skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This particular system seems to be focused on our soldiers' "lethality, mobility and situational awareness."

So while the "lethality" certainly is all about facilitating killing, I would say the other points are at least somewhat about lifesaving for our troops.
> the singular they as a compromise works ok but it leads to a larger question about whether there should be separate pronouns for a single person vs. multiple people.

English already dropped it with 2nd person, settling on the plural (and formal) “you” as the sole pronoun and dropping the informal singular “thee”; and for 2nd person distinguishing number in the pronoun is probably more often an impediment to discussion than 3rd person (a 3rd person pronoun needs an explicit referent in the framing context anyway, so you don't lose much by not adding a reminder of number into the pronoun itself.)
This meme has to die.

These things were normal in our history.

The difference is now many of our near ancestors didn't have these things happen to them.
That’s pretty cool!
"Several Microsoft Corp employees on Friday demanded that the company cancel a $480 million hardware contract with the U.S. Army and stop developing “any and all weapons technologies.”"

Apparently "several" means three. How and why is this news? Microsoft has thousands of employees.
By the way, I sometimes miss the "parent" link on comments.
And yet, if you took Blizzard CEO's total pay (from the article, I think around $28 mil) and spread that over the nearly 10k employees, everyone gets an extra $3k, which wouldn't do diddly squat for retention.

Also, losing 40% of growth would be pretty awful for anyone who has company stock (employees, 401ks, investors) especially if that's year over year.
These are simply claims of fact about the world. One can easily investigate their veracity and see if an error has been made. There is nothing anti-semitic about acknowledging Jewish success.
Or your software may be working because the emulator was correct where your hardware stepping may be wrong (e.g., FDIV).
Nobody said proof-of-work. Bitcoin is not the only game in town. Ledger consensus can be reaches without wasting resources on a proof-of-work algorithm.
Part of OP's point though is that CEO pay is apparently not tied to performance because CEOs still get astronomical pay really regardless of whether or not their company/division performs well.

So CEOs just get paid more period. And there's this funny set of myths as to why that is the case. In reality, I think it just boils down to the fact that humans sort of instinctively (or maybe culturally?) like the idea of royalty. And so we're okay with some people just getting more for no good reason other than the fact that they're somehow anointed or divine.
It actually generalizes pretty well... You just need an array for each type of parenthesis, so if your language is "(){}" you would need 4 vectors and play the same "zipped" game two by two. You can also generalize the counting solution (where "(" = +1 and ")" = -1) to this scenario using vectors ("(" = [1,0], "{" = [0, 1], ")" = [-1, 0], "}" = [0, -1]), etc. If you are only interested in pairs of tokens, there's probably a bitstring solution too...

Efficiency, on the other hand, is not the best.
> "big bucks" management position? Or does it all flow through that class system, and if you didn't enter at the bottom, you're not able to get to the top?

Unless you are bringing in substantial expertise in the strategy side of technology (and most importantly, have a rolodex full of rich potential clients), it is unlikely that you would be hired. Outside of the traditional hiring rounds from undergrad and biz school, it is exceedingly rare to be given an employment offer.
It’s more of an investment in the person than a loan. Analogous to debt vs equity financing.

A loan is bad because it doesn’t align incentives as much and pushes risk onto the borrower.
NY governor?! I guess all the pretence about this legal onslaught being anything other than a partisan political attack on Facebook in retaliation for the Trump election just went out the window.
Even more fun is supervising a young child doing the shredding :)
There’s really no reason positive energy output should be impossible though? I guess it’s just a really inefficient design?
Most of the current cohort lives in high cost areas but there is probably a subsidy (like free rent) or savings in there somewhere. I think with a family especially $2000 is not enough without other savings. We hope in the future we can make this $4000 or stretch $2000 longer, but that depends on cost of capital.
This criticism is valid but it's not a problem blockchain is trying to solve. It merely acts as a way to have immutable records. Regardless of if you use a blockchain solution or not, the fact that real world corruption or ignorance can lead to rogue data is an issue that exists in both cases.
Fails on the first example in TFA.
Years ago I read a book written by one of Kerouac's ex-wives, detailing the truth of their lifestyle, the willful damage the Beat Poets inflicted upon everyone around them, their incredibly poor treatment of women, their constant simplistic search for thrills, and the general sense among themselves of their fame being a giant literary scam, which they eventually died believing and simultaneously hating their own lies. The book is out of print, but it looks like another of similar vein is available here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12566913-one-and-only
Yeah, feels more like a "top". The current homepage is like Reddit's "hot", and the new "more" is like Reddit's "top".
Not essential, but IWBNI date selection respected user timezone. It’s 23/2 here in the Pacific; seeing 21/2 as “yesterday” felt wrong.
Doesn’t that answer your own question?
I don't know the scope or applicability of this regulation (i.e. what loopholes exist or alternative mechanisms for licensing), but "licensing of government-owned patents... will generally be royalty free, revocable and nonexclusive. They will normally be issued to all applicants and will generally contain no limitations or standards relating to the quality or testing of the products to be manufactured, sold, or distributed thereunder." https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/34/6.3

I don't think the [notorious] Bayh-Dole Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act) applies as it seems the inventor is an actual DoD employee (Naval Air Systems Command/NAWCAD, NAS Patuxent River), not a scientist at a private institution receiving government funding.
Redis is not a very large scale piece of software or software system.
I suppose they do have a right to express what they observe.
Utilities Are Investing in Big Batteries Instead of Building New Power Plants
> Apparently "several" means three.

“Several” has long meant three or more, but the article says that three workers described the effort to Reuters, not that the three constituted the entire effort.
> The trouble is, it works. Depressingly well.

It does... if countries allow it. There was either some fear that this was happening or deliberate intent to keeping this from happening with the case of North Korea's sanctions - my memory's a bit fuzzy since the class I took where this came up some many years ago.

E.g. Some unethical people would setup a black exports shipping company to ship stuff to North Korea, and then when they got caught, they'd declare bankruptcy, liquidate hardware to some shell or holding company, shut that company down, create a new legal entity, rebuy all of the same equipment from the holding company, and restart the same old behavior. While the courts waste their time chasing defunct companies, the bad actors get to continue their bad behavior. This is just a new version of that game that's even easier since there are far fewer physical assets that need to be shelved or hidden (perhaps even none if the servers are all in someone's cloud).

Countries have largely stopped this kind of sanction-avoidance behavior by arresting the people in charge, ceasing assets to prevent them from being relabeled under the new company, and freezing accounts to prevent recapitalization under these kinds of shell corporations, in addition to requiring strict compliance around interactions with these sanctions countries and business entities.

tl;dr: the CA folks should be sitting in prison right now, and Facebook and Google should be sanctioned and require strict supervision in the way it shares data with its customers, to prevent this kind of microtargeted-electioneering-as-a-service. Laws like the GDPR won't actually stop anyone from collecting onerous data, since it basically only requires people to consent to it, and as we've seen with EULAs, people are willing to click through anything if it gives them the end result of using an application. The time for a law like that would have been literally 15-20 years ago, before companies like Facebook could tell you what someone's likely eaten for lunch or Target could tell when someone's gotten pregnant by their purchase histories. Unlikely we're going to be unringing that particular bell now...
> How and why is this news?

"Described to Reuters by three Microsoft workers" doesn't necessarily mean only three workers are involved in this protest. However I would be interested to see the actual numbers. If the number of employees signing the petition were impressive, I'd expect it to be prominently reported. Since it's not, that leads me to suspect it's not very much more than three.
How many workers have signed the petition?
Agreed, but they got both of us to click, didn't they?
It might be easy to do that in a well written single C/C++ codebase like Redis.

It's not simple nor something devs will ever want or care to do in a big web app with several binary dependencies.

Just consider that a single Node app's binary deps could trivially include the entirety of Chrome itself, not just in the form of Node's v8 engine, but e.g. as the PDF rendering "headless chrome" wrapper Puppeteer.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, add DBs, extensions, Python backend scripts, etc etc, and few will bother.
The scariest thing about Facebook is that they allow advertisers to target by e-mail. This has a number of implications. Say I want to target a specific individual. I create a bunch of fake profiles to meet the minimum number of required e-mails for an ad and then launch it. This way the only real person who's gonna see it is the one I'm targeting.

Now imagine running this scheme with everyone you know. Your ex, friends, co-workers, your competitors, you name it. You can learn all their needs and desires by creating dozens of fake ads that lead to a bogus site that doesn't actually sell shit but works as a front for whatever product you want to advertise.
Parse.ly Data on Referral Sources. Unique Insights 2019
I can name several. But you won’t think of them as tech companies.

Hotpoint, pioneer, bose, Samsung (some TVs and audio equipment), whirlpool and many, many more.

They all use netbsd in firmwares.
The events themselves may be reality but the subsequent written account, as with Bukowski, is a fragmented, curated snapshot with an intended purpose.
Yeah, and if I buy a Ford, Toyota, GM, or Chrysler, its going to be in the shop more than a Tesla.

I think its just more of this weird nonsensical anti-Tesla crap going on, one of which I thought CR was immune to. I guess I was wrong on that. You can't just change the goalposts because Tesla is the new upstart in an otherwise zombiefied industry.

If Tesla has less cars per capita in the shop than other brands, and they get them in and out of the shop faster than other brands, you don't get to take away their recommendation.
wait aren't virtually all android apps written in java?
I am sad about all the hates of the blockchain technology. I do agree that most of the blockchain products are hype and have no real use cases, but that doesn't mean the blockchain technology is completely useless.

Disclaimer: I work for a company building a blockchain ecosystem.

It is not the silver bullet that magically solves all the problems, but it does improves few areas compare to other technologies, which are decentralization and distribution.

Distribution is a mostly solved problem as we have many distributed database available so I won't go into details about it.

Decentralization, is the core attribute of any blockchain technologies. No single entity needs to be trusted, instead the user have freedom to decide who to trust. In terms of currency, user do no need to trust a bank. He get to decide to choose which wallet app he trust (which itself is not an easy decision), which node implementation he trust, which blockchain protocol he trust. Or alternatively he may be able to create his own implementation if there are no reputable implementations available. This is not the case of banks. I am forced to use whatever mobile app the bank offers. I can't use an alternative implementation (at least no banks in my country allows). It have very limited (most of the time, zero) extensibility and customizability. I can't simply create a bank because I don't trust other banks. As a user, I don't have a choice.

Blockchain technology does not solve the trust issue (track operator can fool the sensor to make it report false information), but it provides full transparent and allow user to choose who he trusts.

No blockchain can't prevent dishonest seller make a copy of a real bottle with a token and fill with low quality wine. But user can see who issues this token and able to decide never buy wine from this sellers again. The problem is still not solved, but you cannot say blockchain does not improve the situation here. Yes centralized technology can help as well, but the user have to trust the centralized technology provider and the wine seller. In this case the centralized technology provider will have a large leverage on both the seller and customer. And we know it can be bad if a single entity have too much power (e.g. Facebook, Google).

Yes, there are too many hypes on blockchain technologies. No, blockchain technologies are not useless. It gives the power back to consumer, instead of controlled by a few large entity.
Well, you are free to provide a better design.
Problems are many, mostly the very high temperature and pressure needed to achieve fusion ... no material can stand that so you need to have your fusion happening floating which needs energy etc.
Keep in mind that just because an email purports to be from a .gov address, that does not mean it is authentic.

It is trivial to send an email with any address you like as the from value. So this may be a response on google's part to the irs scammers (and other 'govt' scamming artists) sending out spam emails with .gov from addresses to give them a fake appearance of authenticity.
Hollywood was a great look into the production of the actual film, as a nice piece after reading Barfly.
What if your work helped reduce the amount of innocent civilians or soldiers that are killed in war?

I guess we could always go back to the good old daze when advanced tech or computers were not used in weapons systems. I wasn't around back then, but it sure seems like there sure were more innocent people killed in the bygone days of software-free weapons systems.

High-tech weapon systems save lives. But I am pretty sure you already know that.
I think it's interesting to see all the people talking about the Bay Area here. I've never done anything but pass through California, and yet I tend to mostly share the views of these "liberal" Bay Area folks. I grew up in southern Virginia.

You should remember that we're not all from the Bay Area.
> Yes, it does.

I'm trying to follow your explanation but help me understand better: which model assumptions would it violate?

Typical assumptions for time-series forecasting are stationarity (differencing is used to achieve this if not already the case), residuals are homoskedastic (constant variance) and normally distributed, etc. In fact, the primary use of the Box-Cox is to stabilize the variance and make the data more normal. Box-Cox itself doesn't violate any model assumptions. Forecasting on Box-Cox transformed data shouldn't either -- if anything, Box-Cox attempts to better satisfy the assumptions of time-series forecast models (well, as best it can -- some data just don't want to be normal).

Now the question is whether the inverse Box-Cox (or the entire process) violates any model assumptions. Intuitively, I don't believe it does (and Rob Hyndman, author of book on Forecasting agrees) but I'm not certain how to demonstrate this rigorously.
Two purely-functional versions (written in Haskell):

balanced1 input =
let partialsums = scanl (+) 0 $ map (\x -> if x == '(' then 1 else -1) input
in all (>= 0) partialsums && last partialsums == 0

balanced2 = balanced' 0 where
balanced' count [] = count == 0
balanced' count ('(':rest) = balanced' (count + 1) rest
balanced' count (')':rest) = balanced' (count - 1) rest && count > 0

A more general version with multiple types of brackets:

balanced = balanced' [] where
balanced' stack [] = null stack
balanced' stack ('(':rest) = balanced' ('(':stack) rest
balanced' stack ('[':rest) = balanced' ('[':stack) rest
balanced' stack ('{':rest) = balanced' ('{':stack) rest
balanced' stack (')':rest) = head stack == '(' && balanced' (tail stack) rest
balanced' stack (']':rest) = head stack == '[' && balanced' (tail stack) rest
balanced' stack ('}':rest) = head stack == '{' && balanced' (tail stack) rest
balanced' stack (_:rest) = balanced' stack rest
The starving college kid in a Helsinki dorm working on his EE degree can't afford 600-1000 dollars for another Laptop/Desktop to experiment with. A 35 dollar ARM SBC and a monitor that doubles as his TV is right in his price range...

35 dollars will buy you an oldish x86 beige box that will absolutely flat out murder a Raspberry Pi performance-wise. Cheap, fast hardware is not a problem anymore.
> MS abandoning their Windows ARM port didn't help the cause.

Doesn't look like this is the case now

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/11/15/official-s...
Citation or seriously some actual examples sorely needed for this statement.
MacOS Finder Shows Zero-Size Folders, Dangerous If Unaware
It's not about what information is useful. It's controlling what information is bad/can be abused.

How do I feel about my comment being flagged? It's totally expected. This is a heavy technolibertarian site.

The idea that "things will just sort themselves out" in any field can never be questioned. Saying that maybe things should be a little bit controlled is always met with extreme cult like fervor. The current effects of status quo paradigms are never taken into consideration.

And because of this the term "free speech" has become a thought terminating cliche.

You apparently can't ever know what's right or wrong, or say what's good or bad.

What a terrible way to think.
I think there's a huge difference between technology used to train our troops and technology used to create automated killer drones. Which is to say, I see no reason for Microsoft to hesitate on this contract, but absolutely pushed for Project Maven to be dropped by Google.

If we want our military's actions to be humane, we need to keep real people somewhere out on the front lines, and we need them to be well trained to defend themselves in the event of a real threat, rather than reacting inappropriately to a false one.
>And they only way that massive core counts help is if the software is designed to utilize them correctly.

That's for servers and scientific software (and perhaps 3D and such).

For regular devs the massive core count helps even with non optimized apps, because unlike the above use cases, we run lots of apps at the same time (and each can have its core).
Sounds good. After Russia, China, Iran, ...
I just want to point out a mathematical error in your post.

You said, "nobody is 100x more efficient than anyone else". This is a reasonable (though not strictly true) statement by itself. But the implication is wrong - nobody needs to be 100x more efficient/effective to justify a 100x pay differential.

Consider an example:

* Company earns 1 billion per year.

* Normal-Person will increase profits 5%.

* Super-Exec will increase profits 10%.

--> Note that Super-Exec is only 2x more effective at increasing profits than Normal-Person.

Let's imagine we can hire Normal-Person for $100k. How much does Super-Exec have to charge to no longer be economical?

The difference in company earnings between the two is $50 million. So Super-Exec can charge up to $49,899,999 and it'll still be economical for the board to hire him. They'd be throwing away money if they hired Normal-Person when Super-Exec is willing to work for only $45 million.

These numbers are made up but in the same scale as how a big company really operates. The critical fact is that when the base amount of money being managed is huge, tiny differentials in performance translate to huge dollar values and boards are willing to rationally trade a large chunk of those values to execs in exchange for that performance.
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLL
Methodical or just overly cautious? It took ages to get the `[-]`/collapse tree link, and the other IMO obvious QoL improvement -- a 'parent' link to a) get to the root node of a discussion tree that no longer interests the reader and then to b) use the mentioned '[-]' to collapse it all -- might take even longer.
Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi is a criminally under-rated book in this aspect, specifically the first half. Twain related how riverboat pilots talked, navigated, trained, and dispensed info on the Might Mo and how they formed a union (sort-of) that kept them well off. The key part is how the pilots acted when new technology and methods threatened their livelihoods.

The parallels to modern computing and programmers are uncanny and provide a good reminder about how unions, capital, and labor all interact. Even though we imagine ourselves on some grand crusade of science and reasoning, ever towards the Kurtzweilian singularity of rationality and thinking sand, we are still bound by the same forces young Samuel Clemens was lashed into.

In general, it's a great read and a great look into the life of one our greatest writers. Highly recommended.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/245/245-h/245-h.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_the_Mississippi
Specifically Bukowski "wants to seem" a particular way, which is the essence of glamour. Virginia Postrel is very good on this expanded sense of glamour, finding it almost everywhere in professional culture (including space travel, and maybe not so surprisingly, the military).

But the basic desire to project an image of being somehow special is the key ingredient that leads to glamour. Glamour is essentially mediated charisma: always constructed, to a degree, always something artificial rather than a direct encounter with someone's real self.

Postrel's politics lead her to let glamour off lightly. IMO, though (on the other hand), manifestations of glamour (and its pursuit) are closely tied to narcissism, and something we should get tough on.

The "hacker" image, by the way, is a glamourous MacGyver kind of deal. Calling hackers "coding bums" as Dijkstra did, is the antithesis of that. The former term glamourizes what the coders are doing, the latter mocks it.
I wouldn't care.

Are the designers of TCP/IP responsible for everyone whose death was assisted by the internet? Are Orville and Wilbur burning in Hell for all the people who were killed by things dropped from planes? And God help whichever unfortunate human invented the wheel. Sorry for my tone, but I find this perspective naive and annoyingly sanctimonious.

I'm making tools. People can use them for whatever. I hope no one murderers anyone (unless they have a really good reason) but I'm only responsible for making sure I don't murder anyone, and so far I'm doing okay.