot of the complaining you hear from Swedish people is because they haven't really experienced anything different. They have no idea how comfortable life is here (still). As a parent, I can barely fathom raising a child in the US for instance. Even the best companies will give you 4 months paid time off, if you're one of the lucky few working for FAANG. What the hell do you even do with a 4 month old after that time's up? They can't fucking even crawl yet. Not to mention the healthcare situation. The relief to just be able to walk into any hospital and just give your person number, and everything is just taken care of. No $20k bill because the hospital is out of your coverage or whatever.

The main thing worrying me today is like you say, the immigration and crime situation. The current crime wave is not because of recent immigration but because of earlier waves. I don't want to find out what happens when 200k refugees and (mostly) their disillusioned sons turn to crime in about 18 years. Hopefully we can figure this out before then.
It looks like a case of personal biases both misleading and bringing down a great scientist. It confirms that intelligence is not sufficient to protect against irrationality.

Aren't Watson's claims about IQ differences falsifiable? Either because the evidence he claims exists actually doesn't exist, or because the evidence exists but doesn't support his claims?

No one in the article directly falsified the claims ... they said things like it's “essentially guaranteed to be wrong" instead of "factually incorrect."
How could you win a Nobel and be so dumb and at the same time?
Which definition of ad requires it to be a paid placement? As far as I understand it the word advertisement is a pretty broad term. You could advertise for someone for free, perhaps because you have an existing relationship, or perhaps you could advertise for something other than monetary payment. It's an advertisement.

Worse, it's an advertisement, for a commercial service, in a place that I didn't want it to be. The last place I wanted something like that to be, really.
The original statement: “Why would the latter enable the former” sounds like it’s arguing against necessary as well. If the original post contained “imply” instead of “enable,” this line of reasoning would be sound.
The Chinese would check for 'illegal' pregnancies during the days of the one-child policy. They would use a solid state x-ray emitter as a source of radiation and a passive fluorescent screen, both probably because there was no reliable electrical power available and this is a very cheap to manufacture setup. The dose emitted would be quite high due to the insensitivity of the screen, the degradation over time of the source (requiring a higher than necessary quantity of radioactive material at the start to get a long useful operating life) and the duration, on the order of seconds.

I've tried to find a video of this but alas, no luck. The one I remember seeing was extremely primitive, safety was basically non-existent, both for the woman being screened (and her unborn child, quite possibly to be aborted anyway if detected) and the operator of the device.
Education is not the issue, in my experience - career opportunities are.

I work remotely and live in a rural area. To get my career to the point where I could reliably find remote work, I moved to Charlottesville, VA for five years.

Meanwhile, of the 20 or so people I’ve tracked down with two-year degrees intended to train them for tech jobs, exactly zero have done so. The primary problem that I see is that no one wants to hire a remote junior developer. Senior, sure, but never junior.
I've just moved to Denmark, and pretty much both the positives of the original article and the points you've highlighted also hold true here.
If you can afford to, go buy a car before absolutely needed, get a Costco quote, go to the dealer and tell them that’s what your willing to pay, and keep saying no to whatever the financing person says. If they get annoying, walk out and find another dealership and hand them the Costco quote, and repeat. Should be done with whole process in 2 to 3 hours with minimal stress.

This is if you don’t want to play the haggling game. But I feel like most sought after cars don’t really have much haggle room anyway since they are so in demand, might as well save a few hours of your life and just walk in with the Costco quote the dealer has agreed to.

I avoid trading in and all that nonsense, that’s when dealers get to start playing games. I just prefer to run the car into the ground, give it away to family, or if I want a luxury car just lease it and return it.
Now that Mickey is out it should be easier. Disney was one of the most powerful lobbies for extension largely because of the mouse.
Hacker news is in bed with corrupt silicon valley billionaires

What despicable machines you have created

I have information that hurts billionaire friends of yours.

Not enough cooperation with corrupt globalist/corporate interests and the United States. Wise up or you will be wised up
Ask HN: Best book for an overview of deep learning applications?
Hi HN, one of my goals for 2019 is to get more hands on with deep learning. I’m looking for a resource that covers the different applications of deep learning, such as time series forecasting, text analysis, reinforcement learning, and anomaly detection. I’m not looking for code samples, but instead an understanding about how to go about designing networks when facing different types of problems.
How I Built the PixelPerfect CSS Game
What's the story with the Pirate Party in US? I wouldn't call this a "left" or "right" issue even. Those terms aren't descriptive of this problem.
maybe the point is not to be overly functional but some sort of art trail that people hop on/hop off normal PT in between cafes and galleries etc. for a small town, even a few hundred tourists per month on weekends can make a huge difference to the economy. maybe someone else who knows the area could comment on the route.
For me, when technology trudges along it's in response to some sort of use. E.g. solid-state data storage started out being used in exotic situations like flight recorders. Later came camera usage. It evolved over the decades to become dominant in phone and laptop storage; perhaps eventually it will drive spinning-rust storage out of existence.

What are the equivalent real-world use cases for blockchain tech that are a) delivering economic value not achievable by other technologies, and b) are paying for sustained innovation?
What is missing today is not superb music, it's the dynamic the brought excellence together permitting its fusion and the evolution of a re-enforceing and self-perpetuating identity.

The huge empowerment to make and distribute music today, as wonderful as it is, has led to an overwhelming abundance that dilutes excellence and prevents it from coming together to reinforce itself and perpetuate its creation.

There must be wonderful music out there, but I'll never hear it. Sigh!
Bandersnatch Life – An Interactive Website for Bandersnatch
Many pilots fly freight — passenger aircraft pilots are a subset of all pilots. And passenger aircraft incidents are exceedingly rare, although I agree individual pilots can have outsized impacts on lives in passenger applications.
ouuf that's depressing
> In response to questions from The Times, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.”
Have a contrary view? I would love to read it. Sell me.
If you want an example of fake news they have refused to provided proof and context of his statement

"Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

He's also an old man. 90 years old. If you think you're 100% there on all fronts at 90 you're as awful as someone who picks on children for making mistakes.

This bullshit search for a outrage culture has to stop.
I've taken a step back from crypto-startup news in 2018. Are there any bright spots? Interesting projects to follow?
Also curious about this, and in particular what the alternatives to shortish-term consulting could look like.

A model I've been wondering about is offering longish-term contracts to build/support/maintain some capability. Perhaps could be thought of as a kind of one-customer SAAS. Anyone tried a model like this?
We made one in Facebook messenger; people seemed to like it and it helped us grow our audience.
I’m currently at my third remote job. The first time, I was 29, newly single and I found it got old real fast. Moving back to an office environment was a major improvement for me. Fast forward 10 years, I’m married again, different living situation (in the city now) and I absolutely love the freedom and lifestyle of working remote again. There are a ton of factors involved but I suspect I’m not alone in finding remote work more appealing as I get older and more settled.
That's fair. My comment was more on leaving - if I already know that management is sane where I currently am, and I like my co-workers, I would think very carefully before leaving for more money.
I agree with you that immigration has generally been a good thing and that the vast majority of immigrants would not pose any problem. However, I'm not sure that it's fair to just ignore the fact that open borders could have serious complications that would need to be addressed.

If a large number of impoverished, unhealthy, or uneducated people moved to a country it could overwhelm the resources available to help them.

Increased population could overwhelm the availability of things like good jobs and housing.

Open borders may not be reciprocated.

Many people could move to the country for economic reasons but be uninterested in or unwilling to become part of the country's culture.

Many people could move to the country that do not value norms such as democracy, freedom, equality, etc.

There is a limit to how quickly society can adapt to cultural change. If too many people with a dramatically different culture moved to a country, it could cause unrest.
Another Nobel Laureate, William Shockley, reached the same conclusion and was similarly exiled. Shockley is also widely regarded as founding Silicon Valley.
Carmax feels a lot like dealing with Saturn dealerships. No haggling. Fairly simple process. Low pressure. I’m never buying from a dealership again.
Not wanted to deal with a dealership is the biggest reason I haven't bought a new car in a long time. Last time was such an awful experience.
> Cryptocurrencies is about divorcing money and state.

Is it though? I used to think that, but over the past couple years I've seen plenty of politics around governance of the future of cryptocurrency. Seems like everyone tried divorcing the two and ended up just creating a new state.
Blockchain tech and decentralization are orthogonal.
I don't know why I love tower-defense games so much, but I think it might be because playing feels like programming. Nearly every TD game I've played is deterministic; in fact, I think random gameplay elements would ruin the appeal. That means the challenge of the game is not being lucky or twitchy, but rather figuring out the rules and how to optimally apply them. That's also what I like about programming.
The problem is that they are corporate shills. There are quite a few things I wish the Democratic party would do that I'd support, and lots of them they did historically. Even if they were still actually pushing anti-war, freedom of speech, and related things then that would be fantastic, but lately they seem to tow the same line as the Republicans on those issues.
I never said that it was not genocide. I said that Native Americans were not a faction.
UI lit by the lights in your room – Bob Burrough
Soon relative to the never it was looking like a few years ago.
Most modern Batman stories don't seem to contain Robin or joker.
The LinkedIn angle doesn't contribute to the other points, and even as framing it doesn't help. While the stuff put on there may be fictitious and the interactions with it are just signalling, it doesn't relate to the observation that many people seem to place a higher significance on their work than just a paycheck, or that they expect some degree of fulfillment, a chance to make an impact, or an opportunity to leverage their experience and relationships for later gain.

This mainstream self-actualization of work is probably an artifact of knowledge work moving from the domain of the intellectual elites towards the masses, which broadened the prospects of people beyond working on the fields or factories for a lifetime. Two generations of this during an economic boom created a recipe that was immortalized in culture, but didn't work as well this time, and the ones who were spoonfed the dogma are still reeling from the bust, while the ones who were rich enough or lucky enough have made it through fine. The angst about the lack of job-related fulfillment transcends generations, but it mixes with the realization that they likely can't leverage their job experience and relationships to advance forward. And despite all the armchair economists repeating the refrain that the economy is not zero sum, people aren't blind and know that their relative losses to their peers affect their future prospects and likely stunt them for life.

Nonetheless, we shouldn't conflate intellectual fulfillment with financial security, and their respective lack thereof. People earning well who feel professionally unfulfilled have options to find something they like more, without the crushing pressure of needing uninterrupted income. And those engaged in fulfilling work with tangible impacts can get paid peanuts; in these cases it's often their emotional attachment to their work that keeps them going. It's most unfortunate when the two conditions coincide. But it should also not come as a surprise, as there's no morality in the economic system itself; rather, all money being paid out is coming from somewhere else, because somewhere someone thinks it's where it should go. The people in bullshit jobs wish they were in control, but control is harder to come by than money. Others on a different tier of Maslow's just wish for money, and so on.