skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is it safe to backup a database by just straight copying its files?

ZFS snapshots are atomic. Recovering from a snapshot is the same as recovering from a loss of power. All serious databases don't acknowledge commits until either the transaction log or the container is synced to disk and can handle an unexpected loss of power/reboot/system crash without significant data loss.

However, it is absolutely better to put the database into some kind of backup/write-suspend mode when taking the snapshot.
Am I the only one who found this to be very poorly written? Its like the author keeps telling me how cool and mysterious this story is, why doesn't he just tell me the story and I'll decide if its mysterious or not?

"Like a handful of random jigsaw-puzzle pieces, each one was incomprehensible without an understanding of the larger picture."

He keeps going on about how unrelated these events are, and how mysterious it is they are happening all over the world - well if you don't know whats going on of course you will not know that two things are related?!
Why do we try children as adults for certain crimes?

It’s just a magic line. 17? No consequences. 18? Full adult.
I think it's just becoming more and more obvious how f*cked up Facebook business practices are and how little they care about the implications.

That's probably what causes this spike in "look what they did NOW".
I know this could be overcome by me being less lazy, but my favorite thing about Google is the results I get without ever having to click a link. This is especially true for searching things like TV shows, actors/directors, athletes, etc. It's just great UX.

I tried to switch to DDG on mobile recently (using the Brave browser) and I found myself really missing those inline results.
Why Doctors Still Use Pagers
And its user interface is quite unlike anything else you've worked with :).

I've done a lot of work with CPN tools in the past. Sadly, the tool has not been updated since a long while, especially after its main contributer (Michael Westergaard) left academia.
Not totally true. Cigarettes are a very effective appetite suppressant. That is one of the reasons why people who work in the food industry all smoke so much.

Obesity has skyrocketed as cigarette and other tobacco use has declined. Obesity also increases the risk for most types of cancer, so it is just trading increased lung cancer risk for some people for increased risk of both heart disease and cancer.

In general nature does not like free lunches. There are costs and trade-offs in everything and smart phones are not an exception to that.
I'm not against humans driving if the car will take over as required to keep everything safe.
Not good enough. As an "Opt-out" with no password required, there will always be cases of unintentional purchases. This is obvious. IMO a company should be obligated to give refunds if their default settings are this way.

Reducing the barriers to payment this way does 2 things.
* Consumers are more likely to impulse buy. This can affect everybody, but severely affects people with low impulse control who can't manage money.
* Consumers are more likely to unintentionally buy.

Both are taking advantage of people.

It would be nice if there were consumer protections similar to "Explicit Consent" in the GDPR. I.e. Explicit Consent should be required when purchasing something.
I found it amusing that Yerevan in particular has decent high speed Internet throughout the city, yet the garbage collection is still antiquated.

In the post-Soviet era, there are some pieces of modernization they seem to be bypassing, while throwing weight behind others.
I can confirm. I deleted the FB app, and deactivated my account for months and it was pretty fantastic.

The problem for me now is that I'm a Clemson alum and Clemson is doing awesome right now...so I reactivated my Facebook just to celebrate everything with all my friends from college.

I ended up finding a fairly happy medium of unfollowing every person who posts anything even remotely political (even if I agree with it) and now my feed is essentially football trash talking + friends celebrating life events.
I'm not sure if this is a good thing... You're basically conditioning yourself to not read anything that lasts more than 20 seconds...
Google shuts down iPhone data-gathering app, apologizes
I think you’re both right. It’s morally wrong to categorize a 5yo as a whale but it also appears to be an isolated case, so the headline is very inflammatory.
its not false, you get to choose, or a choice will be made on your behalf.
I suggest people actually look at the plots in the paper. As an example, on P55, they show the effects on subjective well being for many metrics (life satisfaction, loneliness, etc). Note that a number of these metrics have a large enough standard deviation that it spans both the positive and negative range.

Most news outlets focus only on the mean (most of which are positive). But when your standard deviation is large enough to change the sign, don't put much stock in the outcome. If there's one thing that was hammered into my head when I took statistics, it's that a confidence interval of (-1, 5) does not mean the true value is more likely close to 2 (or positive, or whatever). There's no valid reason to focus on the positive values more, when your confidence interval crosses the zero point.
Is your culture really 'strong' if a new mosque scares you?
If you try to click (because by default it should be "pause") the video the pause it, it'll upsize it and open Facebook watch. Just another trick to annoy you.
No I used CC. Maybe not the latest CC since it's always updating but in like 2017 I was using CC on Linux.
> I don't think Lidar is needed to make self-driving cars.

The only sensor that can give mm accurate, high resolution, long range 3d spacial data with a low latency, is lidar.

For a purely visual system to supplant lidar we need:

1) a self cleaning all weather/all light condition camera with ~170 degree field of view at ~30 megapixels

2) a Structure from motion system that has a sub 20ms latency, and can work with spherical images, at full resolution.

3) a semantic object recognising system that is able to classify any object class. It must be scale, rotation, colour and occlusion invariant. It must also update the worl map generated by 2

4) An object threat management system, that can take semantic information from 3, rank it in order of threat, to be passed to 5

5) A world motion prediction engine, that takes threats from 4 and works out if said object is likely to collide with the car

all inside 70-100ms

Thats not going to happen soon. Of the whole list, 2 is the closest to working.

Lidar allows you to cut through 90% of this, because it gives you an accurate point cloud. From there you can do clustering to make objects, and track those clusters to measure threats. All of this is doable on a small CPU now. Without AI.
No, you do not to pay for anything but the problem is that "Public" (at least for now) just mean that "if another MeWe user (who isn't already a contact) visits your profile they will be able to see all your posts that you have marked as public".

This helps a bit when you are, for example, deciding if you want to invite them to join your group, or have received a request from them to connect or stuff like that: before that you had only the masthead pic and their nick to decide (as most people do not even bother to fill in their profile).

But [I did test it myself] when you try to copy the url of your MeWe profile or a link to a specific post of yours and open it in a different browser you will be asked to login to MeWe.

"Pages", as I said, despite being designed for special entities like fan clubs, newsagencies and so on, behave the same way: outside of MeWe you cannot access them.
They are cheap though (like 3$/month) so my suggestion to MeWe was something like:

"Please allow me to be able to make Public posts available to non-MeWe members. I will be glad to pay for this a monthly fee in the ballpark of what you ask for Pages, and it would be ok if - in case I stop paying - all my Public post revert to the current behaviour (and become visible again outside in case I start paying again)".

Looked reasonable to me, and I understand they are looking for ways to monetize some of the services... except that at the moment you can pay for stuff like "an extra set of emoticons/avatars" or "Activate Night Mode"... :-/
Shrink node_modules with refining
> "the gadgets are the true people of the Earth",

and corporate businesses are fast becoming the true citizens of nations.
posts old timey photo of everyone on a train reading the newspaper
Tollywood confidential: inside the world's biggest film city
Bizarre New Data Suggests Dark Energy Is Getting Stronger
> You do realize that the occupation and abuse of Palestinians by Israel is what drives those Arabs that hate Israel, right? It's a rallying call, if you will.

You do realize that it's the other way around, in that "Palestinians" have always hated Israel (aided and abetted by Israel's Arab neighboring states) since it's lawful establishment by the UN? Palestinians are still failing to acknowledge Israel's right to exist.
I hear you and I don’t mean to be disrespectful in order to disagree...but it seems like USSR didn’t stand a chance. Sustainablity is different from a failed economy.

I grew up in India. One might say China and India’s population is more sustainable than USA because they consume less and yet 2.5 billion sustainable people consume a lot more than 350 million Americans. Life is certainly better in the USA. For me. I must hasten to add that because my needs are different from my kin and peers who prefer India.

My entire school years, I studied from Russian(USSR then) puzzle books and text books and went to the counsul to learn chess. I have very fond memories of what USSR was...from a distance. It was an economy of scarcity. It is not the same as an economy of sustainability. And yet, it failed. It did not create a better life for its citizens.

People leave communist countries for survival while Americans threaten to leave their capitalist paradise because they are embarrassed by their first term President. The priorities are very stark.

China forced the one child policy upon its citizens. Not by granting incentives but punitively. I am not sure that I can be on board with that...I think population control should still have the element of ‘free choice’. People must choose to have smaller families because it benefits them first.

Capitalism will certainly have to change its flavor now especially with automation., but it has done a great job building a foundation. We are already fast approaching a world where there will be more people than jobs. It is going to be possible to survive and even thrive without a work force. But not with 10 billion predicted for 2050 because there is certainly a tipping point to this planet and fixed resources.

I sometimes feel like we should step away from limiting labels like communism and socialism and capitalism. I think those times are long gone..what we need now is a new structure. A sustainable structure based on all that we learnt from capitalism AND communism. Everything is going to change now ..not just with automation but also with climate change.

Capitalism can and will morph. I doubt if communism can..it’s just too rigid because it’s a philosophy of conformity for all while capitalism is a philosophy of freedom for the majority.(not all)

I won’t pretend to know a lot about this...I know plants and animals more than political systems. What do you think of the above and can you convince me to change my position?
And why wouldn't they be excited about living someplace remote, in a nice jungle either in Peru or in Costa Rica? I mean, it's my home, after all, is it not?
Hmm...how about: inflate the supply of labor, price of goods goes down and better goods are invented, then average working stiff benefits when buying these goods?

I understand your point that the average working stiff might experience wage loss or lose their job altogether, but I'm not sure you're considering the benefits to consumers, which is another role of the average working stiff.
Hi thanks for your thoughts. What should be changed at least in your opinion to prevent being suspicious about that matter?
thanks
I'm speaking as former CTO/Co-Founder of medical image ML firm (for 3yrs):

1. there is already a major bias in medical diagnosis - a bias favoring those who can actually pay

2. automating even parts of the diagnostic process saves money and reduces cost, that is a huge benefit to everyone

3. not everything gets done immediately. lets figure out the basics first (getting classifiers working on whatever dataset we have) and then focus on getting it to work on everything. It isnt like medicine was right from day one...heck, I seem to recall leeches and bloodletting being the norm for a long time.

4. Almost every doctor i spoke to was afraid of ML/AI because it pierced their forced scarcity and threatened their wages. I might argue that Health Disparities are worsened currently because medical boards throttle residency programs and fellowships to create an artificially constrained supply and hence high prices. (before I get the rot response of...of course doctors will never go away...:yes, they wont go away, but they will focus less on rote things and increase throughput thus increase supply thus decrease wages.

5. We got all our training data from minorities. Incidentally, foreign countries are a lot more generous with training data. For our ML diagnostic firm, we had envisioned giving the product away for free in poorer countries where we could just get training data.
You can monetise it the same way as facebook. I'd be more than happy for my data to be sold and analysed, as long as they were used according to strict ethical guidelines.

Perhaps worth giving DuckDuckGo a look, at how they're making money.
A few facts about crypto currencies
Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try.
Most people don't actually want a smartphone. Pain in the ass to keep charged, carry it everywhere, not drop it, not lose it.

Everybody generally wants a few core services from their smartphone: send and receive brief messages, directions, ride hailing, listen to a podcast or some streaming service, mobile payments, take photos (perhaps most importantly).

Sometimes some people want the distractions available on a smartphone: watch video, read the news, social media, browse the web, read a book.

Sometimes some people want to Do Work™ on their phone, but the vast majority of the people don't want that, at least outside of their preferred work hours.

I try to do more and more with my Apple Watch/AirPods only, and it's starting the feel like the future depends less and less on having a smartphone. In our Star Trek utopia, your wearable would let you go up to any screen and access your stuff, and these would be in convenient locations, like a public transit stations, cafes, etc.

You'd do work on a purpose built machine for the work you do, one with a lot of buttons if you type a lot, one with a stylus and weird knobs if you do precision work.

The personal smartphone as it currently exists is this weird mandatory liability we're all burdened with, costly in time, attention, and money. They're worse than cigarettes because at least you can carry on a conversation while smoking.
Are you suggesting publishers should not view 5 year olds as valuable customers? Or is the total dollar amount the issue? If this was a child of an UHNWI there really isn't a problem with spending $5k on a video game at the end of the day. Really this article is just click bait jump on the FB hate wagon.
An “Operator Pattern” Experience Report
Because prosecutors sometimes care more about being seen as tough on crime and not compassionate towards young kids who do stupid things at an age where they're not blessed with an abundance of restraint and good decision making skills?
unfortunately the law has to balance principle with practicality. it's hard to imagine a way of detecting a wide range of distracting behaviors without some sort of pervasive surveillance. would you be willing to accept a camera in your car than an LEO can tap into at any time?
Vouched for this, b/c it was flagged? I found it interesting, at least, so thanks for posting it.

Might have been better to just link to the Reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/aggom4/my_mom_painted...), but perhaps Twitter's ability to inline the images might make it easier to read.

Also, don't miss the webapp DAG that someone made showing the tree of paintings: http://nubleh.github.io/i_painted/

Edit: and it's [flagged][dead] again. Can someone care to say why flagging this is more appropriate than just not upvoting it? (Edit edit: It's alive again.)
As an immigrant from India, who worked in the US on H1B, I welcome this change, because this increases the chances of weeding out the bad apples and increases the chances for the good ones to get an H1b visa.

This at least encourages genuine direct employers to hire those who have already contributed to the US economy (by paying out of state tuition which funds/subsidizes the university education of US resident/citizen students)

With this rule change, it certainly is better than what it was earlier.

How could this be made even better?

Make it such that those who studied in the US are not in the lottery. Meaning, give H1b to every applicant who has graduated in the US, and lottery with the remaining visas to those who didn't study in the US. That way, the downward trend of international student admissions will reduce, and help the universities and all the students.
Not only did you seem to skip the words “as a whole”, but you seem to be too far to one side to realize that the GOP never wanted Trump and they are begrudgingly stuck with him - because they didn’t have the sense to rig their primary system like the DNC.

I recommend taking a step back. Because if you really look at it, the GOP establishment you hate and Trump eho you hate, are enemies. It’s not 2008 anymore.

Trump appearing on Fox doesn’t mean much. Fox ran only 48% positive news on Trump according to a bias in media study in the first 100 days, I don’t think anything has improved. The highest of any network, but hardly in the hole for him.[0].

[0] https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...
Do you just enjoy spewing lies incessantly? The H-1B LCA requires visa holders be paid equivalent to or better than U.S. workers. Also, the LCA often lists a lower salary than what people earn. At my last company, my base salary was close to 140k, but the H-1B LCA on file listed 95k or something. With bonuses, I've made over 200k in a single year in the past. My tax return and the H-1B LCA paint two very different pictures. Based on the public LCA records, one would think I was paid 95k. And, of course, the dedicated haters and liars here on HN will probably say the company violated immigration and labor law, and paid less than what the LCA required. They'd probably suggest I was paid 30k. Of course, the truth doesn't matter to these haters. They're filled with a disgusting hatred of immigrants, along with a repugnant and shameless love of dishonesty.
More likely to happen: write a blog post about it on Medium, submit the post to HN, continue with life as usual.
Does “putting yourself in the shoes of others” reduce attitude change?
LIFX Smart Bulbs May Reveal Your Wi-Fi Password
Summary: because of YouTube's broken copyright enforcement system, the only practical way for channels to monetize while guarding against spurious copyright claims is by signing with a multi-channel network, or MCN. Once done, YouTube delivers a channel's revenue to the MCN, who is responsible for taking their cut (10-20%) and then transferring the rest to the channel owners. One could imagine that this would be equivalent to a system where YouTube paid channels directly and channels were then responsible for paying MCNs for their service, however, a property of the former model is that it allows MCNs to claim the full value of each channel's revenue as their own revenue on their balance sheets, which is then used to mislead stupid investors (such as, the video alleges, Disney) as to the effective revenue of the business, even going so far as to delay payment to channels in order to inflate their cash-on-hand for important reporting milestones. One such MCN, Defy Media, folded without warning and without disbursing revenue to 50 of its channels, and this YouTube channel is attempting to raise awareness in attempt to see that the money that was merely in transit from YouTube to the channels by way of Defy's bank account is paid out the channels before the normal hierarchy of creditors start splitting it up (or failing that, warning other channels about what they should look out for when signing deals with MCNs).
Awfully clickbaity title

Alternative: Redditors form a chain painting Art
> Unfortunately resolution of your eyes drops off quickly from the center of vision.

True, but we can move our eyes around very quickly. Cameras in self-driving cars are usually fixed.

Also, human eyes have better dynamic range.
Interesting, so many Czechs pop out regarding things like this.
I think you misunderstood what I meant.

> no matter what it takes

That's an effort on my part to sort out of my life to a point where I feel comfortable raising kids. I live a very humble/spiritual life and have no intention of imposing bullshit on my kids or anyone else for that matter.

I do know how that works though because a lot of it happened to me personally in my own family during my upbringing.

If my home is a remote village someplace in South America, then that's just how it is going to be for my kids. I guess, right?
Ease Me into Cryptography Part 3: Asymmetric Ciphers
You could try indiscriminately selling users data.
The parents were most likely not aware.
Some platforms/games purposefully design their UX so that it's hard to control for a parent and easy to spend for a child.
So, Medium?
Actually, not all 800 numbers are toll free. Just another dark pattern.
Tell HN: The best business book Trump didn't actually write
Trump: The Way to the Top: The Best Business Advice I Ever Received

One of my favorite business books. Trump didn't write a word of it, probably not even the "Introduction by Donald J. Trump".

In 2004, Trump's people solicited advice from dozens of business leaders. What they got back was amazing and put in this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Trump-Best-Business-Advice-Received/dp/1400050162

Makes an excellent gift after destroying the cover with Trump's face on it and covering up "Trump" on the spine with a permanent marker :)
I have grown so accustomed to Facebook scandals every other day that I think have become desensitized to these kinds of news :-(
I think that there is some other concern about the general issue of clickbait or "fake news" that is entering this HN discussion.

I didn't get it at first but now looking at it it does appear that the title is a little misleading. It appears that the actual chat logs show them referring to a 15 year old as a whale. I'm totally with you that referring to a 5 year old as a whale is disturbing but if that isn't what the employees did then the headline of this article is incorrect.

I'm not really sure how I feel about the 15 year old and I'm not sure exactly what information they are working with. It does _seem_ like as long as the person is over 13 then it's policy for FB to charge them. Can a 13 year old even have a credit card?