skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A similar 'experiment' with similar results is landing page optimization. You want to be very clear what you're trying to communicate and what you want the visitor to do with as few distractions as possible.

It turns out the same types of optimizations that you make on a landing page are good UI/UX features for past-middle-aged people to use. Computers don't have to be hard, we just put everything on the screen and have the user sort through what each thing does and whether it's in or out of context for the current action.
The 2016 election? Both the Democratic front-runner and the nearest also-ran not only had campaign finance reform prominently in their platforms (each with a full page devoted to the issue on their websites) but also brought it up during the debates.

https://www.npr.org/2016/02/06/465781632/fact-check-clinton-...
Sync3c: Go tool to sync/download media from media.ccc.de
i'd think there would be very little erosion in interstellar space, even over billions of years.

"Perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them.

Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all human beings will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms.

Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on."

- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
From the article:

> A good estimation of p(x) makes it possible to efficiently complete many downstream tasks: sample unobserved but realistic new data points (data generation), predict the rareness of future events (density estimation), infer latent variables, fill in incomplete data samples, etc.

To give an example, we use generative models for model-based reinforcement learning. Basically, RL algorithms have relatively poor sample efficiency. They require a lot more data than supervised learning for a number of reasons. Rather than train an agent against real data, which is limited, we train a generative model using supervised learning and use the model to simulate real data—either using the generated outputs or the latent representations. This covers several of the author's described use cases.
It’s not all or nothing. While a takedown is bad (and illustrative of some real problems in Saudi.) Netflix having a presence in Saudi let’s them spread their media and worldview into that country/culture. Unilaterally disengaging just gives Saudi people less access to a roughly liberal and western source of culture.

What we (speaking as a fan of western still liberalism and rule of law) in the west need is to be better able to provide a full throated explanation and defense of our principles and value prop. There seems to be a very real movement toward an alternative authoritarian world view based on the promise of prosperity and stability through social control, social control that takes full advantage of the enormous surveillance and monitoring capabilities of modern technology.
This brings to mind a great Futurama scene:

> Fry: How many atmospheres can this ship withstand?
> Farnsworth: Well it's a spaceship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one
I’ll address the elephant in the room:

Primary use case currently: moving money/value to somewhere or someone that some centralized entity doesn’t want you to move it to.

That covers real world uses from skirting high remittance fees to the infamous dark net markets.
As I'm sure you're aware, there's a thing called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which predicts that people with less knowledge are more confident in their grasp of the situation than people who really do know what's going on. Reading your comments makes me wonder if perhaps you might want to reflect on whether you've seen 10,000 psychiatric patients on the in-patient wards. If not, I'm guessing you may want to revisit the possibility that the thousands of psychiatrists and nurses on the floors, who have invested their lives in caring for the sick might have a better appreciation for the signal-to-noise ratios that matter in the present topic of discussion.

It seems you consider yourself wise. If that's true, I suspect you will recognize the value of at least projecting humility in the face of the cummulative lifetimes of effort others have invested in a problem.
The enforcement of copyright laws is something that is paid for with public funds and resources (indeed, the courts themselves) even though a small fraction of the population recieves any direct benefit.

The burden of proof should be on copyright holders to explain why the state furthers the public good by requiring the courts (and police, customs, etc.) to enforce these laws.

Legally in the United States, the power to establish copyright is in the constitution: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

This makes indefinite copyright unconstitutional.
> pretend nothing happened

Sure, but in the hull of the spacecraft that's leaking my air away, I'd still put a wad a chewing gum in the hole to patch it.
When I use Safari on macOS I find myself misclicking tabs more often than I'd like to admit. It's like I have to stop and actively process what I'm selecting, which has never happened to me before in a browser. The all-gray UI is such a downgrade for me. [0]

[0] http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/image/107150709190
Not sure. But they provide a service called Caller ID that purports to identity callers but can be trivially spoofed by people scamming their customers. Moreover, caller ID used to actually work (IE couldn't be trivially spoofed), so customers might have a reasonable expectation that it still does work. It's the telco's responsibility to present accurate caller information to customers.
> The long run trend is very obviously toward a single government

Is it? I believe there are far more countries now than 30 years ago.

We seem to have some more powerful international organisations now than a century ago, but earlier than that we had world spanning empires, and Europe was less than 10 countries before WW1.

I want to believe that we're heading towards a star trek like unified post scarcity planet, but I'm unsure we're not just seeing a local trend.
Maybe they could torrent Wikipedia from academictorrents.com and they could have the offline copy?
Motivational videos by Erik Wernquist:
New Horizons (for National Space Society): https://vimeo.com/132183032

Wanderers: https://vimeo.com/108650530

Casino's Grand Finale ( for JPL) : https://vimeo.com/210782375
It would be nice to see a visual diff vs Courier or Courier New, particularly for development purposes.
Trademark is actually more narrow than that. It is a "logo or brand name" used in the identification of the source of a good:

https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-getting-started/trademark-b...

What Is a Trademark or Service Mark and How Do They Differ From Patents and Copyrights?

A trademark is a brand name. A trademark or service mark includes any word, name, symbol, device, or any combination, used or intended to be used to identify and distinguish the goods/services of one seller or provider from those of others, and to indicate the source of the goods/services.
You might be interested in Times Newer Roman. [1] It's like Times New Roman, but 5-10% wider so enables you to write 13% fewer words.

[1] https://timesnewerroman.com/
If you lift the images of the strange mouse/person hybrid directly from Steamboat Willy, I would expect that to be legal. But I'm not sure if you could draw your own or not, could Disney have a trademark on the general likeness of the mouse man? I couldn't say. That said, parody/fair use would probably cover your ass for that in practice.
I suspect there's actually quite a market to develop such UI for. Given a service that standardizes UI over a wide array of applications (web apps, mobile apps, desktop apps), I bet there's a large enough market for it.

Implementation would be interesting and most likely quite hard to achieve, though.
Can you provide a link to some evidence of how it "devastated the local economy"?
It's a spin-7 particle called the Fortuna particle. It is its own anti-particle, but it's metastable. You're likely thinking of the decay paths.

For historical reasons, the three decay particles are called "good", "bad", and "random" luck, occurring at 0, 2 pi/3, and 4 pi/3. The particle interferes with itself, causing the anti-good luck particle to appear as a superposition of the "bad" and "random" particles. (The Feynman diagram for this looks like a fractal three-leaf clover.)

Preferential generation of bad luck particles can be done via the Jack of Diamonds decay mechanism. It's the easiest one to induce as it can be done optimally with a diffraction grating with 40, 52, or 54 slits, about 0.3 mm apart.

There's a risky method to create good luck particles by a shooting 26 bad luck particles at the moon, but otherwise we don't know how to create the other particles.
Right, I get that they have to lead the company. But if other parts of the company are doing well, and engineering is struggling, and they have key insights into how the software was built, and why it was better, it would seem they would be in the perfect spot to lead the engineering team to a better place. They are the subject matter experts, and it seems like this app, whatever it is, is key to your business. And they previously made it successful. But you said they don't want to touch it with a 10-ft pole. This just doesn't add up.
Yes, 200, but China, India, US, EU (ok, bit of a stretch there), Brazil and Indonesia is about half of the world's population.
the biology, origin and culture of who built it might be interesting.
Doctors don't become 'mister' the day they stop practicing, that's also a title you keep for life.
One Year with Flutter: My Experience
I tried to get into Scala a little while ago, but I couldn’t quite grok the language - there was a time where I wanted to pull out a nested function call (e.g. f(g(x))) into a variable and it gave me compile errors (there might have been implicit a involved; I just backed away slowly). Something about that just completely put me off from the language. Maybe it’s worth another go. Have they done any kind of syntax cull since 2-3 years ago?

I’m curious about the choice of Azure. Why that over AWS/GCP?
South Carolina 2018 Ballot Image JSON
Why? An LLP is supposed to be for lawyer partnerships, dental practices, etc. and has all sorts of limitations a ltd company doesn't.

You can't sell equity in an LLP being a big, obvious, one, so basically you can't raise money.
Who needs nukes when you can send an autonomous drone swarm to subjugate a country? Or develop an ethnic bio weapon to wipe out your enemies with no damage to infrastructure? Nukes will be seen as primitive brute force weapons in the future
The same public good the Brothers Grimm contributed, and that Disney made great use of.

Share and share alike, otherwise it's pulling the ladder up, rather selfish, and a theft from all of us.

Copyright was never intended to be infinite. Every work is derivative. When we don't return works to the public domain, culture gets stale, owned by big players.

Rambo 13, 14, 15...

Rip, mix, burn has lowered the bar for creation. When we do that, and expand the pool of works to draw from, we empower people to add to culture outside the big players and whatever boardroom vision they may have.
Fair Use Continued to Bear the Weight of Protecting Speech and Innovation
"Click Me" is what the title should be.
Exactly. And one of the reasons why I think NPR is different from other things I can listen to is the lack of ads. I know there's placement and sponsorship, but they don't have other ads spliced in (usually at a much louder volume, with random noises and music and ways to get attention) that easily wake me up.
It was more effective than just grounding would have been, since it had a certain fairness to it. He also helped me apply the putty, and gave half my pocket money back after it was fixed "because the jar was still half full", which is kind of funny in retrospect.

It's probably easier to create teaching moments when your kid does something negligent or thoughtless, rather than downright malicious.
And yet, GitHub hasn't become (and is unlikely to become) the single repository of ALL software in the world. Clearly, there's a counter-balancing force (sovereignty, innovation etc). To call centralization as "efficient" is to ignore these valuables.
See https://fairuse.stanford.edu/case/klinger-v-conan-doyle-esta...

I would expect drawings based solely on thr Steamboat Willy work to be okay. The sequels start new timers on new characters or qualities, they don't extend the copyright on the original work. of course, IANAL.
>But there’s no reason Courier has to look terrible.

With such small modifications (afaict) it seems odd to claim/imply that it goes from "terrible" to great (or whatever). I like the "y" descender tho. And more Unicode support is basically always good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courier_(typeface)

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/courier

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/courier-prime
tl;dr, It was a light-hearted ironic idea, not some statement on the impending downfall of human civilization

"that the whole earth somehow is a balanced system, were it not for greedy humans"

This was in no way implied by what I said!

I think the word balance is justified here, the word I got wrong was ecology (I meant climate, but it was late, and I didn’t expect such a defensive response to my joke,…).

Either way, both the climate and ecology of earth work by balancing conflicting interests and drivers. food chains, carbon cycles, etc.. all are based on interlocking processes that combine to create a system that is stable at a macro level (Of course localized factors can make things seem much less stable). But on the whole, these systems are balanced. Things periodically come along and upset that balance, and it takes a while for the system to adjust and re-balance, typically with a result that is different from before.

My point was that it would be ironic if ANY civilisation got to the level where it could alter these systems meaningfully, but by doing so, and not understanding what/how they were doing things, created a situation where not only were they wiped-out, but also all trace of their technology was wiped-out too.

I accept that this exact scenario is extremely unlikely, as our current models predict that in these situations, at least some of the population would survive due to those localized factors, but the civilisation could easily be destroyed by sudden and climactic shifts.

It's unclear (to the best of my knowledge) if we would expect the historical record of such a thing to be carried by these people, but a lot of the detail of our knowledge of roman and pre-roman times(1,000s years, not millions) has been derived from archeological records, so it's not unreasonable to assume that if Ice were to scour all hard evidence of such things from the surface of the earth, then the knowledge of such may die out or become so garbled that it ceases to be believed.

Of course there /are/ parallels with the situation modern humans find ourselves in. I think there's little doubt that what we do has an effect on the balance of the world's climate and ecological systems (you eat a chicken, that has affected the food chain by an infinitesimal amount), but how much impact we will have, and our ability to comfortable adapt to any resulting changes would require a much longer response, and isn’t relevant to my original post at all :)
Absolutely. It's Disney's turn. Everyone has one. Keeping all that static serves all of us poorly.

Who knows what may come? That's the point. That MADE Disney, BTW.

And Disney will be just fine. It's the little guy somewhere who has a vision that won't be, unless we allow the same process to play out again.
This article is making a big legal mistake I think... You should be free to make a Mickey Mouse doll with modern colors and white gloves after Steamboat Willie enters the public domain because those would be derivative works (of the original). The colors of the character's clothes can certainly be trademarked but after the initial copyright expires any and all color combinations should be fair game (legally speaking).

If this were not the case the entire body of case law on derivative works would be turned on its head. The entire point of derivative works law is that there's an original that everything else is based on. If the original is public domain any variation thereof is also public domain from that point forward except for exact replicas.

Meaning: You can produce all the Mickey Mouse stuff you want as long as you're not literally copying something that's still under copyright. Mickey Mouse dolls are fine as long as your artwork wasn't literally copied & pasted.
>Interview is a 2-way process and it seems a lot of people have bought into some of the kool aid.

What too many people choose to forget or ignore is employment itself (at least in CA) is a 2-way process. The employer is not doing you a favor by employing you, despite how many people have drank the kool-aid to the contrary. You and the company have entered into a mutually beneficial agreement. Unfortunately, many people don't have the means or desire to walk away when an employer veers into "you should be thankful we let you work here" territory.
It's misleading actually because unincorporated territories or completely unmanaged or ungoverned groups could be counted in a "sultinate" and it would effectively mean nothing.

Much how King Arthur, Lord of the Britains was not known to the members of the anarcho-syndicalist commune.
Ask HN: What happened to the monthly Seeking Freelancer thread?
It was posted a few hours ago but is marked "dead" now.
>Is there a way for people to learn to be good negotiators?

There’s some great channels on YouTube showing real negotiations, not just theory. Check out https://www.youtube.com/user/CollinRocka
How does this square with the principle of shareholder primacy and Dodge v Ford?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
I feel really old now that I realize we aren't talking about IMAP servers. Also slightly let down, since that would have been a fun blast from the past.
Interesting... makes you wonder why people don't raise the pardon as a counter example to Trump's wall.
You could just open it in reader view or in pocket/instapaper
I'm a fan of clean design, which is most definitely not flat.

The trouble is UI and UX stopped being anything about productivity and became simply empty fashion.

iOS 6 was an excess of 3D shine and starburst effects, and skeuomorphism excess like news looking like a set of library or newsagent shelves. Mitigate some of that and the UI would have been lovely. And finished.

Since iOS 7 the excess flatness detracts from usability and discoverability. I still feel the camera icon looks annoying wrong and bland, as do settings, photos, calendar, passbook, compass, safari. Games and Passbook are determinedly unrepresentative of anything at all, just random blobs of colour conveying nothing at all.

Still, on the plus side MacOS and iOS have not followed through with the excess of bland extreme flatness that is Windows 10. That still seems to want to push the propaganda of a phone GUI on the desktop that started in 8. Several years of regular use and I still hate it at every touch. Even adding every tweak I can find to make it more like 7 and it's still a significant step back from 7, and two headed in typically Windows fashion in that settings are partly in apps partly in old control panel. Usually control panel is required for basics that for some reason aren't felt necessary to allow configuration of any more. Never a complete transition from one to other.

After all this progress? I find the app based settings worse in every respect, and perfectly typifies the ethos. Fixing a ton of things that were not, in any respect, broken. I guess they knew that or they'd have continued to permit theming. :)
Personally, I wouldn't bother. If you're dealing with reputable companies, just make sure the contract / license agreement clarifies what IP you own and what they're allowed to do with it. Most companies aren't going to blatantly violate a contract like that. And if you're dealing with less than reputable companies... stop doing that?
I'm not a screenwriter, but Courier Prime Code/Sans seems very interesting. Have to try it out on my various screens.

The italics are a bit distracting. The subjective tilt of letters seem to vary, e.g. 'j' and 'l' may be have the same tilt but the 'l' appears more vertical (as does 'i'). Also the tilt on the center line of 'e' seems weird to me, but that's perhaps an intentional stylistic quirk.
Typical example is iOS design (Traditional) vs Android (Flat).
Android design is a mess. Learn from iOS instead.
I’ve been reading through Sapiens lately and it lends some insight into the whole “was work ever meaningful”. My take is that basically once we got to the agricultural revolution, the answer has basically always been no.

We evolved to be hunter gatherers. Millions of years of evolution brought us there. Then in the recent thousands of years we found ourselves being repurposed for efficiency. But at the end of it, were spear throwing carnivores still. We just don’t have the physiology and mental wiring to be happy going into the same place for decades doing bs abstracted work.
From what I can tell (the video, ironically, was taken down) he said this in 1994, which was right at an inflection point. 10 years from there in either direction was a huge change. He'd just shipped the fastest 68k NeXT workstation they'd ever build. 10 years earlier was the original Macintosh, and 10 years later was the PowerMac G5. Obviously there's not going to be much compatibility across those systems.

The curve has flattened out, and the number of architectures has shrunk. I'm typing this on a 10-year-old computer, and it's running modern software just fine.

We're not building systems like we used to. We're taking maintainability into account. Performance is good enough that applications rarely publish hardware requirements. Continuing to assume that everyone is going to throw out their computer (and its entire architecture) in 5 years, so we might as well make developers rewrite everything, is just going to lead to a lot of frustrated developers. A little more care inside Apple could save a ton of time outside of it.

Apple is great at long-term thinking in some respects, and terrible in others.
> Do we have sufficient evidence that there is definitely no genetic aspect to intelligence

No, the evidence is pretty consistent that a little over half the variation in IQ is genetic.

That's not the part that is in dispute.

> It seems that the scientific community is willing to have an open dialogue about the possibility of some ethnic groups having HIGHER intelligence due to genetic reasons

Yes, that's also not in dispute.

That genetics play an important role in intelligence is known. That this sometimes aligns with identifiable ethnic groups is also known. But there is very good reason to believe at least most and likely all of the black-white IQ gap observed in the United States is due to environment, and particularly social/cultural environment, including race-based stereotypes and expectations.

Among the evidence for that is that the gap is largely eliminated for young black and mixed-race adoptees raised in white families (and also that some of it returns for older black and mixed-race adoptees.)

> We should also not write articles like this with condescending dismissal of the very idea as backwards and racist.

His specifix ideas, in light of the available evidence, are backwards and racist.