skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is a peer-reviewed paper which describes how meetings are beneficial, not addictive:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/108107397127806

(Note that this is a paywall link. Here is a quote to give readers here a gist of that article: "acceptance of the tenets of AA may be associated with positive behavioral change"; the paper describes how working the AA program results in people having a more positive world view)

12-step meetings are not a short-term fix; I have already linked to a paper which shows that two out of three people who regularly go to AA meetings in their first year of alcohol treatment are still sober 16 years later. Here's the original paper with those figures:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2220012/
> Is there evidence that these devices lead to widescale breaking of these regulations? And if so, is there evidence that this causes harm?

Yes there is. A lot of people now import devices from countries with different frequencies causing a mess. This is especially a problem if frequencies are used for other purposes.
People may have different motivations for promoting CCS (carbon capture and storage). However, the underlying motivations for a subgroup of those promoting a technology shouldn't be a reason for dismissing the technology itself.

I agree that CCS shouldn't be used as an excuse to continue fossile fuel use. However, as long as there are fossile power plants in existence (and we are necessarily stuck with those for a very long time), it makes infintely more sense to capture emissions at the source (the power plant) rather than spending energy capturing CO2 out of "thin air" later.

Moreover, there are a host of industries (steel, cement, chemicals) that would continue emitting large amounts of CO2 even if they switched 100% to renewable energy). To cut these emissions, there is no alternative to capturing the CO2 and storing it.

Looking at the figures, I would dare to claim that people against the use of CCS are not really serious about tackling climate change. (And by the way, the reason large-scale CCS has not yet happened in Europe is to a large part public resistance - I would assume that's a big part of the reason for those power plants in Germany too).
The GP conflates two things, facts being reported, and poor media coverage of partial facts or falsehoods. So therefore because the media report facts as well as non facts that means facts === non facts. Brilliant deduction isn’t it.
كلمات اغنية مشوار طويل احمد حسن و زينب محمد
New DNA test can distinguish between twins in crime cases
Ah, yes, and every curve is a line.

If some amount of something didn't have meaningfully negative effects, than a vastly increased amount of that same thing can't possibly have negative effects!
> I'm also confused by the china comparison. I'm not aware of any google tech China is using to oppress, but even if that is true, your China example is technology causing more oppression. This is the opposite. The technology reduces the oppression.

Google could very easily prevent China from using Android phones to oppress people. China is forcing people to install well known .apk files on their phones. Google has a very well developed infrastructure for blacklisting malware from their devices. But they refuse to life a finger.

> You're presenting a very weird moral arfument. If you thought that not supporting this app would accelerate the fall of the Saudi regime, I'd say you're naive, but ok. But you're not saying that, you're saying that American companies shouldn't work with groups you don't like, even when the result is objectively good, because, for lack of a better term, virtue signalling. Why?

In the short term it may be objectively good, sure. But no, I still don't like them working with groups "I don't like". I don't like American corporations legitimizing oppressive regimes. And what you are essentially saying is that if an oppressive regime threatens to hold a population hostage, then we must work with them.
I've read a lot of papers about negative emissions. My main take-away was:
1. It will be necessary
2. We can solve part of the problem with cheaper/easier solutions like trees and ocean farming, but we will need more technological solutions.

I think BECSS are difficult since it's still uncertain how the actual net carbon negativity changes when we change land to grow 'BECSS' crops/grasses. Also BECCS cost a land and water, something which will be a luxury when we are going from 7.5 billion to 10 billion people in 2050.
With DAC we can actually set an upper boundary of the total cost of the negative emissions, which will only go down due to technological improvements.

What I do agree on is that we need to stop using fossil fuels where possible. I don't think every sector will be ready in time (airplanes and boats for example). However we can make synthetic fuels using direct air capture which are almost carbon neutral (look at the super work David Keith is doing with Carbon Engineering: http://carbonengineering.com/ )
Those Health Apps Send Your Biometric Data Straight to Facebook
How has your company built a good remote/distributed culture? And where has it failed?
This is awesome. You should share it on ShowHN!
Yes, quitting your job is not the only way - or the best way for many people. However, it's not always possible to start something on the side with a full-time job. In my case, my employment contract prevented me from doing that. And even if it didn't, it would have been hard to find the time between work and family. If I didn't have enough savings, I might have taken a different approach - maybe start consulting or freelancing while boostrapping. But in my situation, I preferred to just focus on my business. I still have the option of doing freelancing/consulting if the circumstances require it. And obviously, I also have to option of going back on the job market if I don't manage to pull this off.
That may be true. A 2018 paper shows that other non-12-step fellowships are as effective as AA (as long as the goal is abstinence from alcohol, not moderation). Since the paper is still under paywall until later this year, here's a good lay summary:

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/5/17071690/alc...
My current works codebase.
I've never seemed to like other peoples code. Not even my own after 1 month
But this code is very good. I would attribute it to the strong set of rules and design patterns everyone follows. All code/services are broken up into `unit` which all follow the same pattern, of how it's called, how the code is arranged etc. This means there is no ambiguity for any new starters trying to contribute to the codebase. In addition to that our linter doesn't allow you to push code if it detects any errors. There are a few other elements, involved too, but I think the most important thing is keeping a standard of where each bit of code should live, how it should be called, and ensuring everyone uses the same conventions (i.e. single quotes instead of double, all this small things add up)
Start off by getting your house in order (finances, health, logistics).
Why learning Game Engines suddenly becomes popular among high school students?
I inherited a popular open source charting library. People like it because it has a data model - you can automatically brush and filter between charts.

It is intentionally a leaky abstraction so that there is always a way to customize it if it doesn't work the way you want.

There is only enough design to make it reusable, no claim to a "grammar" or other highfalutin abstractions.

There have been dozens of contributors and many parts are inconsistent.

Yet it still gets a ton of use 7 years on because it does 80-90% of what you want.

I've learned so much from this. Worse is better. Don't box yourself in with designs you don't understand.

Solve one big problem and after that be humble and let users work around anything you didn't think of.
The cost reduction is relative to the price Russia charges, not compared to their costs.

Supposedly[1], it was $23 million in 2007. but Russia raised the prices since then. The cost of the Soyuz to the Russians could well be lower than SpaceX still.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090604111935/http://www.kommer...
That makes no sense. First of all the driver is ETSI which the UK is a big part of, secondly even a non EU country (Switzerland) is behind this. Even after Brexit the UK will likely adopt this.
EmbraceTheHuman: Curated List of articles discussing the modern human condition
Unhealthy and Unprepared (2018)
Ethical AI is hard, but so are ethical laws, ethical taxation, and ethical advertising, to name a few more ubiquitous things than AI. The real answer here is that ethics is hard, and even if you know ethics and can get some agreement, getting humans to be ethical is even harder.

AI only introduces a new danger, but at the current complexity of AI I don't think its any more significant in effect than the other ethical problems we have. In fact, many misuses of A.I are based on the uses, not the AI itself. I don't think linear regression is inherently an immoral tool either if we're going the "this tool is too dangerous to use/allow access to" route. Until we have anything close to AGI, AI is a tool only as ethical as the user of the tool. That's the real issue here.

We absolutely do need regulation, but I'll be damned if 10 people with power in any government understand AI well enough to regulate it. Every day I think we get closer and closer to needing to implement technocrats in governments. The FCC is a great example of a place we should have had the model for decades.
I honestly don’t see any benefits to living on Mars until every inch of space on Earth is used up. Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what? To say we are somewhere else that looks like the Atacama but infinitely more difficult to get to? It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to kill you when we have a great place here already that we could just stop messing up.
Save food from the fridge: Shaping traditional oral knowledge (2012)
> Life threatening? Cold weather and lack of electricity kill far more people than global warming.

Global warming is as much of an existential risk to humans as nuclear war. The rapid changes are causing species extinction and, if it hasn't started already, will cause ecosystem collapse. We're still very bad at understanding things like complex food webs to see exactly what effects it will have
> When you put the scaremongering into this perspective, and we're worried about sea level rises of a few centimeters over the course of a century

We’re not, particularly. Oh, sure, that sea level rise is one of the predicted effects of the thing we are worried about, and it will itself have fairly expensive consequences and kill lots of people, but we're really concerned about getting to the point of an unstoppable feedback loop that, among other things, ends the current ice age (and not in the loose sense of a glacial period, which we aren't in but there have been several of while humans have been on Earth, but in the stricter sense of a period when Earth has permanent polar ice; all of human existence has been during the current ice age.)

> The earth has had far worse extremes that we can't even comprehend.

Sure, the Earth has, and the lump of rock will still be around whatever we do to the climate.

Humans, OTOH, have not been through anything like what the current warming trend will do if not arrested, and may well not be around if it isn't.

The concern isn't about the Earth, it's about conditions of human life on Earth.
The commercial crew missions by both Boeing and SpaceX are new and interesting for a number of reasons:

- This will be one of the first vehicles developed by a private entity to launch people into space, rather than a nation. That represents a huge step "down" the ladder of who has access to space. First, it's only nations. Later, it's large companies and entities. Down the line a little bit medium-sized companies will have access to space and wealthy individuals. Then we'll get down to small companies and fairly well-off individuals. Finally, we'll reach a point where everyone can afford to make trips to or through space. This is a huge first step on the ladder.

- The first stage of this vehicle was a booster that autonomously landed itself on a drone-ship, allowing it to be recovered and refurbished quickly and cheaply. Re-use of this first stage has the potential to drastically lower the cost to get humans (and stuff) into space. SpaceX has already pretty radically altered the launch provider scene by causing all players to lower costs across the board. And they can do that while maintaining very healthy margins if they get re-use right. Eventually, as other competitors (like Blue Origin) enter the market with re-usable launchers the price will fall further toward the new marginal cost, which is drastically lower.

Both of these things have the power to be the first steps into a world where there's a radically expanded access to space for people and companies. All this is happening at the same time that there are a number of other exciting developments in the space industry (NASA planning to start the Lunar Gateway; SpaceX thinking about how to plan to colonize mars; Bigelow planning to launch commercial space stations; Blue Origin about to enter the scene with a very exciting new launch vehicle), it feels (to me, anyway) like we're on the cusp of another big leap forward.
First we’d have to make an ethical society...
> They're curating for user experience, not for political opinions. If someone uploaded a vim clone google isn't taking a stance in the editor war by letting it stay up.

That may have been true in 2015. But no, Google us curating for political reasons. Google claims that they are concerned about things like the safety of women and LGBT groups. They have banned apps like Gab.com for purely quite flimsy political reasons. So you would think that Google would have no problem banning this app.

Thus, their approving of an app which literally facilitates patriarchal misogyny on a nation-wide scale, while banning apps that simply make misogynist jokes, is colossal hypocrisy on their part.
Then give feedback. The process is open for that reason. If you remove the EU from this you will have the insividual regulators ask for the same. Austria and Switzerland for instance push for this.

//edit: also even the proposed regulation would not prevent custom firmwares. You just meed to lock down the radio.
I have chronic painful peripheral neuropathy from alcohol abuse. I wouldnt describe it as being on fire; however, more like random jabs from needles on top of a constant numbness associated with your feet being asleep that no amount of movement or rubbing can satisfy. The doctor prescribed neurontin which I took for a year while unemployed. It made me incredibly drowsy while only marginally helping with the pain. When I started working I chose to discontinue taking it and just live with the pain as I found myself unable to stay awake while coding. It's funny at times to be sitting in a meeting trying to listen to someone while not expressing outwardly that an invisible dagger is being driven into my thigh. :)
Do you have any concrete examples for Python? As far as I know, ggplot2 is only for R. I would be interested to try out some alternatives to Matplotlib.
> In addition to that our linter doesn't allow you to push code if it detects any errors.

I just added a couple of linters to a new project and am looking forward to having the computer flag any obvious errors before allowing a git commit.
Perhaps the most pernicious Intellectual Denial of Service Attack is the "need" to censor opinions that we don't agree with.
I think it is because of the comments here that sometimes offer even more value and insight than the linked story and article. Reddit too has some really good comments occasionally but the SNR is high with comments from novelty accounts, "This." , etc.

This could be one of the reasons why people prefer to read news here.
I've read your blog post. A million is a nice nest egg for bootstrapping.

Just a thought: You can generate $15k of monthly passive income directly with $300-350k investment. If the bootstrapped business fails to make money fast, there's always this option with your amount of money.

Developers often miss those obvious ways to make money because these ways aren't technically intricate.

Source: I do affiliate marketing. This are the usual ROIs.

Good luck on your journey!

edit: wrt. the downvotes - that's one of the reasons I don't want to talk about this in public. I agree that it sounds unbelievable, but most people also don't believe in $500k salaries. Many people dismiss those opportunities because they don't believe it's possible.
For some unfathomable reason Google no longer allows Google Voice clients to forward their calls to Project Fi numbers. So my new layer of abstraction is a $3/mo Call Centric number routed to a $12 SIP deskset.

Call Centric lets you whitelist so step one is to upload your contacts to them and then drop any calls not in your list. Goodbye telemarketers. Second step is to leave the phone unplugged altogether unless you need to use it since anyone you know has your mobile number anyway. :-)

If you really need it, you can add the Call Centric number to your cellphone via a SIP client but in my experience that's a bit of a battery sucker and call quality can be poor with noticeable voice delay.
I agree with you, but for anyone following EU rules and regulations, this ship has sailed a long time ago. Drugs, guns, radio are just part of a huge long list of "general purpose technology" that have been regulated out of existence.
Nice work, I’m going to play with it a bit.

One thing I would recommend to everyone is adding a multiple to your expenses. Essentially, < expenses > * < margin of error >

I manage my personal expenses down to the dollar and have managed seven figure budgets. One thing that always occurs is unexpected expenses. My go-to rule is assuming my expenses are going to be 25% higher than expected, per year I go out. I personally track my error between expected and actual to develop a hard number for my margin of error. However, between 25% and 50% larger than expected expenses is a good estimate to give you breathing room.

This method ensures you can be hospitalized for a week or so and it’ll kind of “be in the plan” so to speak.
It's unreasonable to expect judges to divine lawmakers' intent on subtle issues of tax policy. If lawmakers want a tax to work a certain way then they need to just write that down so that it's clear to everyone.
I disagree. Tax laws should be simple and explicit. The people in charge change over time. I don't trust that the people later will interpret the laws the same way as the people today, or that either will interpret the laws the same way they were intended, or that the group of people that wrote the laws all had the same intent.
IMHO it's the content that is addictive rather than the gamification mechanisms (though they presumably serve to improve the content)

I haven't found a better source for interesting and relevant links

And then because of HN's popularity you can often find relevant people (such as the author or noted experts) commenting in the threads (as well as the inevitable noise, such as myself)
No. And if you think yes, you are probably deceiving yourself about your own ethical abilities.
> A lot of people now import devices from countries with different frequencies causing a mess.

If they are already using devices that are not compliant with EU regulations, then I don't see how stricter regulations would solve this. This sounds like an enforcement issue. What prevents people from importing the very same non-compliant devices under the proposed regulations?

In fact, I can see more of this import happening as the domestic devices will now be more expensive and crippled.
I wonder if you know how silly your comment reads?
Ok I have to ask- is 500k pa a rare dev salary for FAANG or is it fairly normal - I mean that's insane levels
A lot of general purpose technologies are restricted to safe use.
Show HN: EduClan – Start Teaching Online at Lowest Cost
Something tells me the mainstream scientific citation will never come from these hit and run climate skeptics.
Well, I'm only a lowly WordPress developer, but I'll say that most WordPress plugins are a PITA to extend the functionality of, but that the WP Store Locator plugin was very nice to work with. Just sensibly implemented object-oriented programming and extensive use of WordPress hooks.
What's the application?
Ethical yes, whether those ethics are in alignment with humans is another question.
I like to live in the present and not base my life on hypothetical states humanity might one day attain if it transcends everything that makes it human in the first place.

Transhumanism is a good form of entertainment, but for me it's no more than intellectual masturbation for now. The average person (aka people not actively working in these fields) don't have to worry about these things and have an infinite amount of actionable decisions to make that would have an actual effect on their day to day life.

> If you're not optimising all your life decisions, you cede to someone who does.

You have to differentiate two types of optimization here.

I eat healthy , exercise multiple times a week, get enough quality sleep because I know it's good for me. I don't invest in training apps, fancy enhancing supplements, weekly blood test, a smartwatch to monitor my HR 24/7, sleep trackers with detailed second by second summary of my night, diet "AIs".

All of these are distractions that have minor impacts on your experience once you got the basics right. If everything it's a ridiculous waste of time, energy, brain power and money for everyone involved, but it makes money so I guess we all know why they exist.
An improvement on the classics:

M-x tetris.

or if your the text adventure type

M-x dunnet

(M-x usually is "esc -x")
> In that case, Google and Apple should completely withdraw from Saudi Arabia: no iPhones, no appstore, no AdSense, ... Any of these lead to tax revenue which facilitates running that oppressive government.

> That's not what people are demanding though: they want some inconsequential app removed to demonstrate that they can coerce big tech companies to do their bidding.

Actually, I kind of am demanding that they not do business with oppressive regimes. You make it sounds like some huge sacrifice. It is not. And it would give them a shred of moral credibility.

Or, on the other hand, if Google must do business with Saudi Arabia, I expect them to shut up and never again speak of virtue again. I expect them to let neo-nazi apps trend on the front page of their app store. Because they have no moral authority any more.
similar situation -- have had a lot of success with nal. but now curious about the neuroplasticity you mention. curious if you have any further reading on this. I'm reading Pollan's new book "How to Change your Mind" and it makes me very interested in exploring LSD more for similar addiction purposes.
Yet we have entire editors that do far less that require a entire web browser and take 100+ Meg's of ram to run.

Edit: gigabytes of ram.
You could destroy such devices at customs inspection. Currently such devices are legal. The use outside of the legal frequencies is not and enforcement is almost impossible.
Best Smartphones of 2018
It can be a huge catalyst for change though. Food chains poisoned and disrupted, throwing off migration patterns, etc. And THESE changes can illicit evolutionary jump-starts. Unless he was just a fishy Paul Revere coming to warn us CTHULHU is awakening.
Except for the end. That wasn't necessary. Good read though, very informative indeed.
Is an ethical hammer even possible?
No, I think that offensive opinions are an order of magnitude LESS serious than a women's tracking app.

Are you serious? Publishing misinformation about drugs is more serious than the handmaiden app?