skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Real interest rates after inflation vary from negative (parts of Europe) to much more than 1-2%.

As long as real interest rates remain negative, it is clearly self-sustained.

Countries that control their own currencies can always negate all debt by printing money (through fractional easing).

However, if inflation starts to increase again, printing money is only a short term solution if there is a budget deficit. If the budget is run at a deficit in a high inflation scenario, printing more money will cause Venezuela style hyperinflation.

In the case of the US, it would be interesting to see how the government would react if the dollar was put under this kind of pressure. Early austerity would result in mass unemployment and heavily slashed welfare. Looser policies would create high inflation, cutting savings by half or more and also collapsing salaries for public sector employees.

Hopefully, the US would be able to avoid hyperinflation, but with the current tendency towards populsm (on both the left and the righ), I don't feel so sure anymore.
>> I believe that we will have a different President of the United States by the end of 2019. The catalyst for this change will be a devastating report issued by Robert Mueller that outlines a history of illegal activities by our President going back decades, including in his campaign for President.

I will only give weight-age to Mr.Wilson's prediction on this if he discloses whom he cast his Vote in 2016 and its not Hillary Clinton.

Also, if you have an annual tradition of forecasting the upcoming year, please also make it a tradition of evaluating your previous year's prediction.

Edit: Here are his predictions for 2018. Some he got right, but on lot of stuff he played it both ways and honestly expressed his lack of clarity.

https://avc.com/2018/01/what-is-going-to-happen-in-2018/
Having spent a fair bit of time looking into applications for gesture inputs (kinect and leap motion mostly) I can tell you the hardest part by far will the user experience design. Gestures are extremely unintuitive on their own. Users need really clear prompts and/or training to understand how to use them. And if you want to innovate and create new and subtle gestures as your product evolves, it only gets worse.

The leap motion is already pretty good and has some useful applications, but it's still very, very niche. The Soli looks like a real evolution of the technology in terms of both precision and how embeddable it is, but it's going to have the same challenges in user adoption. I'd expect this kind of thing to get more traction in industry than in people's homes.
I am speaking of public usage of data - there is a significant difference between a nosy neighbor noting your coming and going and the government doing so.

One is an annoyance and the other is a very abusable tool. Selective enforcement is a well known tool of power mongers. Point out malfeasance and get hit by harassment by rules ignored by and for everyone else.

If a nanite system could help detect high blood pressure oh and it can also cause a stroke by accident or at the push of a button it is not a good system. Just using other methods to get data would be far better. That is how it has no good use - any benefits could be obtained by a far less dangerous way.
I’m from an LA suburb. I’m able to get to Santa Monica/Culver City, LAX, and J-Town just with light rail and a free transfer depending on where I need to go. In terms of time efficiency, it’s comparable to driving (faster than driving/parking in rush hour but not as fast during off hours).

LA metro is dropping track like crazy and way more usable than it used to be. And it’s cheap. $1.75 each way or monthly pass.

Tl;dr it’s awesome now and getting better!
There still could be impact on trade, especially if we have a no-deal brexit.
Blobmaker
Sounds like a communication / planning problem. What is your process of planing and carrying out a project and are those processing being properly carried out?

It sounds like the engineering team don't have a clear vision of what they are supposed to build. This leads to them building the wrong thing. The people who wrote the initial brief don't see a problem with it but do see the engineering team struggle with the project, not knowing how to explain their vision they resort to micro-management.

Having a non engineering person trying to manage an engineering problem at a micro level will result in all the problems you describe. The developers are missing the big picture and will have to guess, redevelop, then test it on the non-engineering person, repeat until they say yes. This introduces bugs and tones of useless code.
> They don't mention in the article, but this was probably the first game to use sampled dialog from a motion picture

They do mention it, but not quite "sampled", unless the word has a different meaning to us.

> Synthesized speech was added to the game, using clips from the film. This was a first for Atari. Various familiar phrases were used in-game such as “Use The Force, Luke” and “Yahoo, you’re all clear kid!” are used to encourage the player, and of course add to the sense of “being there”.
I think London has a greater ridership (5m tube, 6m bus) than NY (5m subway, 3m bus - http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/). Buses really are the secret to how London gets around.
RenPy is the VN software that gave us, among others, DDLC and Katawa Shoujo.
I solved most of them using plain CSS except for the 7th puzzle, I had to right-click the solution canvas and view that within another tab so that I had access to the dev tools colour picker tool. Great puzzle though! Got me thinking about the possibilities of such projects.

A community run puzzle platform where people have to pay a few thousand Satoshi to play. Or simply a lottery style game that clocks out at midnight every day.
Calculated Risk: 10 Economic Questions for 2019
Dissecting Code Readability
Dedicated lanes don't do much to help; the capacity of virtually all city streets is limited by the capacity of the intersections, not the streets themselves.

Give buses priority at intersections, or even better build them dedicated overpasses if you want to see buses really move.
I imagine this could work with other jobs where disabled humans could augment a robot/drone e.g. security guard, house sitting.

But - of course - the human interaction component is probably the most fulfilling for the operator.
The real trick isn't just to start a blog it's too keep one running so you may use it for years to come. IMHO that's where most blogging systems fail.

WordPress got us close but revealed even push-button upgrades don't provide enough incentive to keep sites secure.

What we need are "upgrade incentives" which aren't centralized as outlined here: https://after-dark.habd.as/module/toxic-swamp/
Average 10-year-old has eaten 18 years' worth of sugar
Censorship isn't really a product. Also a website censoring itself vs an ISP censoring a website can be thought of as different actions. A website developing a hand sensor vs an ISP developing a hand sensor seem essentially the same. (Censor vs sensor pun not intended.)
Also, Caltrain stops going south from San Francisco five minutes after midnight. BART stops going north 25 minutes after midnight. At 25 after midnight all rail service out of San Francisco stops - which is 90 minutes before last call.

In New York City you have the LIRR, PATH, NJ Transit, Metro North, Amtrak and subway trains running all night.

It's true NYC subways started having problems in the past few years as ridership has grown and long-needed maintenance has been underfunded, but the politicians are (supposedly) fixing that.
A large percentage of Eurozone finance is based in London and while (whilst?) I’m not sure where this will land (FRA most likely), it seems likely to involve some dislocation in the short term. Of course it remains to be seen how much market access will exist and possibly more importantly what the hiring rules will be. Still, all of this will impact the Eurozone and has already made for a turbulent year.
Don't forget the corollary to Hanlon's razor, Grey's law which i think is far more applicable here:
'Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice'.

I'm not sure why others who respond think if something is old it isn't applicable, I suppose I'm on the X/millennial border so I don't get it though.
Don’t rob the self-learner that doesn’t have access to TAs, fellow students, and professors the ability to check their work, just because someone else doesn’t have the discipline to not abuse it.

Textbook solutions are good for those that aren’t in school, aren’t in formal programs and have no other way of receiving feedback.

The “you should know if you’re right” mentality doesn’t necessarily fit a person that’s been working for 10-years and has been out of the academic mindset. One that is a beginner and could easily fool themselves into thinking they have a correct answer.

It doesn’t allow for correction of false thinking. Anyone can think their proof is correct. But fewer beginners can properly recognize when they are wrong.

This sort of mentality is a bit elitist and gate keeping.
This article does a good job explaining why they were overhyped: https://blog.growthbot.org/chatbots-were-the-next-big-thing-...

Basically, people were too occupied with the fancy technology, and forgot about actually solving problems. People want to get things done, and clicking and choosing options in a GUI is already an very efficient way of doing so.

When they want to do more complex things, we don't want to talk to a chatbot, only to eventually get an useless response like "Sorry, we can't do that request online. Please call us" (if I wanted to call someone, I wouldn't be using you!)
Might be demographic differences but every college campus I've been to in California had about 50% macs
They can do what our more courageous laborer brethren did back in the 20th century: Organize and engage in collective bargaining. It's the only way out for the lot of us.
Rich people tend to have asset outside their home country. Those assets tend to be hard to do things with.

Poor people have all their assets inside their country.

This is why poor people are more affected.

As an example, think of a person who owns a building in another country. Kinda hard to tax. Especially if you don’t know it exists.
> I take my statistic back, Saudia Arabia ranked no.3 for executions last year.

Clearly they need to step up their game.

But seriously, if this one episode of Hasan Minhaj is the only thing on Netflix that's censored in Saudi Arabia, I'd be very surprised.
I'm sorry, dang. I appreciate your work here. I like to use farce to point out what I see as inconvenient truths. I can accept that they're not welcome here.
I would recommend playing around with https://www.firecalc.com/ as it seems to be a pretty customizable calculator.
Great resource, though I wish it was available as an EPUB (or MOBI, or AZW3).
I've hit some real walls with OpenSCAD though. Trying to create a 1000x1000 point mesh for example will blow up pretty much any machine. That's not an outrageous size for a large textured surface.
Ask HN: Any suggestions for new laptop?
I recently received a gift card over the holidays and would like to get a new laptop. I have not bought one myself in many years because I typically just use the one I received from work. All-in I'd probably be willing to spend $1500 (maybe a bit more, but not much) and was curious if you had any suggestions.

As far as use goes, I do some development/coding (mostly Python - either to create websites and/or to perform data analysis with pandas/numpy/matplotlib) as well as some design. I am not as good at design as I am at development, but I do enjoy it (e.g., I play around with Inkscape, like to try to design nice looking websites, etc.). I like Linux, but would be willing to consider macOS.

A couple of other notes:

- I recently got a Dell XPS 13 for work and am not a fan (the keyboard is awful and several windows apps that I use don't display well on the 4K screen).
- I use iPhone and my wife has a mac at home, so I am not completely unfamiliar with Apple machines.
- I would like a laptop (not desktop) as I travel a bit and want to be able to bring it with me.

Thanks for any suggestions!
Service Orchestration and Service Choreography
I'm guessing this uses a vpn loopback?
Netflix Hires Activision CFO
The post's title different from the article's title : "Why the West Coast Is Suddenly Beating the East Coast on Transportation". Anyone else seeing different titles?

Also, the article is nothing but PR for the NYC transportation commissioner. Of course the NYC commissioner is going to say X is beating NYC because she wants more funding. She could have gone to Boise, Idaho and came back with similar story.

Electric scooters and a couple of test rides in self driving cars means the west coast is beating the east coast on transportation. Really? NYC metro area by itself outshines the entire west coast when it comes to public transportation. I couldn't take this article seriously. There is certainly room for improvement and investment in the NYC metro area, but what's the point of "east coast vs west coast" comparison that is simply not true.
Bystander Effect:Neuroscientist shows how brain dehumanises the homeless [video]
The Go effect after 7 years with Java
Solutions are to questions as tests are to software. For me they offer peace of mind no matter how sure I am.
This looks beautiful!
Is the engine available as a library?
>There's really no easier way to express "double newline" in Rust than this thing which requires that the reader parse a "lazy static", a parametrized type, an explicit type conversion and a library utility? Why not?

The code doesn't express 'double newline'. That would be just the "\r\n\r\n".as_bytes()

The code lazily initializes an TwoWaySearcher to parse such double newlines.
Nice. I did a classical animation demo [0] for a product that we worked on a few years ago and was surprised by how much we could achieve by simply following general advice. Although I wouldn't recommend anyone going down the path of classical animation for their product demos, the excursion surely made an impact on me.

[0] https://bubblin.io/cover/demo-in-sixty-seconds-by-marvin-dan...

Edit: Added a link.
If you know some basics deep learning, you can find source code on github to play with. You will also find tutorials made by communities of developers and users.

Otherwise, if you look deep enough on the Internet, there are already websites offering deepfake as-a-service for a rather low price.

Not all these tools were developed for malicious purposes. Quite the opposite. But today it is up to everyone of us how this tech get utilised. And while it's becoming easier and cheaper to get realistic synthetic imagery, with better tools day by day, it is not yet obvious how we will cope with fake videos in our society.
Unpopular opinion, but part of the problem is that stupid people are more likely to have kids, and especially many kids. Stupid people become stupid parents.
Interestingly, the clear image we think we see with our eyes is very much an illusion (or rather: best effort reconstruction). The area our eyes can see sharp in high resolution is tiny, and our peripheral vision is mostly greyscale. Yet we think we see everything sharp in full color.

A similar thing may happen with mental images. You "see" the pirate, but unless you are looking at the trousers you can't tell their color (the same would work with a real life pirate in front of you)
If that where true China would happily jump on the nuclear bandwagon. Instead, they use minimal Nuclear because the basic cost of running a nuclear power plant reasonably safely can’t become really cheap.

Nuclear in China is 40.6 GW vs 290GW or so total power production. They are adding 14 GW but these things take time so the ratio will stay about the same. Meanwhile they are ramping up wind and solar extremely quickly with a stated goal of 1,300 GW of peak solar capacity by 2050 which they are on pace to reach. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China
Straight out of the John Scalzi novel! Our science fiction writers need to adjust to the quickening pace at which their ideas are turned into reality.
I suspect that the amount of learning required is overestimated and avoided just due to it being an unknown. It shouldn't be much more than learning to use SQLite or PostgreSQL for the first time on another platform.

One thing I'm really looking forward to, and beginning to see is the bridging of the Linux and MS worlds. I'm sure one you've done it, you could write a great blog post for others who didn't realize that this could be easily done.
How to Build a Non-Blocking REST API Using Vert.x – Kotlin/Coroutines – Keycloak
Could easily be both. Turning a profit by making use of people who were previously less useful? It's a capitalist's dream.
The competition has a different goal and focus, and what you miss out on in return is an abosolute focus on video playback quality and correctness, which vlc seems to have a reputation for falling behind on compared to mpv. For example vlc doesn't have colour management functionality
PGP printed their code in a book and exported that. The clarified matters and the courts ruled that source code was protected by the First Amendment. This is still true unless the courts overturn precedent.
Ah whoops. Still it highlights a clear legitimate if relatively niche use.
Say goodbye to the cold, hard cash in your pocket (AU)
Large parts of the U.S., Japan and Canada all have good nuclear. Gates' has always been about pushing research in the area to get better nuclear, which he outlines clearly in this note.
There’s a reason Cynthia Nixon’s campaign emphasized the subway: Cuomo was uninterested in maintaining it, aside from scant, hollow PR moments.
I've worked quite a bit with Dart on my time the past year and it was great. Being a JS/TS developper I found my mark pretty quickly. However as it's not _that_ popular and the online resources (be it SO questions or articles) are a bit scarce and the most recent one are usually centered around Flutter and not just Dart.
I'll keep playing with it and if the possibility would occur I'd happily work full time with Dart.
On the one hand, giving disabled people some activity that helps them be independent and care for themselves sounds great!

On the other hand, the idea that this could become a weapon against disabled people (why are you staying on benefits? go out and get a job for yourself, you lazy paraplegic!) is... scary.

Especially given that it sounds mostly like a marketing gimmick, and that the very thing allowing them to interact with the world is not their own, but property of the store owners - i.e. they can't take the robot and move to a different caffe, they are tied to the benevolence of their boss.

Overall, this is much more distopic than utopic, and should be discouraged in this form; but the technology is interesting and could be an asset in the lives of many people.
> the difference in bootrapping between PoW and PoS is in PoS, a hash of a block is also needed from a trusted third party.

so far so good...

> In both cases, a trusted third party is needed

wait, what? when did that thing sneak into your argument? why do i need trusted party for PoW?
I just signed up for a free OnShape account a month ago. Has something changed since then?
Old brick industrial buildings, the sort that get turned into exposed-beam loft style workplaces or condos. The front exteriors often have a bit of ornamental stonework. Nothing baroque, but just enough to make the exterior interesting and attractive.

When designed the architects probably weren't paid to mess about putting in useless impractical things, because these were workplaces.

For example, the buildings on Chicago's Printers Row (From 525 S. Dearborn south)
2019 market outlook roundup
> It's very rare not to need GCD reduction, though

Yes good point, I did wonder this... it's easy to look at the individual operations and think "that's cheap" but holistically, the GCD which I assume is expensive could make the overall performance benefits moot. It might be optimisable to not do it unnecessarily after _every_ operation though?

Perhaps then the only advantage in terms of hardware use is that it can be implemented on a CPU with only ints e.g small micro-controllers with no FPU or int divide. I think that by comparison implementing a soft FPU would be impractical, still niche I guess.
>If I could buy fusion 360 for $1000

Why would it be that cheap? Fusion 360 is competing with SolidWorks. A standalone license for SolidWorks probably starts at $4000.

For any comparable commercial 3D parametric mechanical CAD system just the B-rep modeling kernel alone represents several hundred person years of commercial development going back 30 to 40 years, and academic research going back 50 years.

The Fusion 360 kernel is ShapeManager [0], forked from ACIS 7.0 in November 2001.

Work on ACIS [1] started in 1985 after the 3 founders (Ian Braid, Charles Lang, Alan Grayer) left ShapeData having worked on Romulus.

Romulus [2] was released in 1978 and was based on BUILD 2.

BUILD 2 and before that BUILD were created by Ian Braid during his PhD thesis started in 1969 and supervised by Charles Lang. [3]

Now, what about SolidWorks?

The SolidWorks kernel is Parasolid [4], dating from 1987, which was a C dialect rewrite of Romulus, which was written in Fortran. ACIS, by the way, was written in C++, so was one of the first commercial systems written in C++.

How do I know the above? I worked on Parasolid 1989 to 1995. We had 20+ devs then - department head count was 40+. The still have lots of devs working 30 years later.

There's only one comparable open-source B-rep modeling kernel - Open CASCADE, that powers FreeCAD. But quality wise, IMO comparing it with Parasolid, ACIS or ShapeManager is a bit like comparing Lucene with Google or Bing.

CGAL that powers OpenSCAD is high quality - but it's a very different beast, and not something you could use to power Fusion etc.

Why is B-rep modeling so much work? Here are some reasons:

* B-rep models are inherently complicated graph based data-structures with many different node types (geometry and topology). Just keeping the model consistent is a lot of work.

* Lots of surface and curve types means lots of combinations for surface X surface, surface X curve, curve X curve intersection/distance/... algorithms.

* Tolerant modeling.

* Topology case analysis from hell for blending.

* Hybrid b-rep modeling with other approaches, meshes, volumetric etc. and make it work properly.

* Feature-based history modeling layered on top of b-rep modeling means that your b-rep operations must replay EXACTLY the same, even when you upgrade the kernel.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShapeManager

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACIS

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus_(b-rep_solid_modeler)

[3] http://solidmodeling.org/awards/bezier-award/i-braid-a-graye...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid
> Kubernetes' reputation is just the opposite: that far from being a simple and useful thing, it's an overengineered, overcomplicated solution to a self-inflicted problem (deploying a distributed monolith).

Thats why companies pay the buck to get 24/7 support. Because its that good!
The princeton algorithm site has solutions for some of their exercises. Also they have online lectures as well along with animations, visualizations, etc. It's an excellent resource for those who want to learn algorithms.

https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/
I figure the only reliable way to extract gesture intents is to define them abstractly (as a set of drawings or what have you), have a large number of people try to execute them, and then design/learn the detector based on that.