skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have an Uyghur acquaintance, and I keep wondering whether I should reach out to him, or whether contacts with foreigners are likely to make his life more difficult.
> CEO should have never folded under the pressure because it was a waste of money, time, and it put people at risk.

At the same time, he board of directors should never have exerted the pressure, for the same reasons.
Huh, that's weird. It looks like something got screwed in the copy/paste process, because the previous article I linked definitely has the correct "range/step" format. I thought I had copied it from there, but can't find this example there. And you're absolutely right, the version I quote here is syntactically invalid.

So the syntactically valid version does not work in that earlier cron-to-English translator, but it does appear to work in this version.

My apologies for the error on my part.
Beyond the Brain (2013)
And it's starting, can't wait until Elsevier is bankrupt. Parasites.
Three projects to get started with Serverless in 2019
Probably September, though no promises. We're still redoing some core metaphors. Codewise, you can expect it to look similar to Elm/OCaml - functional/imperative language with structured error handling and no null.
Google employees pushing for nationwide legislation banning forced arbitration
By what metric does one assess Bitcoin's success?
This seems to be really interesting insights they did! Could it be that having solid search can improve numbers that much?
No one needs meat glue for hamburgers.
> This space is gigantic and there is plenty of room for multiple solutions.

My concern is that references are a poor signal in general, not that LinkedIn has a monopoly on them. I don't request or look at references, and I haven't provided references to a potential employer since I was in high school.
This just in: https://twitter.com/michellemalkin/status/110076019755373773...

Twitter sends legal warning for blasphemy. They couldn't find better timing for illustrating the point.
There are AC units that, instead of sending heat to the outdoor device, pipe it to the hot water heater.

There are also hot water heaters that, instead of burning something to heat water, have an heat exchanger on top of them to extract the warm from the surrounding air. Usually called "hybrid".

I known Rheem makes such units, but there may be others.
Requiring a sysadmin to add a new bulb to the network? I'd rather stick with dumb lightbulbs, thank you. (In a practical deployment the janitor will have the credentials to the network that the lightbulbs are on, hopefully not the one that all other devices are)
The article makes a good argument against simplifying Silicon Valley down to its faults

The article makes a good argument against taking media spin at face value. (Including that within the article. Including that within this comment!)

I feel like the author falls victim to the same blind-men-and-elephant problem: he somehow reads all the 'thinkpieces' (whatever that means) that focus on strange things...

We all fall victim to all the media [X] that focus on strange things. In Manufacturing Consent we see how it worked in the 80's with newspapers and television mergers in the context of the west vs. the Soviet bloc. In 2019, it's Left vs. Right and new media vs. old media.

I personally do not see this phenomenon, probably because I get my news from aggregators with different bias.

Then you do suffer from an analogous phenomenon, modulo your own biases.

The (successfully defeated) strawman is just that, a strawman.

If only it were a strawman. At this point, it's more like a miasma we are all living in and breathing in.
Official statement: https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/02/more-updates...

It's not "all".

> A small number of creators will be able to keep comments enabled on these types of videos. These channels will be required to actively moderate their comments, beyond just using our moderation tools, and demonstrate a low risk of predatory behavior. We will work with them directly and our goal is to grow this number over time as our ability to catch violative comments continues to improve.
The freerider-dilemma is a real thing. Even when it works in some cases (Wikipedia has large enough audience to get by on donations even when the percentage that donates is tiny), those are the exception.

Hence the efforts to build better coordination models (such as https://snowdrift.coop is doing).
I'm sure there are many parameters to tune, although I don't know the details. But a "heat pump" is just a machine that pumps fluid in a certain way to make one end hot and another end cold. With a traditional AC, the hot end is placed outside and the cold end inside. What the HVAC folks call a "heat pump" is a particular variety that can reconfigure itself to put the hot end inside. If you were so inclined, you could heat a space by taking an AC and turning it backwards so the hot end was inside. (This would be pretty dumb unless you needed to heat stuff up in the summer, since the temperature range it's built for would be all wrong otherwise, but it works.)

I'm sure there are heat pumps that don't cool well when the temperature is too high, but I don't think it's a general property of all of them.
Unwritten rules of calling, texting and social media
Oh, if you join the alpha (https://ellen-mailinglist.builtwithdark.com) you get to see it sooner
We've been writing HTML for a couple of decades now. There have been dozens (hundreds?) of WYSIWYG editors and nothing has really caught on.

My hypothesis is that unlike other mediums like paper or video, the elastic nature of the web makes understanding the positioning paradigms/box model/etc a necessity that no visual tool can really abstract. By the time you understand all that, it's just faster to write and maintain code.
>> [...] solves the same problems without a runtime, and about 3 times the performance.

I think you should look more into Ada. The only "runtime" is for the exception handling and bounds checking, both of which can be turned off if needed.

And I don't know where you got that "3 times" figure from? Do you have an example you are referring to?
> YouTube told the BBC it would use algorithms to detect which videos contained children.

I guess we will have to see how well this works out. I can foresee someone's legitimate video having its comments suddenly removed causing uproar…
I think if you go to peers who you trust from old roles there should be no awkwardness in asking for a rec. However, I totally empathize with every company seeming similar when you're an applicant. It's hard to get a sense of the intangibles of a workplace until you actually work there. That's something I'd like to see a startup tackle
On the other hand, I read Dilbert and when I noticed his political rants a few years ago, I just adblocked the css for his blog posts.
Unreasonable choice by Elsevier. I never understood why the authors of a University/Institute have to pay for open access on top of the huge subscription bill.
WebRender Newsletter #41
I live in a flat that was built mid 90's and it's a disaster from a heating and cooling point of view.

Ventiliation is shit, one side never gets the sun so the outer wall is cold which means condensation is a daily battle, I basically run a big heavy duty dehumidifier from mid-autumn to mid-spring (at least its not a net loss, it dumbs a fair amount of heat as a byproduct so I can run the heaters less).

It's rented though so not something I can fix until I buy a property in a few years.
I seriously doubt Apple’s cost to administer the App Store is double digit percentages of revenue.

The 30% is a tithing to Apple for creating iPhone in the first place.

Patreon could sort of justify the same thing. Their real product is just the idea that anyone could be a monthly patron at all. That’s worth a LOT to creators. People didn’t think that way before Patreon.
The Case for Dennis Rodman
Surely this group will always be a small fraction of channels creating content that is affected by this rule?
git is already a distributed, peer-to-peer system
Terry Crowley's posts on Windows/Office (where he ran engineering) are well worth reading: https://medium.com/@terrycrowley
Bell cuts phone service to family struggling to pay surprise $1,800 bill
Because in principle, all the same amount of resources could fund the same work and yet a far greater audience could get that much greater value without paywalls.

Paywalls are a compromise that dramatically reduces the overall benefit a work has in order to get over the freerider problem that public goods face.

Basically: the PAY part isn't the problem, the WALL part is.
The models have about 1k triangles each. The code is optimized to scale to many units (racers), but the initial rendering cost of instancing with pre-rendered animation skeleton may be high I suspect, so it may be slow for few units on old hardware. I could try to have different rendering paths for small and big number of units to alleviate the problem.
For like 10+ years at least the “media” was probably overly kind...

This is one of the things which we need to get better at calling out in the media in 2019.

Basically just taking PR press releases

Too much media in 2019 is just parroting other media and official pronouncements and press releases.
There are AC units that do this: pipe the heat to the hot water tank first.

* https://www.rheem.com/innovations/innovation_residential/int...

* https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/12/air-conditioning-water-hea...

Once the water tank reaches its max temperature, then heat is dumped outside.

The practical problem is that you need to have the different parts work together, and fridge makers don't don't to hot water makers.
Transparent? Never heard of zucc?
YouTube steadily moves toward the TV station model.
Blockchain as a Force for Social Change
Man people are depressing. I'm guessing the scum bags will have to post scummy things on other forums and link to videos. At least the consumers on youtube wont be subjected to such.

Incoming new challenges for reddit. Maybe its an opportunity to get rid of some more scummy communities.
To top this all off, "United Healthcare’s attempt to save $2,000 cost over $1 million in health care costs over the past year."

To save a small amount of money, they ended up spending way more money and killing the patient.
Many Swedish suburbs are supplied with communal hot water for heating (fjärrvärme) produced by burning non-recyclable rubbish or maybe a local factory. The last stage of houses built near us was so thermally efficient that the supplier refused to extend the heating network, as there was not enough consumption to generate a profit. When I lived in New Zealand I could see my breath indoors in the winter. Insulation? I'm a convert.
It's mostly a problem in more specialized fields where there are only really one or two journals servicing it. If Elsevier owns the only journal(s) in your field then you're gonna be in a tough spot. Organizing and launching a new journal is challenging, which is one of the reasons Elsevier has been so hard to overthrow despite almost everyone being unhappy with them.

What is also needed is for more journals to be founded or defect. Elsevier's big subscribers can exert some leverage, but Elsevier's strategy has been to lock down their control of publishing in entire fields, meaning that you may not have much alternative.
Chase Bank suspends access of conservative activists to their personal accounts
Fantasy response, like if you somehow saw it coming and didn't care about the job:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-b2nc4Qbi4

(unedited: https://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/chris-farley-coffee-comme... )
Videos with children are just as „legitimate“ as those without.
Insulation is probably the most important mechanical energy saving feature of a house. Unfortunately it is behind the drywall and as they say "out of sight and out of mind". We built a very large cottage (3000 sq/ft) in Northern Ontario, Canada. The entire house had a continuous envelope of a minimum of 4-5 inches of Closed Cell Foam (2 lb) ( https://www.demilec.com/ ) . Installed a Geo-Thermal Unit with in floor heating through out the basement and forced air everywhere else. We also have a high efficiency fireplace stove. It can be minus 40 C outside and you only need a couple of logs in the fireplace to keep the entire cottage very warm.

You can change out your furnace/AC/Heat Pump anytime, but try tearing off all the drywall in your entire house to replace the fiberglass insulation that doesn't work or was installed incorrectly. Spray Foam Insulation pays for itself and to think it's only around $3.00 a sq/ft at 3 " thick installed. People have no problem paying more for carpeting or tile floors, strange....
More depressing that people like you would rather stifle expression so broadly in response to false panics like this one. Thanks.
Yes, but I think that UX is a particularly toxic vector for unqualified people. UX people are often good at dazzling upper management. What they do is vague enough that it can be hard to nail down a failure condition. Everyone wants the newest and best.

I've seen CEOs give the reigns of their app to some UX person, because they want to impress the hip young UX expert, and they know just enough tech to appear to a wizard.
Stop Creating Maximal Voluminous Products for Your ‘MVPs’
Chris Ulmer, who runs the popular YouTube channel Special Books for Special Kids, said that comments were removed from his channel despite no evidence of unacceptable comments, and YouTube told him that if he turned comments back on, he risked his channel being deleted. [EDIT: Turns out, this is not actually the case. See child comments.]

https://twitter.com/chrisulmer/status/1099366622329036801

"Last night I realized all of the comments on SBSK's YouTube channel were disabled. I saw I could manually turn them back on so I did. Then I read a post by YT saying that by turning comments on I risk our channel being deleted. I love and respect YT but IDK what to do.

"The beauty of SBSK is the love and acceptance in the comment section. It shows families and individuals across the world that their [sic] are people who accept them. Many people I interview have been socially isolated. Comments can change their self perception."

So it sounds as if YouTube content creators are now in the unenviable position where they need to actively moderate the comments section for videos featuring children, and if they don't do so to YouTube's satisfaction, they could have their entire channel nuked. Even if you're pretty darn sure that your commenters will behave themselves, that doesn't sound like a good deal.

Seems like YouTube will need to come up with some sort of "trusted subscriber" designation, and allow content creators to permit comments only from those subscribers, so that any random bad actor can't swoop in and destroy a channel.
> The general advice of "don't optimize until you've measured" is still almost always correct.

The issue of course being that when designing code, various design choices can have significant performance implications, and can be very hard to change once implemented and in production.
Any you can recommend?
Yes I haven't optimized a lot for older hardware, but I think it could definitely be done, just have to ditch the complex stuff I am using to scale to high number of units when there are not many of them.
Man this is going to kill Michael Reeves' channel.
Social media scandals like this one are a reminder that there are larger numbers of closet pedophiles, racists, Nazi sympathizers, and conspiracy theorists in our societies than many people realized.

Social media gives them a means to discover each other and collaborate, but they were always there.

I agree with Youtube’s move here, but the root cause of the problem is that our societies are worse than we thought they were. Fixing that is going to take more than policing comments on websites.
Yeah, I get that, I really do.

But what you mean is that you are able to interpret these statements.

Plenty of others, maybe less experienced, are not.

Next thing you know, they are spreading the word - "hey, did you know there's a new development methodology? The idea is that you completely ignore performance until after you've written some code. Yeah, you heard me - completely ignore!. It sounds crazy, but that's how it works!"
Imagine a similar situation but where people died: Who's corporately responsible for that decision? The company, or the individual directors? How about the NEDs?
Most of the programming accounts I used to follow were ruined by politics.
The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking.

In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet a basic level of decency.
Seems to me requiring the uploader to approve all messages would work just as well without cutting video creators off from their audience.
You gotta declutter and optimize your software
Its comments like this that make people hate HN. I agree with their writeup fully. They focused wayyyy too much on performance and not enough on an MVP, pivoting, marketing, growth, and staying agile.

I would love to get all these "Performance First! Its so easy" engineers in a room for a week. Hell, give em three weeks and they still wouldn't have a single line of code written. But they would still be arguing about the best way to deal with their upcoming 1 million hits per second.

Rule #1 of any business: Sales cures all. You know what's really hard to sell? A product that hasn't even made it out of the damn door yet.
It's not like the US doesn't have a bunch of laws that violate free speech but are never enforced, and thus still sit on the books unchallenged.
Largest US Center on AI, Policy Comes to Georgetown
This only applies to publications post-2018.

The UC system, i.e., its students (tuition) and state taxpayers, is still paying Elsevier for all pre-2019 publications, including papers published by UC authors.
It depends. If your county has the right equipment to recycle those mixed paper/plastic cartons then probably so, otherwise the whole thing goes into landfill or is incinerated, and that's more material than a plastic bag. You can check online if your county has the facility (unfortunately mine doesn't).
Children is gender neutral. But thanks for correcting my misapprehension about the relativities. What's the source so I can understand distribution to kids?
The ramifications of this are profound, at least:

- shake the money stick at them and they will dance (thanks, of all people, Nestle!)

- they've admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can't be trusted to self regulate)

- they've all but admitted they can't fix this in reasonable time, if at all

This is the first time I can think of where there has been a seriously material chink in Google's.. cultural armour? Turns out the advertisers are in control, and turns out they don't have a technical cure all. It'll be interesting to see how they attempt to reintroduce comments in the long term, no doubt more ML. Of course, this says nothing about a recommendation system that continues to blindly cluster videos of lithe toddlers together. I wonder if any advertisers are making a stink about that

Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in. The subtext here of course is that Nestle and Disney are some of the most evil companies around, and yet they're the ones that were forced to strong-arm Google. The irony of this defies words, and the reality of the only mechanism at play here to protect children is almost as disturbing - these companies don't "care about children", they were only forced into action to maintain their reputation.

(gentle reminder: HN punishes highly commented 'controversial' stories. If you care about this issue being more widely understood, try to limit your commenting)
What would be the appropriate course of action then in this case? Just quietly downvote the comment I disagree with? Flag it? Flag the submission?

Honest question.
My advice to you... jump in the water and you'll learn to swim faster. My Linux skills were always lacking a little. (I use to dual boot Windows/Linux) But then I just said fuck it, I was getting tired of Windows. So, I removed Windows and then my Linux skills got way better much faster. I wanted to reduce how much I used the mouse. Unplug it and move it to another room. Boom. It's quite some pain in the beginning but in the end you'll be faster.
In reading the comments here I see that some people do use voice with their hand rectangles for other purposes than speaking to someone. I never do even though there is some Google Assistant icon staring at me. If I accidentally start recording my voice by fumbling buttons then I instinctively try to stop it so I can continue pecking into the keyboard.

Is it a generational thing and will future generations find typing into a search box as anachronistic as I find using a land line with a rotary dial?

I am also British and therefore not as loud as some people in the English speaking world. Talking to my phone on the train would make me cringe. Clearly people like me will die off soon enough, however, is adoption a problem for these voice technology things? How do people get into changing habits from pecking at a keyboard to the evidently easier voice driven way of doing things? Is there one use case, e.g. in the car, where the habit of speaking to a gadget is learned?
I can't think of having ever seen a comment on YouTube that made the commenting feature seem worthwhile.
To ban comments is an important step IMHO, but how about putting the people making the comments behind bars? They will keep watching these videos.
Great news. Now there are enough dissenters that Elsevier will be forced to come to the table upon more favorable terms.
Mythbusters tried this and got some smoke, but IIRC not actual flames. Seemed to be pretty possible though.
Just adblock everything but the player element. It's the only way to use YouTube.
That won't stop a former employee from suing me though. I might win the case, but I'd still have to pay a fortune to defend myself.
Did you look into the scandal? It seemed pretty overblown to me.