skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked for the Harvard library for a while (as a part time student job) examining the quality of a lot of these Google scans in ~2005.

I’m frankly not very impressed by Google’s scanning process, OCR, image detection, de-warping, contrast adjustment, general QA/QC, etc.

Quality is variable, peak quality is mediocre, and the results are largely useless for anything but text.

Like a lot of other parts of Google, it’s a case where they tried to cheap out on trained human labor, and make it up with algorithms.

On the upside, even a mediocre book scan is better than nothing.
Has someone been reading David Eisenbud lately?
Janus: Statically-Driven Profile-Guided Automatic Dynamic Binary Parallelisation
Bitcoin doesn't punish late adopters, it just does not give them the same advantage as the earlier adopters. Somebody who adopts Bitcoin today will still have a major advantage over somebody who adopts it in 10 years from now, but it might not be of the same magnitude as the people who adopted it 10 years ago have over the people who adopt it today.

The decline in rate of inflation is what prevents punishment of the older adopters. Inflation is inherently punishing of people who are saving an asset, because it steals value from them, or at least would do if demand didn't outpace supply.

If bitcoin offered the same reward to newcomers as it did to the people who adopted it 10 years ago, then nobody would've adopted it 10 years ago, and the result would be that everybody is punished, because the world at large would've ignored a great innovation.

You can't have both! Either you punish the savers by taking value from them and giving it to newcomers, or you let savers keep their value which pushes up the price for newcomers as demand increases. Socialist ideology fails to understand economics as usual.

Now you might argue that the rate of bitcoin's reduction of inflation is just too high, and should've been more gradual, or over a longer period of time. There might be some merit to that idea, but nobody could've accurately guessed the rate at which adoption would occur for a brand new technology.

After everyone is aware of what Bitcoin is, it doesn't really matter how long you make the halving. There will still be risk-takers and there will still be laggards. Some of the laggards will leave it until they can no longer go around with their eyes closed and must acquire some Bitcoin in order to make some purchases. Others will acquire it now (and 10 years ago) even when it is an extremely risky investment. Most people are somewhere in between.

So you have the option right now that you can either: Acquire some Bitcoin while it is apparently still cheap (relative to where it may be in a few years)

Or you can: Chose not to acquire some bitcoin because you think it is overpriced, and in a few years, complain again that bitcoin is overpriced, when it is worth significantly more than it is today.

Late adopters punish themselves by ignoring economic reality, either intentionally (because they are driven by ideology), or accidentally (because they don't take the time out to learn). Once you grasp it, there is only one direction which bitcoin can go over the long term.
PXs and Commissaries don't charge sales tax anywhere. Source: 12 years in the Army.
Lazy Dog Bomb
You can't nicely ask the hacker not to do it. The hackers are constantly scanning the internet regardless of what you want.
There's a pretty solid overview of the decision making process (including pros and cons compared to other options) here: https://github.com/tensorflow/swift/blob/master/docs/WhySwif...
The Dumbest Op Ed I’ve Read in a While
Fine, whatever. I shouldn't expect an atheist to be able to be specific about what a theist is. After all, you need belief to even be able to begin to understand it anyway. Sure, ok, let's talk about atheism instead. If only so you can have a sure footing. I'll ask the questions so you can answer.

> A person is an atheist because of the specific things they do to be one.

That claim is... fascinating. It hearkens all the way back to the beginning of Christianity. Faith, what you call belief, is what makes you a Christian. According to you, works, actions, is what makes you an atheist. Most atheists tell me that it's lack of belief / faith that makes you an atheist. You're literally the first atheist in my 15 years of exploring the space that has said to me that it's actions that makes you an atheist, not lack of belief. I have never even once contemplated that atheism could be so like Islam in this way. So understand that your claim is quite the interesting one to me.

So are you saying that there are atheists in name but not in deed? That there are atheists who don't toe the party line, so shouldn't be considered "real" atheists? Because that's the space you're inhabiting here when you claim it's by action and not by belief.

It would be a rather fun debate space to play in, markedly different from the usual one where I have to take ever finer slices out of what the meaning of "belief" is so as to show that the atheist's position necessarily reflects belief instead of the lack thereof, and then showing that the "agnostic atheist" is belied by his actual debate style rather than his stated (non-) beliefs.
Atlanta Zoning Updates Could Pave Way for ‘Missing Middle’ Housing
yep. indeed. and it is still a valid and interesting answer. if you talk about keyboard driver, rendering of the address bar, etc ;)
Yes.

I don't know what your thresholds for impressive might be, or what your basis of comparison is, but pure control theory seems to be at a bit of a dead end, whereas reinforcement learning allows for greater flexibility and robustness for control tasks, subject to your willingness to gather (or simulate) a lot of training data[0].

See for example this video[1] in which OpenAI shows off a robotic arm with "unprecedented" dexterity.

-----

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVIxt2rt1_4 for a video (there's also an associated paper) about setting up RL tasks for robots.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwSbzNHGflM
I'm confused. If the stuff in the buckets really was just uranium ore, even if it was really rich, then the only significant radiation was alpha, which would be completely undetectable (and not hazardous) outside the buckets. Am I missing something?
I feel like someone should facilitate an introduction between some of these guys and the desert bus community.
This is a very interesting argument .

I think it's worth noting that you can calculate an estimate of the externalities and remove that from the profit to achieve a more balanced justification. Though unfortunately, unless you counted the loss of culture as an externality then you could still trivially justify the removal of land from those less productive/ technologically advanced than you.

Furthermore, even though I'm not personally supportive of the removal of land at the individual's loss I do have to ask if the removal could account for a net gain overall; improving many people's lives. Perhaps profit isn't the best measure of improvement to the collective but it is at least indicative.
Yes, but there is a lot of nuance here.

Introducing dependencies is a quick way to get to market since you don't have to build a universe from scratch.

Once you've gotten to market, you have to support your thing. This is when dependencies start to have a non-zero cost. When you'd rather spend engineering efforts on building new features, you instead have to do regular house cleaning to make sure your thing continues to work and have a happy upgrade path.

The larger the engineering organization you work in, the more apparent this becomes. Smaller orgs can sometimes brush the ugly under the rug. Larger ones bump into issues constantly. I'd wager that 5% to 10% of engineering might be dealing with maintenance of dependencies.

(fwiw, I'm mostly speaking in terms of my experience as a backend engineer.)
Javascript dependencies grow on you, quickly...
Glad I'm not the only one who was giggling wondering if this could be applicable to fusion research. Put the deuterium into little standing-wave-sized pellets?
Sounds about right, though I would guess way earlier than Norman. Probably goes back to some Celtic or Viking goddess long before the nailed tree god was forced upon us. That goddess probably came from some bored doodles centuries before that.

I never knew these things gained a specific, and very odd, name. I wonder if there is a taxonomy of gargoyles. :)
An Itch You Can’t Scratch-Off
Codebases: Millions of Lines of Code
hehe. however, if you look at this. do you think this is a server engineer or a client engineer ? :D
I might have misunderstood what we were talking about here: I thought the context was ground beef. I agree that I probably wouldn't assume that my steak wasn't reconstituted.
For sure, but usually a less general algorithm has better performance at an specific problem
They remind me of the sand woman Joaquin Phoenix's character in The Master sculpts for himself, then has sex with.
Keep up the great work. Don’t listen to others.
Yeah. It’s frustrating to be treated like a Cassandra...
Love ASCII art! I even use it on my blog [0]. I write all my posts in Markdown and it's pretty sweet to be able to see and edit diagrams in-line with the rest of the post.

I'm still looking for an ASCII art editor to make it more pleasant to draw though. So far, I like the default styles in Asciio [1] the best.

[0] https://preetam.io/post/s3-static-hosting-https/

[1] https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/App-Asciio/lib/App/Asc...
With adaptation, low-pressure-sodium street lamps look white to me. Key to this is having no other source of light as an alternative reference.

So if you are going to count adaptation, then all light sources are white. That makes the whole question of color completely pointless.

The same goes for not reducing the brightness. Burning out your eyes makes the question of color completely pointless. Here is a filter that would work: a small hole in a rapidly-spinning disk. Look right at the sky with the Sun, but with a duty cycle that reduces the light down to levels similar to typical indoor lighting. Another method, not quite as good due to field of view and imperfectly white screens, is the pinhole camera box commonly used to view eclipses.
IMO the choice of reference counting for memory management means Swift is going to lose out to garbage collected languages for most problem domains. It makes sense for UIKit but not for most backend work.
Uber Please Pay Your Drivers
China Unveils Plan to Tie Hong Kong, Macau Closer to Mainland
I think of monads, which are real easy to explain in a programming context as soon as someone understands lists and map/reduce, but are total gibberish in a math context even if you've gotten through calculus.
These tiny blobs of data with utterly fake scarcity consume more energy than whole countries. And you try to argue that they’re a good expenditure of energy?

The only reason to single out bitcoin is that it’s a highly visible waste.

But just because there’s multiple ways we waste a ton of energy, does not mean we shouldn’t fix any of them.
The most audacious home cockpit I've come across is that of a flight sim enthusiast (& investment banker) who has a full motion rig & all authentic 737-800 instrumentation. He does streams of him simulating all the time, with lots of great camera angles.

Here is one: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/380056714

It begins with a montage of progress shots but there is also hours of him in the sim. It's really incredible.
This is done via linear algebra, yes? As in, you have a 27xk (for some k) matrix with the one's of the l'th row corresponding to letters of l and zeros for the rest of indices. Reduce the matrix to reduced row echelon form. Increase k until you have an over-constrained equation. Repeat with multiple languages to have high success values.
> do his individual works stand alone or do you have to understand his life and/or complete body of work and the context in which it was created to appreciate it?

From my perspective, I'd say it's really more important to know where an artist's work stands in relation to their culture and their contemporaries. Most important artworks can be seen to have extended previous practice, to have influenced subsequent practice, and/or can be seen in retrospect to belong to some coherent zeitgeist.

You may see some works to truly stand alone. But I've personally found it difficult to connect to most great artworks that way.
How many times have I listened to that song and never once thought those words meant something... Nice to join the party, even if a bit late.
"Public-works joker" is the third-oldest profession, after sexworkers and cab drivers.
Unlike bitcoin, every person in the US has an (more or less) equal vote to help decide that. Congress's job is literally to decide whether to spend more money on military, among other things.

And also unlike bitcoin, when you pay the salary of 450k+ soldiers, among other jobs and such created, that's likely a lot better for the economy than random people converting electricity into crypto tokens. What does bitcoin provide in terms of add-on benefits like jobs? The ability for power companies to maximize profits by having their supply used more fully?

Edit: Additionally, you can argue that the US army does not provide too much security, because it doesn't take someone more than a few seconds to look at the world and see the world is not 100% safe. There are numerous areas such that, if money was not a concern, could be made safer and more profitable by adding more security. Creating infinite trust in bitcoin would... do what exactly? Let nerds buy drugs on the internet?
It's a little ingenuous to use the word 'genius' for people who put gas money into a meme currency 9 years ago
what is a 'TUI' ?
"Stole" is the wrong word. Facebook gave it to them.
Springboard vs. Udacity Reviewed
This was me. I was actually packing for a move today when I found an old hard drive that has a backup of my homedir on my family's old win98 machine which has all my old BASIC games and programs. At the time I channeled all my boredom into that thing and it led me on a path towards computer programming.

There was a really vibrant community on IRC and ticalc.org, which I was fortunate to find, because it was one of the only programming communities I know of at the time filled with people around my same age; it honestly changed my life. I wouldn't be where I am today without having found it.
Yeah, and I'm not.
Machine Learning for Anyone Who Took Math in Eighth Grade
CS is way too big for any individual to know it all in depth. If it really is a “safe place” because the employees can talk about complex topics without ever losing anyone, that would imply that they’re all specialized in roughly the same topics and severely lack organizational breadth. I kind of doubt that’s really true.
Learning Community AMA: James Clear
No amount of adaptation brings low pressure sodium to white. Several hours doesn't achieve it. Half the cars under it will simply appear black, the rest yellow. You're left with little to no space for colour perception.
These people are already so far removed from the crypto infrastructure that it's a trivial case.

People who bring this up are almost always people who have never lived anywhere near real poverty or conflict. Barring individual cases, the vast majority of the world's less privileged have neither the means nor the knowledge to buy crypto in any shape
On the other hand I am shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing the cost of maintaining the US dollar as a currency. Specifically, it takes a huge amount of energy to maintain the military and police power that backs the US dollar.
for sure i can abuse Go's language features as well in unintended ways.

Language abuse happens when the feature is the only available feature to implemented a particular and no other language feature allows for a better implementation.

in C++ most abuses of template are related to the missing feature "concepts". which took quite a while to get their.

If language switching is not an option, and your application requires generics and you are also required to use Go, you do have a problem. You need abuse the language and work around re-implement generics for Go.

Which can result in a very ugly development process, difficult to maintain code etc.
Formosat-7 Ready for Shipment
Yes there was an HN discussion on it a few days ago, and this was the final justification:

"In the end, we narrowed the list based on technical merits down to Swift, Rust, C++, and potentially Julia. We next excluded C++ and Rust due to usability concerns, and picked Swift over Julia because Swift has a much larger community, is syntactically closer to Python, and because we were more familiar with its internal implementation details - which allowed us to implement a prototype much faster."

However, the Swift community is larger only because it is used on iOS for non-numerical computation applications completely unrelated to Tensorflow. If we draw the lines of community around people who are in Tensorflow-related fields (i.e. numerical computation), I suspect the size of the Julia community is actually larger than Swift's.

I've been a Pythonista for a decade and a half, but in this case, Julia seems to me to be the more logical pick, given that it is designed for numerical computation (it is the modern successor to Fortran). Julia is syntactically closer to Matlab, which is a language familiar to many grad students, a pool from which many future Tensorflow users are mined.

The last point is valid though. Still, as someone with a numerical computation background, Swift remains a curious choice.
Yeah, I kind of meant without any of that. The only thing I spend money on related to legal these days (used not to) is legal insurance which is cheap anyway so why not.
Found the braindead redditor.
Software development is a team activity, thus social skills are important. I don't know if companies are "discriminating" in this area so much as they are simply trying to find people with the right skills for the job.
Paul Kocher: Meltdown and Spectre 1 Year Later: New Vulnerabilities Have Emerged
You should read the typescript threads, where people want types to make their code more bug free.
> albeit less so than slamming on the gas

I dunno, my turbo miata will light up the rear tires at 60mph if you drop a gear and stomp on the throttle
When did links go from "double click to follow" to "single click to follow"?
I work in the FMCG industry, and we treat supply is effectively unlimited. You will constantly have suppliers begging you to buy more, and to buy new products as they expand their range.

However, as a trader, you will only ever buy what you expect to be able to sell. It would be pointless stocking up on goods which you aren't going to sell, especially in FMCG where you need to sell them before they go out of date, else you lose all of the money on your purchase. Sales are almost always the constraint under normal operation.

Suppliers are attempting to create new demand by creating new markets. They usually offer freebies or discounts for new products in order to gain penetration, but it is then up to the market to decide whether that demand warrants them to continue producing the good. Without demand, they cannot continue to produce, because it would be a loss making endeavour.

Electricity can be seen under the same lens. Like FMCG, it loses value with time rapidly, because it gets lost as heat through storage, and it also costs to store. An electricity producer is never going to create more than they expect that they can sell. They might produce a bit more than actual demand as the means to try and capture new markets for greater long-term profits. Mining is part of this - if they can capture a new market for bitcoin mining, they will generate profit in the long term by continuing to supply that demand.
damn, "includes hiring a part time system administrator".
U.S. Dept of Defense: Harnessing AI to Advance Our Security and Prosperity [pdf]
> Most of our drugs are now from India.

Heh, well that's because India doesn't exactly have a lot of respect for US pharma IP. Which is fine, but don't go giving India the credit for stolen IP.
Cool! I'd also like to plug my own RL-related repositories: https://github.com/rldotai/rl-algorithms and https://github.com/rldotai/mdpy .

The first one implements some of the more "exotic" temporal difference learning algorithms (Gradient, Emphatic, Direct Variance) with links to the associated papers.
It's in Python and heavily documented.

The second one (mdpy) has code for analyzing MDPs (with a particular focus on RL), so you can look at what the solutions to the algorithms might be under linear function approximation.
I wrote it when I was trying to get a feel for what the math meant and continue to find it helpful, particularly when I'm dubious about the results of some calculation.
In gdb that stands for "Text user interface".
I thought we were talking about the hypothetical situation where crypto becomes amazing and not at the current state? Of course, crypto can't replace banks as it is now…
Top Tips for Finding Research Paper
This reminded me of the great little paper "Homophonic Quotients of Free Groups" (https://eudml.org/doc/233741), which might also be considered an algebraic theory of French (and English) letters.
>the processing being done by my computer right now

Well it depends what you are considering. Arguably, yes, your computer finished the HTTPS connection long before you got around to reading the words on the page itself. But the scale of an idle CPU compared to a 100% CPU is not even close. Mine is sitting at 2% use while I type this.

You could put that money into mining actual gold, and literally make 4x as much as mining bitcoin [0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/05/energy-co...
Just FYI, you can easily include a @babel/standalone script to get JSX in your script tags.

https://reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a-website.html#quickly...
I hate my iphone x camera because it's slow. I have to double and triple check that it's focusing on the right thing and hold the phone really steady. It is adequate for me because I always carry my phone with me, but I would never want a general approach to a real DSLR or mirrorless camera.

Apple/Google would add too many features, focus on wifi connectivity, and generally ruin the one amazing thing about cameras–the ability to turn them on and immediately take photos, no fuss. No waiting for software updates, or alerts, or any of the million other things that do not belong in a camera.
To thoroughly abuse the metaphor, you don't always want to go where the giant goes. Sometimes you would like to climb down and walk your own direction. Dependencies can take you near where you want to go, and if they can take you all the way there, terrific! Use them for as long as you can! But if you're not directing the giant, you're subject to its whims. And the more people standing on the giant's shoulders, yelling in its ears where they want it to go, the harder it is to make sure it's going where you want. At a certain point, this risk outweighs the rewards, and you adjust accordingly.
Would be curious to see if some kind of gut bacteria intervention could ameliorate symptoms.
Text-based User Interface

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface
Aesthetics are rooted in civilization, time, and class. It's very difficult to say if these works by Johns will survive 500 years from now given that famous bronze statues were melted down to make bullets. However, if you have time you should try to understand what's happened to fine art in the past 200 years if for no other reason than it's interesting and to challenge your views on aesthetics. Not all of it will last another 100 years, so that gives you an idea where things currently stand too.
Buy servers if you have stable workloads, otherwide rent virtual machines in the cloud.