skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The answer is to outlaw lobbyists, it would fix a lot of problems. That, and enact term limits for Congress. That will fix even more.

When you think there are simple answers to big problems it's generally because you don't actually understand the problem.

How would you outlaw lobbyists? Setting aside the fact that it would be unconstitutional, do you think it should be illegal for you to air your grievances to elected officials? That seems to fly directly in the face of democracy. Or should it only be that businesses aren't allowed to lobby? What about a small business that is being unfairly impacted by regulations, or being run out of business by a large company abusing a loophole in the law? Seems like them not having a voice in government would be a path to oligopoly or monopoly. If that's ok, where's the line in which business is allowed to lobby, and how do you keep a large business from simply hiring a small business to lobby on their behalf?
Like eating beef. Quit eating beef, people.

If we're going to fight climate change we're all going to be forced to give up most meat anyhow, so might as well start.
Probably not, but there is a proof in "Principia Mathematica" on page 379.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica
Yes, agreed. It's not ~new alien abstraction to make shiny things~ RELEASE.md but it's indeed very useful (especially on a VM hosted language)
"Most people" down into the middle classes (at least in the US) have money invested in the market already, through either an employer-related pension or a 401K-type plan.
Visual Studio Code Tips and Tricks
EEPoE is new to me:

Microsemi's exclusive EEPoE technology cuts the power losses on Ethernet cables by 50%, through the utilization of all the copper available on cable when a Microsemi EEPoE PSE IC or Midspan is used. It is 100% compatible with IEEE802.3at, and the savings work with ANY IEEE 802.3at Type 2, Type 1 or IEEE 802.3af compliant PD. In practice, devices that consume 25.5W would consume less than 27.75W, instead of the worst case 30W when a non-EEPoE PSE is employed.

So they use all 8 wires for power instead of just 4 to halve the power loss on the wire. For the worst case device that makes the 20% loss be a 10% loss.
Qt mostly does this, if you count modern C++ as a productive language.
> what do you think will be a breakthrough innovation in programming which will enable programmers to deliver ambitious web/mobile apps at a very high speed

I'm not sure that speed-to-market will be where the breakthroughs are. But constraining myself to that conditional...

The best one I can think of is a library of curated, easily embeddable snippets. Like Helm charts for code. We already have package managers, but as the industry grows more and more with a larger number (not necessarily percentage) of developers churning out sub-par code, companies are going to want to leverage reuse sans fear. You already see this curation with some languages/ecosystems having sets of blessed libraries, but a library is too high of an abstraction and it is language specific. Some group one day will offer embeddable, curated snippets (or entire libraries) that follow a certain set of rules to give confidence to their users and they will apply those rules (with language specifics) across runtimes. In both good and bad ways, some systems may end up being a walled garden of code where they only accept this curated code which, as walled gardens can be, are good for the users (i.e. devs referencing the code) and bad for the devs (i.e. devs writing new components being forced into others' rules).

Would you feel better with a "Guaranteed by StringentCodeTrust(tm)" seal on a library/repository you reference? A non-pragmatic middle manager at Big Corp might.
Dark fiber for long-distance earthquake detection, groundwater mapping
I just use Ghostery and hope it already blocks all trackers. Although it also has its own opt-out bullshit and a few weeks ago it "upgraded" itself to offer you coupons "related" to the site you're visiting...
Show HN: Fvextra 1.4 – A Better \Verb for LaTeX
Search, i.e. lower activation threshold for accessing intelligence from strangers elsewhere in the world.
PoE seems pretty nice in that regard. Easy to use, lots of appliances run on it, cabling is easy and it can carry data.
I don't block Wikipedia. I looked at some wire traffic and I can see the SNI header as normal in Firefox 67 and Chrome 72. I found a about:config flag to enable esni, toggled it, restarted the browser, and I still see the SNI. Using Cloudflare's ESNI checker it says my browser isn't using it.

Ignoring ESNI will probably work fine for a good length of time. If pornhub implements it or something I'd probably have to revisit. Or, since I control the clients I might disable it in their browsers.

If enough people bark up the filter vendor's tree I'm sure they'll add a checkbox to drop esni traffic. They added one for QUIC recently.
What the hell is happening to gaming?
I had a similar experience trying to cancel Dish after a few days because everything I’d been told on the phone, including that there was a 30 day trial period, was wrong. I asked them to replay the recording and they just refused. Nothing happened until I filed a BBB complaint.

All I wanted to do was return the equipment and cancel my plan. I even offered to pay for the installation time from the technician who came out but they were not having it for some reason.
It says more that customers overwhelmingly prefer cheap products.

A 1962 washing machine was 184.95 [1] ($1523.97 today) and a 1959 model was $209.95 [2] ($1729.97 today); which are both more expensive than all but the highest end front loader currently at Best Buy. The vast majority of top loaders are in the $500-700 range, top loaders $800-1000. There simply isn't much market for $2000 machines that will last decades.

It's a similar story for almost all home appliances I've looked at.

1) http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/60selectrical.html

2) http://www.aei.org/publication/appliance-shopping-1959-vs-20...
AlphaGo started off more complex and was eventually distilled. AlphaGo started off with 2 neural networks, lots of human training games, etc, whereas AlphaZero used only 1 network and no human training games.

I imagine they're working to make it simpler and more general right now.
Did Lavabit get additional court punishment for sending SSL keys in 4 pt font?
Prematurely published I'd say. Today is Feb 6th and it's dated Feb 9. Should be an interesting article once completed though!
This is the raw text source used to generate the .otf, .ttf, and .woff2 font files:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rsms/inter/master/src/Inte...
> Remember that every imaginable image is also somewhere in the digits of pi.

This isn't known for sure. It depends on the digits of pi being normally distributed, which hasn't been proven.
Best point of interest here -- did they use old manuscripts as part of the wrapping?

I wish we spent a fraction of the money for LHC on finding ancient texts, for which we know (statistically) are undiscovered. The benefits to society and science are just as profound (e.g., to decode charred scrolls of Herculaneum)
Identity is more fundamental then ideology. People get to choose their ideologies, they don't get to choose their identity.

Identity is negotiated between the individual and society. Some people argue otherwise, that an individual can arbitrarily decide their identity, but I don't think most people agree with this. The Rachel Dolezal [1] case is a pretty good illustration of this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal
When we quote someone, we usually include the context of the quoted person. The same sentence is different when said by Dalai Lama and Usama bin Laden.
Artificial Creativity – Introduction to GANs
I'm not using GPU encoding, I've tried it, it generally sucks and winds up being about 2/3-3/4 the size of x264 for similar quality. My experience with h.265 via x265 is usually about half the size for similar quality. Again, somewhat subjective as I really don't mind the blurry fallback for h.265 so much, and don't notice it nearly as much.
Why not QT? I'm pretty sure it works well on most if not all platforms and has bindings for every language.
I've often thought each section of legislation should have a byline that lists every person who had a hand in drafting it since most legislation is now written by lobbyists and not the actual legislators.

For example, H.R. 5323, Derivatives Fairness Act drafted on behalf of CitiGroup.
Survival Ball: Making the Game, in 1716 Hours
How to Buy the Right CPU: A Guide for 2019 – Tom's Hardware
Is there anything more you can talk, write, or link to about "cdn" support for sub-200ms streaming. Like is there a "varnish for WebRTC" or something like it (really more of an ircd for video)? Such that someone could build out a live streaming platform that can be conversationally interactive and yet not require a 1:1 back to origin or mesh connection setup.
From your same report: "The share of reported income earned by the top 1 percent of taxpayers rose slightly to 20.7 percent in 2015. Their share of federal individual income taxes fell slightly, to 39.0 percent."

This is the problem people are trying to point out. Yes, poor people pay a lower % of their income in taxes than rich people, because the real number is more important due to the static cost of goods across all income brackets.

The problem is, everyone expects people to pitch in their share, and it feels like the ultra-wealthy and corporations frequently find or create new ways to pay less than "they're supposed to". What anyone is "supposed" to pay in taxes is obviously entirely subjective, but when you hear things like "rich people are making more money while also paying less in taxes" at the same time you're hearing about how our economy is funneling wealth away from the lower and middle classes and into the investor and upper classes, people get annoyed.
That's my impression too, and I think it's happening for a combination of reasons. Clojure's no longer the new thing, so its faults don't have the benefit of being hidden behind a lack of experience with the language. Clojure's also a language that rewards long-term investment more than most. That's inherent in all of the mechanisms for abstraction and reuse it provides, but it's not necessarily the kind of thing that's immediately obvious. In the short-term you see the funky syntax and all these linguistic tools you don't quite get, but it takes a while to see how it all fits together into a more productive whole. And by the time you do, you or your team may have moved onto something else because the error messages suck or there's not quite the library you want.

I also think languages can suffer because their scope is so limited. There have been times I've thought that I'll switch languages and solve a bunch of problems, only to find out that most of my problems are still there. The requirements are still vague, the team still has its dysfunctions, and the surrounding systems are still unreliable, poorly specified, and run by teams that have no interest in helping because of some organizational dynamic set in place ten years prior.

None of this should be a surprise, but the real point is that even a putative perfect programming language can only address a relatively small fraction of the problems that arise in software work. That can make it even more difficult for minority languages like Clojure to produce a positive risk-adjusted return on the investment they require to adopt in a serious way..
What a naive view, frankly. Yes, it's probably perfectly legal for them (and others) to pay single-digit taxes. And they can do so because they can 1) afford expensive lawyers and tax advisors, and 2) lobby congress to protect them indefinitely.

It's unfair, plain and simple. Stop pretending it's right only because it's legal.
Getting a more efficient fridge, washing machine, TV

And after I've done all of that? Or maybe I'm looking for easier, less expensive wins than dropping $700 on a fridge? Let's not poo-poo the choice of replacing inefficient, CO2-producing tech by being quick with the "yeah, but...".
Well, I'd be surprised if people really don't feel dead when machines will over-smart them on everything. (and I'm not even thinking of singularity like times but anyway). Still weirds me out.
Look on the bright side- in terms of real power, the electric oven, vacuum cleaner, AC compressor, and fridge compressor totally swamp the entire load, waste and all, of those 5V devices.

In a perfect world we'd have both AC & DC, and could use whichever was most appropriate. We could feed DC straight from the solar panels to the cell phone. But in terms of what consumes most of the power, in the typical home it's AC loads.
Imagine my disappointment when I found out this isn't about real pandas.
I used to think that, and I changed my mind. The fancy retrofit fixtures are almost universally flood lights where the diffuser is close enough to the ceiling plane that it’s visible from far off axis. The result is that the lights on the far side of the room cause unpleasant glare.

With a retrofit lamp, you can use a high quality trim baffle (these things cost about $12, are quite well designed, and are probably already in your house and put a civilized PAR30 or PAR38 LED in, and you get a much better light distribution.

Back when lamps were all standardized incandescents, fixtures could focus on quality. Now, with LEDs, I suspect that manufacturers focus on how cheaply they can build a driver and assembly that meets some minimum performance criteria. So, with retrofit lamps, at least the fixture design is separate.

(There are exceptions, of course. Very high quality dedicated fixtures exist, but they’re quite expensive.)
> you have in fact given police a back door without giving criminals the same back door

As long as one corrupt cop exists on the access pool the premise doesn't hold up.
A2DP (the one that doesn't sound terrible) doesn't work with the headset microphone so you'd be using your computer's microphone instead. It's a shame that Linux generally only supports two profiles that aren't all that great. IIRC there is some traction behind another profile somewhere but it isn't ready yet I assume, otherwise we'd see it now.
This resonated with me because a few months back I went back and forth with Comcast regarding my shitty Internet speeds. Eventually I gave up, exhausted and unwilling to invest more time into a path I knew would not fix my issue (spoiler: Comcast has over sold our local network)

Here's the summary:

1. Notice my Internet speed was especially shitty on Sunday.

2. Run speed test (laughably slow), post to Twitter, tag Comcast.

3. Comcast replies, blaming my wifi and device.

4. Post more speed tests from other devices, within inches of my router. Post speed tests during off hours showing how the speed recovers.

5. Comcast still blames my wifi. How this explains why I get full speeds at 5AM I have no idea.

6. Run speed test (graphed and logged) from a wired PC, send to Comcast.

7. Comcast techs immediately "notice some issues" with my home connection. Why they didn't see this on step 2? No idea.

8. Technician comes, replaces some connections but nothing obvious, we geek out, he's an awesome guy and basically explains that my town got shafted with too few "nodes". He explains in his town, the user to node ratio is much better. His last advice is for me to get a "combo" router/modem from Comcast, instead of my leased modem and third-party (new) router. His explains this might help a tiny bit but has no other advice for me (other than move to his town - hilarious)

This final setp would involve me taking my modem (Internet down the whole time) to my local Comcast office (during work hours), and hopefully getting a combo router/modem with no issues.

I would then need to setup new combo device, and then graph and log my connection speed on Sunday and engage support again. At this point, there would be nothing they could do for me because I will have already exhausted all options. A new combo router/modem will not improve my speeds of 2 Kbps during peak hours so this is where I gave up!
I think it may cloud how the Feds pursue a production or a distribution charge. The issue in the US is that simple possession, in and of itself, is illegal. Whether the images are encrypted, xor or base64 encoded, steganographically hidden, whatever, if they are in your possession, and you don't report them, you're guilty of possession. And here's the thing in the US, not only the producers of the content are guilty of the possession, but everyone who has a storage device with that content stored on it is guilty of possession.

You can try to trickety-trick the Feds, but with that particular charge, you're not gonna get out of it. Don't try to outsmart the law on something like this. The best thing to do is to find a way technologically to remove this content from blockchains, and to report whoever had it or created it.
Sounds like busywork without appreciable gain
Does anyone hve a link to the actual study, or know where his list of exercises cones from?
>little boys are just too destructive and disobedient

Don't blame the boys - I've known equally pain-in-the-ass families of girls, and wonderful boys. It's the parents.
Stripe Global
Stopping this sort of bribery is part of the definition of a functioning democracy in my opinion.

You say “in a democracy” but you really mean “in the corrupt US”. Political campaign finance works totally differently in a lot of places.
You need to read the spec sheet when buying LEDs.

CRI, lumen, color temperature and watt (actual, not incandescent-equivalent) are the relevant parameters. The item titles are generally vague.

Specifically for the full spectrum you want CRI > 0.95
$15,000, before or after taxes?
I read this and had to check my browser tab to confirm I wasn't on the main page and this was an article title.
Figuring out people's easy passwords and password recovery methods isn't a weakness in iCloud, and shouldn't be counted as hacking iCloud. And if you were concerned with security, and had to buy a smartphone, what device is better than an iPhone?
I am not sure they have the required expertise anyway, most of the elected politicians have zero understanding of tech for example, many of them never even used email, the woeful questioning of zukerberg showed how clueless they are.

Career bureaucrats are the ones who run many of hundred things that run the government. Politicians need to provide direction and reflect the will of the people. Hardly need to career politicians for that. Younger representation is critical to make sure the voice of youth is being heard.

Do you think any politician understands the needs of the millennial generation ? Any long term policy like say education enacted now is going to impact the future generations more than anyone else.
> Apple Cloud was hacked and celebrity pictures were stolen and noone batted an eye.

iCloud was not hacked; the celebrities were spear phished: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_phot...
Do we have any idea what Netflix activity qualifies for the Federal or California R&D tax credits?

Would Netflix OSS meet the Seven Tests for Internal Use Software [1] to qualify for the R&D Credit? Or is it likely to be something else? Is this information public?

[1] https://www.ftb.ca.gov/businesses/credits/rd/seventests.shtm...
These wins are all relatively easier than weening the country off massive cattle farms, personal gasoline cars and jet fuel vacations, and they can still be environmental wins. I think the energy they take from larger problems is immaterial and so there isn’t any harm done.
> It only takes a few 100w bulbs to equal or exceed the energy consumption of a modest desktop computer.

Might even take a single one, depending on the specific machines it might be pulling no more than 60~80W idle.

As in performance optimisation, energy optimisation requires measurements.
For real time communication— I’m not sure why people find high latency to be so difficult. You just pretend everybody is taking a moment to think. Virtual “talking sticks”, or radio etiquette is not hard to add either.

What is difficult is audio quality issues. I wish voice and video software had a way to prioritize quality at the expense of latency (i.e. never compromise on delivering quality voice, but pause input or fast forward through quiet segments as needed to stay roughly in synch)
It’s http://www.neopets.com/

Wow they’ve been around for 20 years now, that’s not bad!
Quality, latency, and uptime are also factors:

https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-resolvers,World,quality
> I think you just agreed with the comment you're trying to disagree with.

You are wrong.

> To paraphrase your comment: "rationality is a tool for achieving one or more goals".

No, “rationality is a tool...” is not a correct paraphrase of “rationality is not a tool...”.

Rationality isn't a tool for optimization, it is simply a label for perfect optimization of the utility function.
I’ve been playing with CHR lately and it’s really dope. I’m not a big fan of prolog

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_Handling_Rules
Gross income isn't taxed, but profits are.

However, I do agree that the annual basis of corporate taxation creates odd incentives - if on December 31st a company finishes the year with $10 million in cash, and on January 1st they spend $9 million, they will still pay tax on the $10 million, while if they spent it just a few hours before, they would have just paid tax on $1 million.

Estonia's corporate tax system seems more sensible to me; profits are untaxed until distributed to shareholders, therefore a company can accumulate as much as needed for more long-term spending.

The $9 million in spending will be deducted for the year's taxation period of course, but that leads to the situation of the company paying say, $3 million in tax one year, then $0 in tax for the next period, which seems similar to Netflix's case as per the article.
Rather than a pendulum, I think the reality is that typed languages are now going through a significant period of evolution, especially with the advent of _gradual_ typing. TypeScript, for example, is just a superset of JavaScript, but with a compiler that's smart enough to infer many of the underlying types from context. The notion of rigorous, strong typing has always been marred by the concept of casting, but this is practically nonexistent in a gradually typed languages. Do you get the same degree of rigor? Perhaps not, but you do benefit from some of the guarantees made by the compiler.

The underlying trend here is toward more pragmatic language design, and I think this is definitely a trend that will continue in the near future (5-10 years).
In seemingly every one of these cases of "corporation doesn't pay TAXES!", it's more along the lines (to use your analogy) of:

in 2017, Netflix dredged out a canal to allow access to another waterway.

in 2018, they added concrete to the new shoreline to prevent erosion due to the newly created canal.

2019 headlines: In 2018, netflix dumped over 18 bazillion tonnes of concrete into lake nature!

It's clickbait, almost every time.

Are there "loopholes" (incentive programs) that companies take advantage of? Of course there are. One might argue that those tax incentives are why the United States has one of the strongest economies in the world.
@patrickc: “We're kicking off our betas—and seeing our first customers go live—in 6 new countries today! Delighted to take our first steps in Estonia, Poland, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, and Malaysia. 🇪🇪🇵🇱🇬🇷🇱🇹🇱🇻🇲🇾”

https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1093197974744645632?s=21
> I just want to get my work done

I am generally with you, but the purpose of these frameworks _is_, first and foremost, to get work done (Svelte's creator Rich Harris says that it makes it possible to write UI components very fast). I love it when the code is explicit and when the framework does not introduce any weird shenanigans (Backbone, where are you? I am missing you), but this explicitness comes at a cost of having to write boilerplate.