skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I developed a mildly negative opinion of Singapore and HK when I saw their brightest minds enter the finance industry and wear three piece suits in sweltering weather every single day of the year.

Never again have I seen so many successful people so determined to be uncomfortable for a majority of their workday.
I did not intend to needlessly bash on religion in general, but seeing (what felt to me like) a dozen churches in a town of <500 inhabitants was very surprising.
Sounds like 737-Max has an inherent design flaw that they tried to patch with a software fix adding unnecessary complexity, a single point of failure(AoA sensors) and more importantly adds an element of surprise for the pilots:

https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/what-is-the-boeing...

Basically pretty shitty system design.
> Ballots are numbered and the number recorded against your name.

It's hard for me to express what a terrible idea this is. Pray you never get a government that would exploit this.
I had the same experience. After an Ubuntu update, my workstation was suddenly not able to mount an NFS filesystem from FreeBSD when Kerberos was enabled.

The bug was rather quickly marked as confirmed, with absolutely no updates for several years, even though the root cause was known. As far as I know, it still hasn't been fixed.
Not enterprise devices, though. Some enterprise networks even block third-party DNS servers (yes, even over HTTPS—all traffic must go through the corporate proxy).
Most of the people you know that use Oracle would likely quit if their CFO or CIO came in and told them to migrate away from Oracle. Oracle's stuff works and works right. Furthermore, expertise on Oracle tools is well-compensated and consequently it is common for Oracle expertise to leave for higher-paid jobs (also using Oracle) should a firm cease to use Oracle.

My point is that, despite a proliferation of free and open software, companies still often _pay_ for good software that works correctly. And Oracle extracts their pound of flesh w/o taking a single drop of blood. Oracle's is a very strong business model that is no accident and results largely from having no peers.
That documentary saddened and disgusted me. I realized that recycling is nothing more then moving my garbage to another country where some of it is recycled at the cost of their health and environment. I realized it is actually better to just toss my stuff in the trash and at least it stays in my country. But this still bothers me. In the past every jar you would buy at the store would fit the same lids as the canning jars and you could literally buy a jam, use it, then put your own jam in that jar. Why did they stop doing that? The packaging industry has promoted waste for years and people want change. I too recommend that documentary if you haven't seen it.
Plastics are, in essence, solidified crude oil. Many plastic products are very difficult to recycle, but they make perfectly satisfactory fuel. A modern waste-to-energy incinerator is no dirtier than a gas-fired power station. The Klemetsrud CHP facility in Norway provides a good model for the role of waste-to-energy incineration in a sustainable waste management system.

http://www.trackmyelectricity.com/plants/klemetsrud-chp/
Yep, if you wanted to learn to ride a bike, you wouldn't talk about riding bikes online or read a book by someone who has won the Tour de France. You'd go ride a bike.
As is often the case, by far the best comment is the least popular.

It's amazing how short-sighted people are.
The Symbiotic Nature of AI and Neuroscience
This goes nicely with this video on repairing a damaged (looked destroyed to me) trombone bell that by coincidence I watched yesterday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tIsenuUx_c
> Making cells removable isn’t economic

I disagree. Until relatively recently all battery powered devices had removable batteries, which is why we have standard battery sizes in the first place. Welded and sealed proprietary battery packs are a backward step.
Who disputed it? The only ones who "dispute" the autocratic nature of power in Russia are government backed trolls. That's not considered dispute by any means.

And trying to be neutral or "soft" about these kind of things ends up in whitewashing it. It sounds strong, because the problem is serious.
For a minute I thought the drone algorithm was somehow running on Scratch, and I was curious as to how the author had managed to accomplish this feat...
Sorry landfill decomposition wasn’t my point but I didn’t clarify.

My point was that paper can decompose more easily if/when it’s improperly disposed of/littered. It’s not ideal, but at least it will be gone in shorter time than plastic, and it won’t destroy wildlife, etc.

The other benefit of more paper based products is they retain greater value than plastics (both economic and practical - your McDonalds napkin was formerly a newspaper, which is former office paper, etc) and therefore market forces will typically support a clean stream recycling program for mixed paper, office paper, and corrugated cardboard.
Yeah. That's why I've been sticking with large cities. I've never needed car so far.
Say I sell my vote. The person picks a party I don’t agree with. I will simply vote for them anyway in the prelimenaries, screengrap my proof, and send to my customer.

I can do this multiple times. Each time I void my previous ballot, betraying my previous customer.

Then comes election day, then I show up in person and cast a physical ballot for the party that I favor. As a buyer, my customers have no way of knowing I didn’t void the preliminary ballot by showing up on election day.

Note that frauding vote buyers this way is also possible in most election systems that have non-digital preliminaries.
The 'infinite tape' issue is a red herring that sometimes appears in discussions about these issues. Real computers (such as the one I am typing this on) are informally described as 'Turing equivalent' because they can implement a Universal Turing Machine up to the limitation imposed by their finite memory. An alternative way of looking at it is that their model of computation, augmented with unbounded memory, could implement or simulate a Universal Turing Machine.

This is not the equivocation that it may appear to be, as it establishes a sort of asymptotic boundary between what is possible and what is not (the more memory we have, the closer we can get to it.) It also means, for example, that we don't have to wonder if there is one computer instruction set or architecture that can perform computations that are impossible by another (again, up to having sufficient memory to complete it.)

The author of the claim you are questioning has not, so far, returned to explain what he means, but I think he is saying that the brain is Turing-equivalent in the informal sense given above: we can compute like a Turing machine, up to the available tape/memory (though with a very limited tape, if we are not writing things down...)

If that is so then I (one of the people here criticizing the article) must say that I don't think it is relevant. An alternative interpretation of the statement, that it says it has been shown that that there is a Turing machine equivalent to the human brain, would seem to depend on believing (as I happen to) that the brain's functioning is a matter of electro-biochemistry that could, in principle, be simulated by a computer, but no-one, so far, has given a demonstration, or even a convincing explanation, of how that works at a Turing-machine level of abstraction.

With regard to the quote you offer: I think it is a simple case of rhetorical overreach -- one might need to know the entire history of that brain to fully understand everything there is to know about its current state, but that does not mean that, absent that full history, the state is meaningless. In understanding what a person is thinking, what they remember (which is an aspect of their brain's state) is more important than what actually happened.
I've often thought that a great product would be a leaf powered leaf blower/vacuum. Chop the leaves and burn them in a turbine that runs the vacuum sucking them up. Yes, technical problems - so solve them and bring me this product!
Well in Chrome you can't hook into the network layer to record/replay requests like I've done here (you could fake it by overriding the ServiceWorker, possibly, but this feels brittle and I'm not sure if it's possible either). I'm not familiar with Firefox extensions but I'm given to understand you likely could implement this project as a Firefox extension.

Locking down Electron apps to be safe on the larger web is certainly one area where I think electron could do a lot better. I think my project has followed all of the recommendations and should be safe, but I agree with you that it feels like a bigger attack surface. I personally wanted it to support offline browsing of documentation sites, which are generally pretty "safe" from that perspective.
Even though many of the technical points are highly debatable, my biggest issue is with the sentence "the programmer is freed to work on the actual problem" listed among the "advantages" of automatic memory management, and with how ubiquitous that mindset has become.

Insofar as computer programming is concerned, the "actual problem" is always the transformation of specific data on a specific set of computing hardware. Automating memory management doesn't imply working on the actual problem, it's just outsourcing a part of the actual problem in the pursuit of other objectives - decreasing development time, reducing the likelihood of specific bugs, etc. I'm not arguing that people shouldn't use automatic memory management, it often makes perfectly good technical and business sense to do so - but pretending that memory management is not a crucial part of solving any real problem in computer programming (even if you're not doing it explicitly) does no good to anyone.
Thanks that was a really interesting presentation. And to people who did not get to the end, I'd like to point out the last slide which is a nice tl;dr:

"Early on I said I wouldn’t be giving any ethical prescriptions.I will, however, give one meta-ethical prescription: formalize your ethical principles as terms in your utility function or as constraints.It is nearly certain that tradeoffs between these principles exist, and if we don’t acknowledge this, we run the risk of unknowingly engaging in bad actions."
Doesn't unlimited vacation just mean, take 3 weeks a year with your boss's permission if she/he gives it, or take a smaller bonus at the end of the year if you take more than your peers, or be shamed?

I've never heard anything about unlimited PTO that wasn't a riddle of caution and skepticism.
That's also where you make the least impact.

There is probably an impact graph with popularity * impact of change on the project * probability of change being accepted * log(delay of change reaching 80% of users).

For instance with Homebrew: high popularity, high probability of being accepted and low delay to reach 80% of users, so the impact of the change on the project is the main factor.
Warcraft IIIs map editor
Very few sites use certificate pinning. Chrome dropped support for dynamic certificate pinning. Web based certificate pinning is often recommended against because it's very hard to do right.

Also, using Let's Encrypt doesn't stop you from certificate pinning.
I am sure that an autonomous system that does not have a manual override will have the same pushback against it.
Please don't post garden-variety politics to Hacker News. There needs to be an intellectually interesting angle for such a story to be on topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I believe that most of this can be solved with better concept of respect. For myself, I choose not to use words that needlessly incite fear in others, or words that create an environment that makes them fear for their safety, or also needlessly and knowingly makes them feel bad about themselves.

It does seem that respect is lacking more and more these days.
This is kind of a series of non-sequiturs.

Front running has always been illegal.

Arbitrage is not illegal. Latency arb certainly isn't easy.

"Dark Pools" is a book. It's also a thing, but that's obviously not what I was talking about.

There's nothing especially shady about dark pools. We'd call them "private exchanges" if the exchanges weren't themselves already private companies, I think.
> India should have done this long ago.

This is a government ban, which means they want to stop people who want to import this waste. Are those importers too financially illiterate to realise that they're costing themselves money? That even though their business is dealing with this waste, they need you and the Indian government to tell them that recycling is actually pretty tricky?

Maybe they should ban it because it's causing health or environmental problems, but banning activity you think is uneconomical is pointless at best and harmful at worse.

> communities should not have the option to ship out their waste and have someone else deal with the problem

Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything here. If you pay someone to take your trash, or if someone pays you to take your trash, both of you are better off. Banning the activity makes everyone worse off.
OK. So we just happen to be talking about different things, and mostly agreeing on the facts then.

Nothing left to argue about then I guess :)
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it a lot, and we're trying for better here.

In addition to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you might also find these links helpful for getting the spirit of this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
Saatva+Savings+Awesome+Night+Sleep
There is a difference between being able to monkey patch

* objects created in the same scope
* objects created outside the current scope but global
* global objects
* core language features

For anyone who has to read code someone else wrote, as you go down this list life becomes much more painful. Even something as simple as forcing all the patches to be in one place so there is an unambiguous place to look for them would make a huge difference.
There are also a few pdf copies floating around that are acceptable quality.
Here's a useful signal: If you are getting crickets or curt responses ("ok", "great") after you finish speaking, then you are not talking their language.

This was the first sign I wasn't communicating effectively in my client-facing role.
Except we test humans with tests designed to show that a human who is capable of generalizing knowledge can do a few things that prove they can do more things than that. If the AI isn’t capable of that then just being able to pass the drivers test might create a very incapable AI
Sorry to be a naysayer, but I don’t think plain English makes programming any easier. The program on that link is nothing like how you’d talk, because it still requires the logical breaking down a problem into steps of regular programming. Also with many ways of saying the same thing, reading the program becomes harder. Because now you need to map the different English phrases to “what the computer really does” underneath.
>it’s less secure — you’re trusting (many) third parties

You're trusting those third parties regardless of if you use your own PKI, because browsers already trust all those root CAs anyways.
Great link thank you for sharing. It’s amazing how terrible a reputation waste to energy has.
I find it is a failure of deep learning that a model is unable to spot these by itself. A dense layer would have a neuron connected to both f527 and f528. A positive weight on the first and a negative one on the second would give f527-f528. The fact that stochastic search is incapable of making these things emerge is problematic.
Presumably, those large cemeteries will have mains voltage somewhere, so you'd charge one or two batteries while using another.
You don’t even need that. In many systems, you can vote multiple times, and only your most recent vote counts. As a buyer you have no way of knowing if your agent didn’t vote after they photographed them self voting for the party you picked.
There's also the misplaced emphasis on speed. Software safety and verification courses are considered "advanced" level. CS undergraduates are now led to believe that logic is a bore, and is old-fashioned computer science. Of course, with the advent of machine learning, "It Works!" is now considered as enough proof, so that's a whole new level of crazy.
The commenter who replied to you disputed it. Jumping to "government backed trolls" is exactly the mentality I was just trying to describe. That's just a form of assuming your conclusion, you have no evidence for saying it, and in fact it explicitly breaks the site guidelines to insinuate it. (Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

The range of legit opinion is much wider than most people think. That has become very obvious to us, looking at the data left by millions of readers, voters, and commenters.
So much conflict and waste caused by the desire to restrict how other people may alter their own consciousness.
Daydreaming about the future instead of doing work today
People are not "deployed" into HFT, they exercise their free will. Their livelihood is not your opportunity cost.
Ah, yep. That's an important one.
Don’t see anything bad mentioned here.

TLDR: Animals with damaged pineal glands have trouble growing hair. Melatonin supplement helps reverse this. Topical melatonin reduces UV damage to the skin and can promote hair growth.
The amount of pollution they make is horrible, but my actual disdain for them is that when just a dusting of snow is on the ground, two or three guys with leaf blowers are clearing the town sidewalks at 6 AM. The noise wakes my wife and child, and it goes on for about twenty minutes straight.

I have used a light, wide broom for the same purpose. I use technology, and I am not a Luddite, but leaf blowers don't seem to have enough pluses for me to think otherwise. You still have to strap on a leaf blower, and wave the blower, wear earmuffs (or go deaf), procure and fill it with fuel, and haul it back to your truck or shed.
Economic Geography
> It's a lot easier if your company is fully distributed and remote.

It's a lot easier to hire, but operate and retain that talents is VERY different.
The Next Killer Use Cases for VR
Yes that's essentially correct the N2 means something just not what the analysts thought it meant. Their recommendations were misleading and could have saved some time if they'd discussed it with someone familiar with process.
Look past the title. It’s a good article.
What's the advantage of using macports over Homebrew?
Then vote for the party your intimidator picked, show them you voted for them when asked. Then simply vote again for the party you want (during election day if you are afraid they will show up unexpectedly again before election day), voiding your intimidated vote. Your intimidator will never know who you voted for during election day (unless they spied on you, but you also have that problem for non-digital votes)
That seemed less than useful.

What do people answer when asked the question "what if my red is your blue?"

If any of them answer "That is impossible, red, green, and blue each exist as different wavelengths" then do we assume that they are not conscious? Or that the person has no visual qualia?

(Technically, the argument is "an AI lacking any visual qualia might respond with" so I'm committing logical fallacy. However, if many people with visual qualia give an answer that is consistent with what's assumed to be a lack of visual qualia then that answer is not diagnostic about the existence of visual qualia.)

Furthermore, color names are tied to culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Cultural_difference...

Some languages don't have a word for green. For example, quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himba_people#Color_perception "The OvaHimba use four colour names: zuzu stands for dark shades of blue, red, green and purple; vapa is white and some shades of yellow; buru is some shades of green and blue; and dambu is some other shades of green, red and brown."

How do you even ask a question like “Could there be a color greener than green?” to someone from a culture which doesn't have color terms? Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Color_ter... "There is also a claim that Pirahã lacks any unique color terminology, being one of the few cultures (mostly in the Amazon basin and New Guinea) that only have specific words for light and dark."

Does that make them any less conscious?

Finally, are any animals other than humans conscious? This argument seems to be that we can't tell if anything is conscious unless it speaks a human language.
Tangentially I'm interested to know whether taking melatonin for long periods of time (years) reduces its effectiveness. I've been taking it for nearly a year but I've heard stories about how you need to keep increasing the dose to get the same effect.
The Influence of Tests
Perhaps the author could just describe the underlying "real" phenomena. Do you really feel like the author is incapable of doing that? Why?
>Melatonin administration has been found to increase hair growth in a variety of mammals

>In a randomized double-blind study of 40 women with hair loss, melatonin solution applied to the scalp increased hair growth significantly relative to placebo

Seems like a positive. The article is suggesting that by helping regulate the circadian rhythm, the use of melatonin can potentially: extend lifespan, prolong fertility, reduce cancer incidence, reduce obesity and insulin resistance, improve neurological recovery from brain injury, improve skin resistance to damage (such as from UV rays) and increase hair growth.

Unfortunately, this is unlikely to affect male pattern hair loss.
ToyJVM: An Experimental Java Virtual Machine
Active fleet today: https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1104838043792490497
Did you upvote it? If so you can find it in your user profile under upvoted submissions.
When shit is hitting the fan, participants become willing to cross _very_ large spreads to trade. It can be a lucrative time for HFT market makers, as well.
That's a misstatement of what occurred. The aircraft had a fault on the previous two flights and was repaired before the fatal flight.

> Flight 610 should never have taken off.

A repaired aircraft should not take off?
Obscene wealth next to in your face poverty is nothing new, nor particularly special about SF. I don't deny it's a big problem, but this is pretty much what every major city wrestles with. Nor is this unique to our time period. For example, it's well documented that in Paris through as early as the 1700's through now, that there was an enormous amount of capital concentration right beside extreme poverty and >40% of the population owning net nothing. 'Dystopian' is also a very dramatic language.. Where do you live in SF? If you live in downtown or soma and only spend time there, I can see what you mean. However if you go out to richmond or sunset for example, there are a lot more families and children there.
Awesome vco build! Have you read the MAKE book about building the Noise Toaster? It's great!

I ran into my own discouraging brick wall when trying to figure out how to fabricate metal control panels/enclosures and printing labels on them without expensive cutting equipment.
Here's one that is 8 years old:

https://www.city-journal.org/html/cali-business-get-out-1341...

Here's one that is 11 years old:

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/dec/18/business/fi-leaving-...

Here's one that is 14 years old:

https://www.ppic.org/press-release/are-businesses-fleeing-ca...

Here's one from 24 years ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/29/us/a-changing-california-...