skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think one of the biggest problems with Agile is that everybody thinks it's okay to operate without a specification of what is to be built.

It depends.

With certain projects, the overriding risk is that you're building something that nobody wants. In this case, Agile makes a lot of sense, and specifications are a waste of time until you've validated customer demand.

For other projects, you're very confident that demand exists for the product you're building, and specifications start to make a lot of sense.

Big caveat though - you can get this assessment very very wrong. "Demand" can be a very open-ended concept (e.g. in the entertainment industry), but that doesn't necessarily translate to user satisfaction. No Man's Sky, for example, probably should have been put in front of players a lot earlier. That means building to a looser spec in shorter cycles with more iteration (more "Agile", for want of a better term).

This is why product managers are so important - they need to make this judgment. It's a difficult balancing act to juggle "minimum features and user testing", "grand product vision" and "efficient and manageable development cycles".
I see it as an analog to public health issues. If you are going to use the public internet, then you need to have automatic updates on.

This feels a little like if you are going to attend a public school, you need to be vaccinated.
Definitely not a "hot take" but there are certainly a lot of users on here who would argue otherwise. A lot of older programmers who were well into their careers during Microsoft in the 90's seem to have a different opinion of Bill and his business practices.
The Japanese take this to another level. Imagine listening to these all day, every day:

Don don don, donki, don quijote...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJyYrrDKYZE (Don Quijote)

Kamera wa yodobashi kamera!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4QSu1ZHunw (Yodobashi Camera)
Fake news.

I applaud what you're trying to do, and look forward to using it, but the problem is that the most studiously honest broker can be slandered as either the plaything or the cynical agent of vested interests at virtually no cost. The arguments of bad faith actors are not based on substantive disagreement but on inducement of emotional posture.

One strategic response to this might be to formalize your citation process. You cite various media organs that use OWID as a source; could you establish partnerships or public agreements such that if a media outlet uses your material as a source, they do not cherry-pick but must present it in an embed to the reader, and can be called out, cut off, or be subject to contractual penalties if they knowingly misrepresent the source data?

https://ourworldindata.org/about/coverage#coverage

Edit to add that this isn't a problem I think you can or should have to unilaterally solve, but rather than observation that our lack of any good mechanism for certifying sufficient consensus is an unfortunate obstacle to OWID's very worthy mission.
Gatekeeping this intuitively universal spoon metaphor isn't going to make disabled people's lives better. A world where only disabled people get to use the spoon metaphor isn't going to have any more people feeling compassionate and empathic toward disabled people. The extension of an idea or metaphor to new situations doesn't devalue it; rather it shows that it is a powerful and useful idea. And before you make baseless claims, I also suffer from a chronic and incurable condition.
I can live with that!
256GB is currently $50. Getting to 1TB @ $50 in 3 years seems inline with historical rates.
I think you are letting TurboTax off too lightly. Many banks and the UK tax office make their login credentials unique by having a username with random characters, or requiring an account number on login.
I have recently thought about applying workflows and ideas of the open source and software world to real world issues.
I was imagining a web platform to locate, describe, discuss and eventually solve issues together. While one of my "example" issues is climate change, I wouldn't dedicate the platform only to this issue but make it a generic tool.

I have written down some of my thoughts about this and if someone is interested I would be willing to share them and discuss this topic.

While doing some research, I also stumbled upon some ideas by David Ernst ([1] and [2]). I think he was heading into the same direction some years ago and he is now running a platform for "liquid democracy" in the US [3].

[1] http://dsernst.com/2016/02/24/open-think-tank/
[2] https://github.com/utopia/building
[3] https://liquid.us
Given it just processes audio, how long does processing one video file usually take?
No, they use electroluminescence, not incandescence.
History will forget all of that. His humanitarian efforts are going to have a much larger and longer lasting positive impact than anything he did at Microsoft.
How often does this happen? The limited bandwidth of communication vs. thought can be frustrating, but I don’t think “car” for “bike” is a natural substitution, even in a non-native language. They’re too dissimilar, not subsets, etc.

Assuming this happens frequently enough to be concerning, I’d be concerned!
The second photo in the article is literally a beach lol
Perhaps few will wonder why their university has an certain name or why a particular mountaintop is full of telescopes.
Frustratingly "solutions" like pgBouncer and similar do not properly maintain session state in transaction pooling mode and so commonly used features like prepared statements cannot be used, which is a non-starter in many cases.

Meanwhile, session pooling mode provides almost no benefit unless you completely disable connection pooling in your application, which then means you incur the cost of setting up a new connection on each request.

MySQL's ability to handle many thousands of idle connections without breaking a sweat actually solves this problem, and does so in a very convenient way, particularly in a micro-services architecture, and I really wish Postgres supported it.
> Neat. Is there a reason not to tune MySQL to this for all instances?

Yeah, I'd think so. On more modest hardware (less RAM, no 10GbE, etc.), those high buffer sizes may waste RAM that's needed elsewhere. The high number of processes may let some death spiral get much farther into unresponsiveness before stopping it. etc.

And most people don't need it. 100k active queries is way too much for most webapps. That means queries average >=1 sec and/or you're peaking at >= 100 kqps. The former sounds painful from a user latency standpoint. The latter isn't the scale of Google, Facebook, Twitter [1], etc. but is still pretty significant. [2] Do you have enough active users that this rate seems reasonable? If not, your best optimization opportunity is figuring out why you have so much unexplained traffic and if you can make it go away...it could be as simple as buggy client-side Javascript in an aggressive retry loop.

[1] twitter in particular I think has a pretty high fan-out from user-facing requests to database operations. I imagine most latency is hidden from the user because it happens asynchronously (after writes) and/or in parallel.

[2] I'd be curious to see a ranking of public websites by estimated (average/peak/whatever) qps. Seems like something Alexa and such must have but I couldn't find a page with that raw data.
I have heard that people spend a lot of money keeping their wealth secret. The Panama Papers leak seemed to shed a lot of light on that.

"Worlds richest person" should actually be read "Worlds richest [publicly wealthy] person" I suppose.
Last year and even more so this year, I'm taking back control over my online computing. I've already migrated to using Nextcloud on a VPS for file management (bidding farewell to iCloud Drive and Dropbox). Mastodon has become a big social network in my life, and I run my own instance. I'm planning next to set up GitLab or Gitea or something like that and migrate all my personal repos to there from Bitbucket. Unlike Stallman, I'm not opposed to using some non-free apps and OS platforms. I love my iPad for example. But the rise of big SaaS and vendor lock-in, as well as all the data privacy and security issues that inevitably arise, has pushed me towards building my own "personal cloud". So far, I'm loving it.
This seems like a problem that could be solved by noise cancelling earbuds that could allow people to filter in things like people talking to them, but filter out background noise.

I've experienced a similar problem at work actually, but with people with loud voices. I've wished for an earbud set that could let me dial the volume down or run certain voices through a vocoder.
> updates can actually have _adverse_ effects on their systems

While Microsoft's QA leaves much to be desired, there are plenty of instances where non-updated machines have had adverse effects on other people's systems.
I vote we switch to Metric Time. That'll solve all our problems.
In the US, lottery winners are advised to remain private because of the significant increase in crime targeting public lottery winners; it's certainly not society collapsing when rich people get robbed, but I'm wondering if criminals in the Scandinavian countries use the tax returns for picking targets?
Do you know where can I buy one license of the business edition?

I recently purchased a Pro license and couldn't find this "LTSB" (I believe it's called) version.
In your example, the US court is ordering you to request the documents. There's no question that the US court has jurisdiction over you.

What about this variation over your example: instead of contacting you, the US court bypasses you and asks directly the European storage company. This is much more questionable, since a US court shouldn't have jurisdiction over an European company.
That's amazing. The game I had was called "Biker Dave" for Atari 800XL [1] and it was a little biker sprite jumping over obstacles.

[1] This was it: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-biker-dav...
Ohh now I got you. I believe README should be improved in this part then.

It reads:

====

Although it can usually work if all you have is the video file, it will be faster (and potentially more accurate) if you have a correctly synchronized "reference" srt file, in which case you can do the following:

subsync reference.srt -i unsynchronized.srt -o synchronized.srt

====

I believe you should explain that if you have a reference file in another language which is correctly synchronized with that video, you can use that file instead of the video, as its timestamps will serve as references when synchronizing the target .srt file.

Now this has raised a question, what if the reference file has a different block count? For example, in some languages (like Chinese or Japanese) we can say a lot with fewer characters than in English. So in Chinese a text will stay on the screen for a long time, whereas in English the corresponding text would be split into two or more blocks. Wouldn't that make synchronization less accurate?

BTW that's a cool project. Thanks for sharing!
I suspect that reproductive decisions are far less genetically deterministic than your account suggests.
I also am still using a Thinkpad X220 from the same era and have had zero problems with it. I did replace the HDD with an SSD at one point just from a performance aspect. I am starting to use a 3rd gen X1 Carbon but still really enjoy the X220. I still have an X61s I occasionally use as well. The X61s also has an SSD now and upgraded RAM and it will handle most tasks I throw at it. Unfortunately the battery doesn't last these days. Interesting how many Thinkpads are listed here...
The first sentence:

> Since 2012 with the introduction of AlexNet, convolutional neural networks(CNNs) are being used as sole resource for many wide range image problems.

Um, CNNs have been around for 30 years as neural networks.
That's an example of shared-nothing message-passing system, which is a perfectly valid solution. It's implementable in all the aforementioned languages.
At the cost of 154+ deaths. That's one thing that has changed since the big projects of last century: construction workers are no longer considered to be part of the cost/benefit equation.

I'd argue that a contributing factor to the moderating of big projects is that the world is now better instrumented and we have a better idea of the costs and benefits of big projects, so a lot more goes into each decision and it's harder to push things though on the basis of a grand vision.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam#Construction_deaths
Very interesting point, and comparison to social media. It seems to me that if most of the users of Facebook, Reddit, etc, were to band together and leave to somewhere they get a better deal - then the value of those sites would effectively become zero. If they could just wield it well, they have massive bargaining power in those relationships. But the cost of organizing such groups, building a new suitably-featured site, and moving there is a large limiting factor. The same relationship could be extended to most networks - including city/housing networks.
But staging this mutiny on social media sounds tough enough - in real life real estate, I imagine it's nearly impossible! As such, landowners get a hefty upper hand, and there's not much power the tenants can wield in that negotiation - even if they do collectively provide most of the real estate value of a property.

That said... what if this bias in network effects isn't eternal, and we humans just haven't been very good at group organization so far? I can imagine a userbase mad enough at Facebook might pick a date a year from now, get everyone they possibly can to sign up to leave on that day, and mass-migrate to an equivalent site with similar features (which doesn't farm $250 a year off each person in data - or at least gives those funds back to the user). With smart contracts to ensure commitment to the move, it could even be a fully-funded and well-organized migration - which might even have negotiation options to abort if Facebook met their demands. People would probably even do it just for the spectacle/coolness factor of being part of such a big rebellion. It's a bit of a pipe dream, sure, but it's conceivable something like this could happen. And let's face it, other than the data/hosting challenges, most of these big social media sites aren't doing anything that difficult to replicate. Hell, I'd go so far as to say almost any company worth the big bucks is mainly being priced on brand and network effects (minus IP/asset ownership). If the networks underlying this got better at organizing and moving/threatening-to-move to alternatives, they could eat that value and pass it down to consumers. Hell, it might even work out that they could be paid to use these services.

The city/housing space is one I'd imagine would be wayyy slower to benefit from any of these potential consumer unions technologies due to physicality constraints, but I imagine it too could be translated into these mutinys. e.g. People could agree to leave a city en-masse to a new one with better (pre-negotiated) rent/ownership prices, leaving the old city high and dry in a bubble-bursting scenario. Of course we don't see this now - or at least, not in any organized form, just an economic drying-up when e.g. a factory closes and tenants can't afford their rent. But perhaps it's possible in the future as mobility, communication and coordination increase? Who knows.
Simple solution. Open the window in your house or in your car while you driving. You will then get direct exposure to the sun!
Thanks for flagging -- this seems to be a common point of confusion; I'll work on updating the readme.

Let's say reference.srt is a set of English subtitles, and you have an out-of-alignment French subtitles file unsynchronized.srt. You could use the video directly as a reference in order to synchronize the French subtitles, but it will take a bit longer since we need to extract audio and perform voice detection over the whole video file. In this case, it will be faster to use your already-synchronized English subtitles file reference.srt.
But that was all the disk space they had!

You were lucky!

Some of us could only walk through the snow uphill one way!

;)
My kids are in an orchestra and half the audience is holding up a big honking bright phone or tablet recording the whole thing. Its annoying
They won't drift if the observers correct for their corresponding known differences. E.g. we know the orbital speed of the planets, so plug those into general relativity and you would know how fast your local time is moving vs time on another planet, and can thus compensate.
That's the case for cars, but I wouldn't be certain it's the same for buses, especially large fleets of public transport buses.

All three British bus manufactures give all measurements except speed in metric, although none give an actual fuel consumption. (Just "20% better" etc.)

[1], as the first reference I can find, uses both l/100km and mpg.

[1] https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/fuel_consumption_of_p...
AMAs, like everything on social media, used to be great years ago when it was raw and relatively uncensored.

Now it's just an ad platform for people and their PR team to push their products, ideas, etc.

It is no longer Ask Me "Anything". It really isn't even "Ask Me". I bet half the comments on these threads are by PR company staff.

AMAs went from being one of the great parts of reddit to one of the worst.
From the README:

"[...] the naive O(n^2) strategy for scoring all alignments is unacceptable. Instead, we use the fact that "scoring all alignments" is a convolution operation and can be implemented with the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), bringing the complexity down to O(n log n)."

I absolutely love it when something that, at very first glance, has no business in being solved in the frequency domain, gets solved in the frequency domain.
I initially started with 1000 IU of Vitamin D3, Costco brand, and eventually settled on 5000 as I noticed improvements in energy level as I took more.

I am at 43 latitude so I only start taking it in mid-November and start weening myself off it in late March (you never really know if/when spring will happen up here in Toronto :)
This is commonly known as the second-system effect, named by Fred Brooks.
... And frequently they won't give you a price even if you ask what it costs upfront.
GPS satellites already control for relativistic effects. Their required accuracy is so high that they wouldn't work without doing so.

You would simply also correct for relativistic effects caused by the orbits of different planets, and boom, you have a pretty consistently defined time that is valid across the entire solar system.
I've probably read his name more times than the names of these celebrities.
You're talking about a guy whose full time job for the last 10 years and remainder of his working life is spending his fortune for the benefit of mankind
The blurred images would convey the concept and the concept in many cases would be psychologically damaging, as you say. However I strongly suspect that the vivid details would only compound that damage. Progressive unblurring wouldn't prevent psychological damage, but surely it should help alleviate it to some degree.

It may even be possible to selectively blur only parts of images for some classes of content. For instance, a filter that blurs portions of the image that are vivid red. If the red blur is on a dinner plate, then it's probably just a plate of pasta with tomato sauce. If the red blur is where somebody's head should be, that's probably gore and witnessing even that could be disturbing. But I know I'd rather see the blurred version.
Facebook could allow access different instant-messaging clients to add contacts from Facebook. In this world, Messenger just becomes another instant-messaging client, but I don't see how this would break Facebook. It would totally devalue Messenger though.
I think a graph/table showing percent under/over budget vs year would be very telling, but a quick search doesn't provide anything that has been compiled. But more troubling, I'm having trouble finding any data with budget related numbers that don't require a phone call to an accounting department.

Do we have that little transparency?
Lived in the UK for a few decades. Have never seen a carolers. Thought they were a weird USA thing.
Right. The options in this area are:

- Don't check. Programs will crash if a thread-local variable is passed outside the thread (C, C++)

- Naive interpreter. Everything works, slowly, because the worst case code is used for everything. (CPython)

- Really clever just-in-time recompilation when what seemed to be thread-local suddenly gets accessed from another thread. (PyPy, Java?)

- Compile time checking to prevent this. (Rust)

- No threads (classic Javascript)

- Explicit shared areas into which only certain types can be placed (ECMAscript 2018)
When writing SQL, I think of "what is the DB engine going to do when I ask this". I don't see that as being substantially different.
I could imagine having a file with correctly-synced subs in the wrong language. Maybe that would be a good reference file.

(I think you're correct subbing "subtitles file" for "video file".)
I disagree. Not only can we no longer build large things, we are barely able to maintain the things we have. I lived in Cambridge MA during the repair of the Anderson Memorial Bridge, described here: http://larrysummers.com/2016/05/31/a-lesson-on-infrastructur... . Fixing a very modest bridge across a placid river took years, and cost far more than the inflation-adjusted original cost of the bridge (took longer than the original construction too!).

Look at NASA's marvelous manned space program. It has less manned launch capability than the agency had when the Mercury program was active. But they still spend money, doing extremely important things like sending "astronauts" to camp out on Mauna Loa and pretend they're on Mars.
> We already have a complete nematode implemented as a computer program. We already have a realistic simulation of the living creature.

It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "a complete nematode". It is very much a simple simulation that isn't at all close to the actual complexity of a living organism, even a worm. We can't even simulate a bacteria with the kind of fidelity required to claim that it approaches the complexity of a living organism.

> Twenty years ago the current output of Google Translate was a pure science fiction

I think you're giving google translate way too much credit. Compared to 20 years ago, yes, much has improved, but compared to a human native speaker it is pitiful.

> Also read about AlphaZero:

I am aware of Alpha Zero, it is an impressive but narrowly applicable use of machine learning that doesn't at all represent anything nearing the cognitive complexity of an animal. It is a complex achievement of applied statistics, not an intelligence. The "world" of Alpha go is a very strictly defined finite universe where the only possibilities are the clean and simple rules of the go board. Yes, the combinatorial explosion of potential moves is impractical to brute force, but ultimately the rules of go are so simple and discretely defined that its worthless as a comparison to a living intelligence.
Then there would be the risk that the rest of fb's employees might be exposed to the reality of this.
I promise, they become practically invisible at some point :) And, usually if you count them compared to similar code in a c-like language, using data/markup from any popular format (xml, json, html), they'll be very close. Definitely far less when it comes to HTML vs. Hiccup.

I jump around between C#, JS, HTML, XML, JSON, JSX, CSS, SQL and Clojure all day long. I have to do the non-Clojure stuff a lot more and have been doing them decades longer, after just a few weeks of getting used to it, Clojure would be my first choice.