skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. The new design makes it seem like they're trying to get away from the political stigma of Helvetica, while also kind of poking fun at it. Whereas the idea of Helvetica was to evoke things like openness, transparency, neutrality, naturalness, etc., the new typeface strikes me as being much more opinionated, but in a purposely understated sort of way.

In a lot of ways it really looks like someone took the core ideologies of modern third-places and distilled them into a visual type system, which maybe says something about the privatization of formerly public spaces and infrastructure over the past 50+ years.
Daylight Association Fatigue
>> No one is evil stuff just breaks.
>Are you implying here that the problem can't be fixed or ameliorated?

I sure hope we can find a way to fix it.

>> buying a $10,000 plate at this donor dinner gets you a sit down with the Senator

>What if there were no donor dinners because campaigns were limited to a set amount of public funds?

I think that would be a pretty good start. Enough so that I spent several years working on getting my state to join the call for a constitutional convention to overturn Citizens United and establish more fairly funded elections.
Interesting in theory but in practice most Americans do not have the financial literacy to budget properly to meet taxes.

What happens when you don't have the cash to pay? Do we then see a whole new sector of predatory loans? Imprisonment? Increasing unpayable fines? None of those are good ideas, yet when things like this happen, our system has already fallen into these pitfalls. Witholding is an essential idea.

What would be nice is if we make the easy filing system but explicitly highlight the amount you paid in taxes compared to your income. Most people only judge on refund amount and rarely check the math on the exact taxes owed.
Nah, no quarterly estimated payments. You just get your whole salary up front and you're completely fucked in April.
A lot more than just ex-FAANG folks would be stuck without the OSS technologies listed in the right column. I daresay, considering much of this software was authored by Xooglers or inspired by Google papers, that it's actually everyone else who would be stuck. The folks who have seen how these problems can be solved at scale would just reimplement the solutions, as indeed they have done.
This chart doesn’t show evidence of a particularly dramatic cut in effective rates for the top 1% of earners:

https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-rich-1950-not-high/
Game Description Language
> The bigger the refund, the happier the customer and the more likely they are to come back next year and give you more money.

Doubt it. We're talking 1040EZ filings by people in the 22% and lower tax brackets, not complex itemizations typical of 24%+ tax bracket filers.

The 5-digit PIN from the previous year's e-filing that's required if you want to expediently e-file this year is enough. Most people aren't going to remember that detail, but the e-filing service you used last year never forgot and they'll gladly auto-fill that block for you as a repeat customer.
This Manager Won't Hire You Unless You Write a Thank-You Email
Everything you've described rings 100% true with me as well (great with directions, can only recall dreaming every few years, no issues moving part traumatic events, etc).

I have not yet tried journalling as a coping mechanism; I may have to give that a go.
Tax preparers usually file federal taxes for free while charging a fee to file state and local taxes. That's where they make their money.
No company in any domain rolls out products globally all at once. McDonalds introduces new menu items in test markets, tv shows start as pilots, software is deployed gradually and as it’s deployed it’s usually measured and rolled back if it’s not working as expected. AB tests are hardly any different. Smart companies experiment.

Why do users need to be explicitly informed of AB tests but not about other new gradual feature roll outs?

Frankly I think when you use a web site you are giving consent for your behavior on that site to be analyzed. I wouldn’t act indignant at traditional retailers attempting to learn from my shopping behavior in their stores so that they can improve their shopping experience. That’s just how businesses work.
for what it's worth, I've generally given up expecting anything to happen from my redhat bug reports.

I tried to dig up the original emails, but I can't see them at the moment. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=571322 particularly springs to mind. Took 6 years before it got closed, and wasn't really resolved. It took more than 3 years to even be asked a question :)

I've a few others along similar tracks, even cases where I've reported breaking bugs in RedHat, where RedHat were the maintainer that fixed the bug in the upstream kernel, and have the expertise still in house, but the fix hasn't been back-ported.
> Why shouldn't it be their right to lose their freedom if they choose so?

No one of sound mind chooses to become an alcoholic. People might accept the risk in exchange for the effects or taste though, and taking that choice from them is a negative.

> Even if you argued that it should not be their right to control their body you would still also have to argue that the side-effect (which restricts the freedom of people that produce alcohol in a way that leads to everyone having to pay much higher prices) is acceptable.

The producers of alcohol are slaves to the market anyway. The reduced freedom of people who want to consume alcohol is an issue though. I dont know if restricting access to alcohol actually increases freedom. My point is that it is not obvious that it decreases freedom.
Here is the historical data for the 2018 House forecast:

- Web: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2018-midterm-election-f...

- JSON: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2018-midterm-election-f...

You are correct they do not publish the exact math of the forecasts, but you can see how the forecast changed over time.
Obviously I don't know the kid at all, but on the face of it, it appears he wanted to win an election and decided to cheat to get what he wanted. Hardly "just for funsies" or "following the hacker ethos". It's just a morally-challenged kid behaving badly.
Wonder if Mozilla can/want to "out source" the bug triad and to current CS students or team of CS students.

Pro:
Train new students to work on real work development processes, issues, teams.

Good for students' resumes.

Con:
Not sure if completely legal if it is not pay.

Also might create conflicts with current employees of the company.
How about simplifying the tax code so we don't need computer programs at all?
Another round of layoffs in only a few months, things are not looking good for the company. Udacity cut 125 employees in November 2018 [1], just five months ago. Just before that 25 people were cut around August/September 2018 [2].

1. https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/28/udacity-cuts-125-employee...

2. https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/online-education-unicorn-u...
It's just as easy with Netlify's tool too

netlifyctl deploy --publish-directory local/ --site-id site_id
For 64 cores, I recommend leveraging custom machine types with Cloud Run on GKE.
We are working on more CPU sizes for Cloud Run, but not in a near future for more than 2 vCPUs.
If the speaker doesn't want it then it will never get to the floor of the Senate.
Winning by doing something unethical isn't exactly a positive message to send to a high school kid, though, no?
I’m much the same. I think that’s part of the reason I’m quite a good musician and can play by ear really well. I can visualise auditory/musical things far more vividly than I can images, and correspondingly I find visual art quite difficult. I can still imagine images to a reasonable extent but I suspect that people who can draw and paint well probably can do it more to the extent I can hear music!
Oh interesting.
No-one paid the top brackets because the tax code at that point was riddled with ways to generate tax losses that reduced liability. The tax reform really was a good thing (unlike 90% of what happened under the Reagan administration)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Passive...
Those quotes express the view that there should be a minimum standard that is adequate. Which I agree with. What I disagree with is the idea that being a professor entitles you to something higher than that minimum standard, which is the premise of the article.
Feature experiments are also a thing that exists. I want to deploy a new widget, and need to check that it works, and hasn't done something unexpected that drives users away. Experiments are how you do it.

How about these: Are corner stores allowed to experiment with pricing? Are restaurants allowed to experiment with new menus? These are experiments involving humans. Are you just asking for poorly designed experiments?

What you're asking for is companies to launch once and never know if it worked. And indeed, software used to be like that, and it sucked...
Cloud Scheduler can trigger a Cloud Run service. And this Cloud Run service can run anything, including bash scripts. Take a look at the "Shell" tab in https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/quickstarts/build-and-depl...
Listen Music in Groups
You joke but there are examples at least back to the 1700s: "Simon Browne: the soul-murdered theologian", Berman 1996 https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/1996-berman.pdf
Correcting typos is a really poor form of argument.
> ...a complete change in economics

For whom?
I wonder if they had a contingency plan for the ferret dying inside the tube.
Didn't they basically get lobotomized and declawed recently? Like they lost a couple people, but due to the hiring freeze couldn't replace them.
Unfortunately I don't have much to share because my setup is so simple. Literally just vim (you can find really awesome vimrc on GitHub, mines pretty messy), and tmux (simple apt install).

When I visit my friends place I usually just use their computer, otherwise I'll use my MacBook pro or desktop. I don't think about setup much, I just use whatever devices around me to access and write code on my server instance.
I didn't stay the stigma was uncalled for. I personally do not use Google services anymore, nor would I recommend anyone else do so.
Just playing devil’s advocate:

What if a fixed/low salary only attracts the already-rich whose interests will never be well aligned with the general public?

If you want superstar government that is the very best at what it is supposed to do, you need a superstar salary structure, something more like professional athletics. Our president should be paid millions (with complex incentive structures for measurable achievements), but under “at will” employment terms and accountable to the people.
Fair enough. And yep, I plan to find a chink in the ol' armor somewhere. Just get me 20% time thinking physics at work and I will be happy... (even if it we never "get there" with the device) Or more likely my insatiable appetite will only increase..
All models are wrong, some are useful. GP presents an interesting way of framing real life decision making processes. That it happens to not be 100% accurate in all aspects is mostly trivia.
The link I provided does actually show every single forecast 538 has ever made. OP was wrong when they said it was the raw data they use to make the predictions. Check out the link I provided, it has everything OP was asking for.
The real issue is incentives created by advertising and people not paying for products because we've become disillusioned to being the product.
Executive branch regulations (though not executive orders) are considered law (called “administrative law”), have the force of law, and are litigated in the courts same as law passed by Congress (unless Congress specifies otherwise, as with the ones the district court said it did not have jurisdiction over).

I was in the courtroom when the case was argued and it was clear the judge was looking for a good reason to throw it out rather than issue a ruling.
Good point. But I think lobbyists and special interests would throw a wrench into all of that.

If we simplify the tax code, some group somewhere will no longer benefit. I'm sure they and their lobbyists will fight extremely hard to make sure this part of the tax code remains. Multiply this by all the different groups that would be in a similar position and now you might see why I think simplifying the tax code would be extremely difficult.
Interesting - I think that matches up with my experience. As I said in a response to another comment in this thread, I don’t have anywhere near as strong visual visualisation as I do auditory, but thinking about this third axis I think I do have quite good spatial visualisation. I’ve always been way better at diagramming, planning layout of things (part of my job is designing circuit boards and I used to do web design back in the day), etc. than artistic drawing.
This is actually how things were done pre WW2. If people were able to budget for it then, why not now? The current system makes filing taxes and getting refunded seem like a reward, it should probably be a bit painful to do your taxes.

Without the painful transparency, it becomes too easy for the government to nearly invisibly turn up the tax rate on individuals to pay for whatever boondoggle or foreign war they see fit.
But it also adds flexibility with the alternate glyphs, so in a way, less opinionated.
There's amusia, which is being tone-deaf; there's musical anhedonia (not enjoying or being emotionally moved by music); and anecdotally there are very large differences in ability to hear music - Beethoven, of course, but you can see a mention elsewhere in the comments of another composer, and here's one anecdote I was amazed by: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/agfbt1/am_i...

"This is why my favorite thing to do is drive and listen to music. I have thousands of songs I have coded to mental movies, all of which are (to me) incredibly exciting. It's legitimately more pleasurable than sex. I don't have much drive towards TV and books because I have this. I've never actually asked if other people can do this. AFAIK, it's just a me thing."

(Although maybe he's just really bad at sex.)
You mention possible score functions in Problem 5, so I have a query about that.
This has been bugging me for a bit-- is there a characterization of applicable loss functions for GANs?
I'm curious about their effects on the results, but also if there's room for different losses.
Or do we capture most desirable behavior using the listed score functions?
Disappointed by the overwhelmingly negative commentary here.

There are multiple private companies providing this service for low amount, as many have mentioned; for free for incomes below a threshold.

1) Why would you want the IRS to duplicate this effort and compete with these companies? Remember 'Free' in this context means paid for by tax dollars. Do you think the IRS is going to spend less to implement a filing system than one of the existing vendors has? If they do it in-house, do they even have the expertise? If they contract it out, is that much different from what we have now?

2) Everyone needs to file state taxes anyway. Seems unlikely the IRS is going to handle this, as it adds a great deal of complexity and isn't really part of their mandate. So if you create a free IRS filing system, then people still need to go to one of the existing vendors and import their info and pay to file state taxes anyway.

There are good reasons to think the IRS creating a system is a bad idea. Blaming passage on a few $K in lobbying is lazy.
Why is the part that k8s uses it funny? That would have been one of the goals right? K8s is like lot of these projects except that it was created as a open source version of borg from within Google.
There are thousands of people still proud of their MVP badges. You vastly underestimate their worth.

It's like being given a blue checkmark from Twitter or Instagram. People want it.
Doesn't putting the criteria in rows disallow (easy) sorting? Spreadsheets are designed to sort by column.
I wholly disagree. Facebook only shows some posts algorithmically, and emotionally, they were probably more or less neutral. They chose to expose some people to predominantly sad and depressing posts, which is not "what they're already being exposed to", and it's without the more positive posts to balance it out.

They explicitly created a situation to depress people, which could definitely increase the likelihood of suicide, particularly if they happened to randomly select someone who already was predisposed to that for other reasons.

I would argue someone at Facebook should've been brought up on criminal charges for this "experiment".
> One way of describing it would be that I can close my eyes and tell you where everything is in my house, or map my way downtown.

I can do this, (also for simple 3d shapes needed to solve school geometry problems) without closing eyes, because i seem to do that independently from visualisation.

But sometimes i see very vivid images just by closing eyes, after having some intense new visual experience

- as a child when i was playing checkers the whole day i would see the game board

- after the first time being in a forest i could see forest any time i would close my eyes for several days

-after seeing the "What Dreams May Come" movie i could see images in the painting style (and it was the only case when i could control the images).

- after playing a new computer game the whole day i can see images from that

But the intensity of the effect have declined over time, presumably because it is harder and harder to find new visual experiences.

> I recall the images that night were dark and foreboding

could this be related to fever? I remember as a child i was seeing really chaotic images when having 40 temperature.

I wonder if there is aphantasia for sound too. Several times i was able to listen music as if played by a real orchester, but simply noticing it, was making the music stop leaving only an outline.
Sorry, but it is that simple. We live in a second gilded age with near total regulatory and legislative capture and trying to soft pedal it by using euphemisms like 'strong networks' does not obfuscate the fact that this is a commercial relationship between bought politicians and the corporations that buy them.

In the face of overwhelming pieces of evidence, year after year after year like the article being discussed here, doing so is just pointless sophistry and contrarianism for the sake of it.
As the article called out, they could have worked with the GOP to pass something that would get through the Senate and president. Rather the Democratic House decided to pass a DOA bill for posturing purposes. (the GOP regularly does this too). Maybe the media should stop reporting on the posturing of the parties.
There's actually already a study on spatial reasoning and aphantasia: https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

Basically, aphantasiacs tend to do just as well at spatial reasoning tasks as people with imagery, but tend to be somewhat slower and do not exhibit the gender gap that has been identified in the broader population.

I'm aphantasiac as well, and can identify with some of the experiences you've mentioned in this thread, and not at all with others. My spatial reasoning is great, and I'm a singer who has no problem at all with singing along to songs - if they're sufficiently regularly structured, even singing along with the chorus the second time it happens in a song I've never heard before. However, like you, I cannot replay sounds in my head. Memories are easily put behind me.

We're clearly very early in understanding what impact aphantasia has on people. It's a fascinating topic, and always interesting to teach people about.
Not without the use of medication, no, which may or may not be related. When I do, the character of the experience depends on the dream but typically is experienced through feeling and abstract form. It never had the character of photo real-ness, real or imagined, that others often describe when talking about their dreams or mental imagery.
MakerDAO Q1 2019 Revenue Analysis
I'm currently running an exploratory survey of these sorts of sensory differences to see their prevalence, especially among people with autism and SPD: https://surveys.autisticempire.com/117683

Prosopagnosia and misophonia are interesting, prosopagnosia both in terms of recognition but also how it affects sexuality (think demisexuality), and misophonia both in terms of existence and what pitches people find intolerable.

Aphantasia is also interesting in that there's a visual form and an auditory form, and my preliminary survey results show a large correlation with autism for the visual but none for auditory. More generally, it's also interesting how it interacts with things like depression, anxiety, and mindfulness as well as things like DP/DR.

I became interested in sensory differences because I do not feel hunger or cold (more common than you'd think, interoception differences), and then discovered I have aphantasia back before it had a name, but also have CEV of at least level 4 and can conjure it up with effort just by closing my eyes which is apparently far from the norm.

I have a suspicion quite a lot of revealing stuff has been written throughout history on these things, just with the author assuming everyone's like them. To take CEV as an example, Jung's "active imagination" as described in the Red Book sounds a lot like CEV level 4, and also resembles how some people describe shamanic journeys. I can also see how maladaptive daydreaming can start off slowly, lead to a paracosm before ending up with Gondor.

Gwern, bit of a tangent but I think actually related: have you by chance looked into thought loops at all? Obviously there's the psychdelic variety, but I'm also thinking of those described by sufferers of anxiety, depression, and especially anorexia.
I don't think anyone here is arguing that it isn't deeply problematic, just that thinking of it as paying for a bill to get passed misses the point.

It's an important distinction to make, because almost all reporting and outrage about bribery is about quid-pro-quo: newspaper reports about politicians spending time at five star resorts etc. etc.

If we enact laws (or social pressure) to stop this, but the lobbyists remain in the ear of politicians by unpaid means (going to the right schools, having the right friends) then all that outrage has accomplished nothing.
Selection bias. The 95% without aphantasia aren't going to chime in saying 'oh, I'm normal, just like everyone else', but people with aphantasia will be extremely excited about it, especially if they just found out.
I agree that there isn't/wasn't a need for them to resign.

Just wanted to provide some historical context.
Huh? Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land has 6,892,427 people living in 8,258 mi^2 for a population density of 834 people/mi^2 [1]. San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward has 4,727,357 people living in 2,474 mi^2 for a population density of 1,910 people/mi^2 [2]. That's remarkable, given the fact that the Santa Cruz Mountains make a lot of the land unsuitable for development, while pretty much everywhere around Houston that isn't part of the Gulf is suitable for sprawl.

Also fun fact: Los Angeles easily beats both regions, with 13,353,907 people living in 4,848 mi^2 for a population density of 2,755 people/mi^2. L.A. is a lot more dense than people think.

Weighted density is a better calculation, in any case. With those figures the sprawl of Houston becomes even more apparent: SF comes in at 2 of 34 (plus L.A. at 3 and San Diego at 9), while Houston is ranked 23 [4].

I grew up not far from Houston. Say what you will about Texans, but urbanists they are not. :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston#Demographics

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland%...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_metropolitan_area#...

[4]: https://austinzoning.typepad.com/austincontrarian/2008/03/we...