skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is actually one of the fun little things I like to do with my VR headset. Just lie down in the middle of my room and look at stars (there's a similar program for VR).
> If I was Google I would be providing easy to use blogging site, blog readers and a loose social network that encouraged links to other sites

Back in the heyday of blogging, there were people working on building exactly this. See for instance FOAF:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)

Of course, then along came the walled gardens and that was the end of that. (Sigh.)
People that are heavily corrupted respond to criticism of neoliberalism/capitalism the same way fundamentalists respond to heresy.
Not sure why you are downvoted. My Subaru does a pretty good job of detecting both moving and stationary objects, using only stereo cameras. It does have its limitations, and I wouldn't trust it to be a level 4 or 5 auto-auto without additional sensors. But it sure blows away Tesla when it comes to little things like detecting parked fire engines and highway barriers.
Are you a family member of a severely, dysfunctionally autistic kid? You can't act like these families don't suffer to some degree.
Wouldn't it be a lot better to do the following:

* Realize that things like 'SSN's are being used as social identifiers and actually just issue them.
* Allow legal entities to authenticate and update their preferred physical address
In ONE place (so I NEVER have to update billing addresses again!)
(maybe even for different kinds of data-packets)
* Make it possible to mail to someone's identity (as the address), BUT
you first have to authenticate as a legal entity
(person or registered organization / business)
that authentication data is hard coded on to the envelope.

This way if someone is abusively sending things they can be targeted by a class action suit/etc.
Well, I'm all for saying it should be none of your business (in the general case) after considering that there are reasons that contribute to the case that it might be, and dismissing them. But insurance is a weak argument. Ultimately that means people fit for employment pay for others' incompetence and malfeasance.
I never said they aren't. Nice virtue signaling though!
how are they meaningful? Job "guarantee" is meaningful? Free college is meaningful?
You mean - the option that says "mark as listened"? :)
We are drifting away from the original issue here. 'However minor' is a long way from near-maximal efficiency, and in the context of the original claim, 'efficient' means compact encoding.

The fact that the DNA involved in gene regulation is mostly non-coding does not mean that most non-coding DNA has a regulatory purpose. If it did, changes in non-coding DNA would be more important, in aggregate, than changes in coding DNA are, with respect to evolution and disease, on account of its prevalence.
Imagine that “free plastic bags” had never been a thing.

There are homeless people without adequate toilets. Would you suggest “let’s fill our world with heaps of littered plastic bags, because some homeless people might be able to use them as portable toilets” as a remedy?

No, that would be an absurd solution.
Well call them out if you see that, I guess. Or if you see Facebook doing that. Seems like a non-issue for me.

This is the world Muslims deal with every day - radical Islamic terrorism gets shouted about, and suddenly Muslims have to say "so er, we're worried about being labeled as terrorists just arbitrarily." Way I see it this will help, because another class of people will now be aware of that distinction issue and perhaps be more sensitive to the differences between, say, a Muslim and a radical Muslim terrorist.
They're hit or miss depending on the instructor. Too easy for bias to seep in in the more social science type classes.

Not regarding any particular subject though, a breadth of experiences is always good because it gives you more contexts to think in and draw analogies from. Things like the behavior of ants influencing your thinking on distributed systems, issues of group communication brought up in a Communications class relevant to server architecture (connections in a group growing as a square), queue behavior in shopping centers/theme parks, thinking of Sherlock's investigation methods while debugging, lots of examples.
Consider Jenna McLaughlin's reporting for the Intercept several years back, concerning the GCHQ raid on the offices of the Guardian newspaper, and why agents felt the need to physically destroy every computer in the building:

https://theintercept.com/2015/08/26/way-gchq-obliterated-gua...
A Sort of All Sorting Algorithms
In python this can be true, if you invest in the various protections like pylint, mypy, and full test coverage.

Python doesn't force you to do those things if you dont need the reliability for a prototype or one-off code.

But if you want to make a reliable system, even convert your prototype into a reliable system, you can.
An Afternoon with Arduino
Very very good book. It sends you into an initial "NO that's preposterous!" thought but as you read through it becomes obvious the damage the current system has done and the weaponization of it.
Previous discussion [1] from yesterday (98 comments)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19498975
I agree, I think Circles was great. Between family and actual friends, most people have probably less than 100 contacts to manage. The rest could be lumped into Followers. Even for those, over time, machine learning models could suggest circles to put them in, or even assign them automatically with a manual override if you didn't like the placement. But the basic idea of Circles is sound, and the biggest thing wrong with Facebook (from a user perspective, anyway), is that it doesn't provide something comparable.
So this is a worse implementation of the German Navel Grid System, taken a few layers deeper, and without the contextual value of an actual grid?

Looks like Lat/Long win again.
Andrew Yang is an Accelerationist.

His Universal Basic Income proposal is the most interesting thing in politics in a long time. It is actually feasible and will get us on the track to post-capitalism.

You are an American? You are a citizen? You get a thousand bucks a month. Funded by 10% VAT.

The freedom dividend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTkhrosH8xw
Only radioactive contaminants. But that's really just my guess, I don't know as much about volcanoes. As far as I'm aware, there usually aren't big radiation deposits around volcanoes. But as far as total contaminants it depends on the size of the volcano.

From quick searching I can get some numbers [0]. Yearly volcanoes produce >200m tons of CO2 (not sure if that is CO2eq, because volcanoes also produce a lot of CH4, SO2, H2O,H2S, and other greenhouse gases). A quick search doesn't yield anything conclusive. But I can tell you I've worked on shielding tech and my intuition is that a volcano is going to produce a lot more. This might be a good place for acidburnNSA[1] to chime in, as they know substantially more than I do.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=acidburnNSA
Because money is just a proxy for resources. Printing more money does not create more of everything else, so it drives inflation and effectively acts as a tax on all other economic activity. You can print more, but you need to be aware that what you are doing has that effect, and if you overdo it you'll cripple your economy just the same as if you increase tax rates too much.
Rejected Vanity Plate Applications, California DMV
You don't really need to know they are contractors, they are looking for a jump in the number of people onsite because access is controlled. A major turnaround or outage will bring in hundreds of extra contractors for days at a time.
IIRC there are also laws that after a certain time anyone is allowed to produce and cell (certain?) car parts to ensure that cars that are on the road can still be repaired and serviced.

Same should be applied to electronics (and a wide range of other consumer goods).
I am watching this IPO with keen interest. If it goes well, in terms of market day open to close, perhaps that suggests that the Uber IPO will be a similar success. I also want to participate in the Slack IPO as well.
Dev Site of European Free Trade Association Is Exposed to the Public
The podcasts are played directly from the BBC's servers.

The BBC already have all the consumption data that they would expect - IP address, device, time listened, etc - in their own server logs. Just like a normal podcast player.

So... what user analytics do the BBC actually want?
My friends own a flat in downtown San Francisco, about a 30 second walk from the 4th and King station. They're waiting till the middle of this year to sell because of the expectation of many new millionaires seeking property after the Lyft, Uber, slack, and other IPOs.
Could have been a lot more about Bostrom's ideas in this article, given the title. But my hunch is that the kind of philosophy enthusiast who writes for the New Yorker doesn't want to dwell on Bostrom's ideas (or those Less Wrong guys) in any way; it's a question of seriousness.
They make the wrong call because they aren't focused on surfacing content you're interested in, they're focused on surfacing content that gets a rise out of you.
I think it is all just a data grab. They HAVE to identify students on their computers, then link with lots and lots of other companies which tie everything together. Look at the turnitin privacy policy.
You pay for many things in life that are not practical. Why would you expect from education to be 100% practical?
You can get ok photos just holding your cell phone up to the eyepiece.

Which sounds stupid, but phone cameras tend to do well with short focal-length, and the large "viewfinder" of your phone's screen helps a lot.

Although the last time we tested this in detail was 2009. The Image-Sensor Processor (ISP) in current cell-phones changes the game.

Sounds like a waste of time, but my favorite onserving sessions are "sidewalk astronomy" -- sharing simple direct observation with people who have never used a telescope. I encourage direct, hands-on experimentation with a minimum of equipment.

Beyond that, of course you pretty much need super-cooled CCD and the best telescope mount you can afford. Often the mount is the key, more $$$ than the telescope itself.

Deep-sky observation, faint nebulae are smudges of light to visible eye even through a big scope. You want a big light-bucket, like a Dobsonian, which emphasize mirror size rather than expensive mounts or optical clarity.

For your first telescope, buy a good set of auto-stabilizing binoculars. Large field of view means you can get used to finding things on the sky. You can take them anywhere.

Big scope is like desktop computer. Binoculars like the cell-phone in your pocket.
>Do you think it is justified to ban or suppress content on social media from people that SPLC/ADL view as part of the radicalization process? Eg jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin.

I certainly do, but evidence (e.g. historic enforcement patterns) indicates that Facebook does not.

Note that my opinion on this isn't global and without nuance. There are things that Jordan Peterson does and says that aren't, at all, controversial and are even occasionally interesting and thought provoking. Not everything he does radicalizes people. Same with, I assume, Rubin and Shapiro, although I don't pay them enough attention to know or care either way.

However, that's all beside the point. Facebook *doesn't appear to thing that they're worth censoring. I'm not sure why my opinion is at all relevant.

You still haven't given me that example, by the way.
Arms are a complete waste of money, until you need them.
Every internet capable device has GPS, iploc, or both. This is just adding an extra step to the process that requires a bunch of button pushes and lip flapping.
Sort of abandoned but still works well enough.
On the other hand, I have a BSME from Caltech. For all degrees, Caltech required 3 years of math, 2 years of physics, one of chemistry, a chemlab, 3 of humanities. My career is one of programming, after a stint at Boeing.

The point is, if I was only a self-taught programmer, it never would have occurred to me to take those "irrelevant" physics classes. But those classes, along with the mechanical engineering classes, math, etc., have helped improve my programming in quite unexpected ways.

There's also the simple pleasure of knowing how things work. I'm able to figure out why my car doesn't work, and when the mechanic is giving me a line of bull. Many, many features of the house I live in was the result of my diverse education. (For example, don't use iron nails to hold copper. Don't run cat5 cables through the same holes as the 125V wires.)
Not every closeted gay man who will sign up for Grindr has already signed up.
Wondering as well. Could they be incredible in some cardio sport because they could push themselves. Or would they push too hard? Or is the type of pain different so they feel discomfort same as we do?

What about holding your breath? The pain is from co2 in your lungs, not a lack of o2, so it is mostly your brain/will stopping you from holding it longer.
If practicality doesn't matter, why not study Pokémon?
Either:

1. You see a podcast you're interested in

2. You go to the BBC's website

3. You discover you need to download BBC Sounds (if in the UK)

4. You download the app

5. You register with a username and password (and UK postcode, which narrows you down to the street where you live)

6. You press play and start listening

or

1. You see a podcast you're interested in

2. You press play and start listening

Wouldn't anyone prefer #2? Including the BBC's programme makers?
In Norway, Student Loans for Astrology
This is what the post-humanity planet looks like: broken, dirty novelty phones piling up on a beach for a hundred years.
Your first four points basically describe lat/lon. But it is hard for humans to parse long characters/numbers. And it's even more difficult to speak random characters. E.g. "B" "b" "be" "bee" are all spoken the same. That's why we use something like the NATO Phonetic Alphabet.
I didn’t follow the previous discussion, but if I were a conspiracist, I’d think that someone in the US government is already or has the potential to be exposed as a Grindr user, and is therefore using their influence to keep the information out of the hands of a foreign government?
So your argument is something like “if any system or policy incidentally helps the poorest people while also doing lots of unintended damage, then it is immoral to stop doing it, because replacing the incidental aid to the poor now cut off is politically intractable”?

This is precisely the same logic that says we need to continue to use coal power plants because otherwise the coal miners will lose their jobs, and it’s impossible to support them except by continuing to hire them to mine coal. When the people who want to eliminate coal power (e.g. Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016) suggest cash transfers, reeducation plans, other industrial investment, etc. to coal-mining regions to offset the loss of coal jobs, the supporters of coal mining reject the proposals as politically infeasible.

Instead of setting up advocates for the homeless and environmentalists as enemies, it would be more productive to find mutually acceptable solutions.
I've read about this "assembly line surgery" being tried in the US as well. But the purpose was to experiment with replacing some of the more junior doctors with technicians. For example, there would be a technician who is only trained in opening the chest for heart surgery. That would be all they do, going from room to room opening chest cavities. Another technician would only do suturing at the end. These technicians would not be doctors, they would be folks who would get about as much training as an EMT (about 150 hours).

The next step after that is replacing the technicians with robots.

The only downside to this system (robots or technicians) is how will you ever get experienced doctors to do the hard stuff if they never get to practice doing the routine stuff first?
The formality around making a discrete group of "Circles" was the problem. If they just let you have multiple feeds and you can add and remove people from those feeds it would have been fine. In those circumstances, the issue isn't you sitting there categorizing how close you are with each of your friends. You're just deciding who you want to share things with, it's not unlike a group chat you might have with a bunch of friends.
TBH though:

- You are WAY underestimating modern Microsoft, they may be a dinosaur in that they are a relatively old company but they are definitely still one of the bigger predators around.

- Not every business has the same target audience. Some companies desire "everyone" and will make the barrier as low as possible; some companies will purposely target only those customers with the money and commitment to call a sales team and will not make the effort to support customers who are not worth the attention.
In the US it's quite common for a BS in comp sci to include 1+ year of required liberal arts courses as a "general education" requirement.
It's not a stretch to look at this and wonder if a more focused 2-3 year or 4 year degrees would produce an equivalent or better result.
Yep, I recall that the FB like buttons proliferating the web was perceived as a huge threat (and drove the +1 buttons.)

> Google had wave, blogger, orkut and other things. It's not like they didn't test different things or try to emulate others. They just failed.

Wave failed, but was a fantastic experiment, and the learnings went into Google Docs/Sheets for collaborative editing.

Blogger and Orkut didn't fail. They were hugely successful -- Blogger worldwide, and Orkut primarily in Brazil (and India, I think.) Both had great rides, and withered away as everything does.
I assume they have a non-randomized/modified version of the database for internal government use.

Still, it makes me wonder how anybody ever finds anything. Do people just not use GPS data for finding/going to locations? And why is this the first I've ever heard of it? Seems like a big deal.
Many American businesspeople conceal their sexual orientation so that they can do business without being executed or imprisoned (possibly effecting an unofficial torture and execution) in bigoted countries, particularly in the Middle East, where capital is in great supply right now.

Also, it's not just about orientation, it's also about affairs, or adjacency to related petty crimes, which make these people vulnerable to blackmail in private and U.S. security life. e.g. a Chinese asset and you hit it off, maybe take some ecstasy or do something you didn't want your husband/boyfriend to know about, and they have it on video. Maybe it's still doable even if the database itself is not compromised, but probably more expensive and time consuming.

Added:
Most Americans' home addresses (usually all of them, going back decades), phone numbers (again, usually all of them, going back decades), and birthdates are available in several privately owned publicly searchable databases which you have to specifically tell not to list these things. DoD broadly, and the Air Force, Army, and Navy at least all instruct personnel to ask that their information be delisted from these databases. Let's say you search for Grindr phone numbers and names in these databases, and find all the people who are not listed. That would be a pretty good start if you're looking for vulnerable people.
- ShiftIt (macOs) https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt
> there is no reason why there are no IT trade schools.

There absolutely are schools where programming is treated as a trade, eg: https://www.bcit.ca/study/programs/5500dipma

I've worked with several graduates from this school and I can say it produces excellent programmers, particularly for low-level systems stuff.
First of all, all open source is free or you can build it yourself, so if the product does not work you did not wasted your money because you did not bought it, you signed no contract(I know you can pay for open source and for support).

>You know what you're getting when you buy the product
This is not true, even today many people go in store, browse things and buy without going and read tons of reviews and complains about the product, do you think that the majority of people that buy a printer know the crap the manufactures do related to the cartridges(it is not printed on the box)? Companies would abuse their power to make more money, I remember when a law had to be passed here in Romania so that money exchanges would print the commission rates on big letters at minimum 10 centimeters because their were abusing people and no competition or educating people fixed it. better to fix the root cause then work around with free market ideology.
Here's what's going to happen: everyone ignores the issue and the disabled have to figure out a solution for their own drop in quality of life.
I wish we would make it possible in the US to use an email address as an address for purposes of things like having a bank account and pick up things like debit cards in person from any branch of that bank if you are traveling, homeless, whatever.

I rarely get any important physical mail these days. But I still run into issues over address problems (ironically, more now that I am back in housing than I ever did while homeless: https://writepay.blogspot.com/2019/02/mailing-address-drama....).

My life is mostly online. I was a military wife for a lot of years and moved around a lot. Lots of people have very physically mobile lives these days.

Yet, we haven't adapted our systems to this reality. We want to tie everyone to a physical address for a long list of things, as if we are plants who can't move from this one location or something.

I don't know what the answer is, but, wow, I sure wish we would come up with better answers than acting like this is still the 1950s and everyone will work for the same company and live in the same house for decades and we can each be found in some particular location all the time.
There's one of these (along with a Blackbird) at the Museum of Flight just south of Seattle.

http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/lockheed-d-21b-drone
Do We Need to Reconsider Free Speech Law Due to Technology?
Hasn't worked well enough IMO since the day they started changing the domain name of my blog depending on where it was accessed from.

At some point it became too ugly and too hard.
Funny how those machines came up in the SJ era and now what we get are inconsistencies, products that are too thin for their own good and limited repairability
I mean, if someone wanted to move to the country to become a gentleman or family farmer, there’s simply no better place to do it than rural Italy.
I recall a story decades ago about a kid who couldn't feel pain. He wound up massively injuring himself playing football with a broken leg.
Also apparently rabbits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_test
Ironically, the current US Secretary of Education and her obsession with over-funding unregulated charter schools seems to be building a future where the only people in the country who will be allowed a chance at any education are the ones whose lives are paid for regardless of not even doing the work.
This reminded me of the delightful David Foster Wallace bit:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”