skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The parent comment suggests European countries are killing "innovation" through taxes and regulation.

This sounds like a bad idea, so I had a look at the article to see what "innovation" was being taxed.

Innovation is a "new idea, creative thoughts, new imaginations in form of device or method". (source: merriam-webster.com)

Plugging in our definition of innovation, the question becomes:

What is the new idea, creative thoughts, new imaghinations in form of device or method that trigger this new tax in Europe?

First the article says the UK gov't wants to tax "companies whose business model requires the active participation of U.K. users in creating content, being targeted with advertising or linked by intermediary platforms."

Is collecting user content and serving ads "innovation"? That is what triggers the tax.

What if we just collected user content, maybe charged a fee? No ads. Do we get taxed?

Second, it says the Czech gov't wants to tax companies with "advertising and personal data sales as the primary base" as well as "sharing economy platforms". The article says the tax "prioritizes targeted ads".

Is selling advertising and personal data "innovation"?

What if some Czech programmer make an Uber or AirBnB style app but do not sell advertising or data? Do they get taxed?

Third, it says the French gov't wants to tax "platforms that put users in touch with each other for a fee".

Is putting users in touch with each other for a fee "innovation"? Does that make ad-supported companies that do this exempt?

What if a company sells native software that puts users in touch with other, peer-to-peer. Is that a "platform"? If not, do they get taxed?

What is their definition of "platform"? Under the Wikipedia definition, the internet itself is a "platform".

As always, the devil is in the details. We need to see the text of these tax laws.

Finally, the article discusses the merits of the "[t]axing advertising that is based on personal data".

Is advertising based on personal data "innovation"? What loss would we, the majority, suffer if this particular innovation were taxed?

Is it possible to have "innovation" that does not involve advertising based on personal data? Of course. That is the kind of innovation I prefer. I am using some to write this comment.

We will not lose the benefits of personal computer-based innovations simply because we take away the financial incentive to collect personal data and serve ads. That is not the raison d'etre for the type of innovation we seek to encourage. It is the advances in hardware and networking.
It could be massively profitable tomorrow.
Starlight plus airglow is at least 6 orders of magnitude below sunlight. Granted, it goes all night, but it seems like 4 watts per square meter is still 3 orders of magnitude above photoelectric gathering of starlight.

That 4 watt number comes from a confused paragraph and it is possible the journalist broke some numbers while handling them.
This isn't new. In fact the same authors already started a company called Skycool that was featured here in a story like 2 years ago. It uses a special coated/layered radiative plate that's specially tuned to an atmospheric transparency window to dump heat to the sky.

The problem is that where this would be economically viable, you would generally already choose to use solar panels for the electricity -- cheaper and similarly/more efficient.
Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Big Tech. Tim Cook says keep Apple out of it
I thought the purpose of the tsa was to make people feel less safe / have more reminders to fear - thus making people less likely to demand we slash the military / police / other security budgets. I suppose they do add to the expense of moving drugs, and make it harder to move large sums of money - so people who control other routes are able to extract higher prices for them, but I don't think that in of itself actually makes people feel safer.
> Research by Przybylski and colleagues in 2016 revealed that less than 1% of gamers might qualify for a potential diagnosis of internet gaming disorder.

Am I reading this wrong? It seems to me that the abstract for the cited research says less than 1% of the population, not 1% of gamers.

> Among those who played games, more than 2 out of 3 did not report any symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, and findings showed that a very small proportion of the general population (between 0.3% and 1.0%) might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder.
I’ve seen that article you linked to before. Is the solution to working around Oracle not OpenJDK? I’m not completely informed on the topic. Would appreciate some more context.
The last post on desktop Flutter said it was going to change a lot. Is this time over?
Linux taking over the world? Article kind of portrays that, and I'm not entirely unconvinced...
Can you be specific about what would be more complex without timezones?
So tomorrow then?

One can dream. :-)
> For comparison, nobody cares that the Linux kernel isn't a standard. Nobody wants a "competing" Linux kernel implementation. The implementation itself is the standard and reference and that's totally fine.

Except for the people working on the BSDs, Hurd, Minix, etc.

POSIX is the standard, Linux is the implementation (not completely accurate, but close enough). Apps built to the standard can usually run on BSD with minor changes, just like websites built to work with Chrome usually work well on Firefox with only a few minor changes.

I will be controversial and say that Linux's utter dominance in the post-UNIX space may have been detrimental to the development of the ecosystem as a whole, limiting radical experimentation and preventing a much-needed reimagining of core computing paradigms.
I think it was meant as an analogy.
I work for Cruise. For safety, our drivers keep their hands on the wheel at all times, including when the vehicle is autonomous. The vehicle you saw may have been in manual mode, but seeing the driver crank the wheel usually isn’t a good way to tell.
ML is about the only GCP service that’s interesting to large business customers.
What do you mean by 'racist consequences'? Intent can be racist, belief can be racist, but consequences are just the resulting state. A racist policy is one that targets one particular race in a hostile way.
A policy that is applied evenly to the entire population but impacts one race disproportionately, while entirely unfortunate, does not in itself constitute racism.

I know this is tangential and a bit of a nitpick, but I feel the semantic difference here is important.
The Wrong Narrative
Just reminded me the asheron's call developer named devilmouse.
That page sounds like standard stuff that organizations put up. Based on James Clapper’s lies that the NSA didn’t collect telephone metadata on Americans, none of the points on that page seem to be truthful or respected.
They are just as terrible for highways. Getting hammered by blue glare in your peripheral vision is very distracting and destroys night vision, making it harder for drivers to see.

(For the same reason, LED car headlamps are horrifically bad for everyone other driver on the road.)
$211m loss on $776m in sales is not staggering. The company is decreasing losses and still doubling sales!
> I'd prefer actual native if that was my aim

I agree simply for the reason that native simulation is a moving target and not something that can ever be truly complete. If you push your app into production and never release another update then your app will atrophy over time as updates to native UI widgets outpace your application's UI; not so with native or RN. You're also betting on the fact that maintainers will make updates to the rendering engine in a timely and comprehensive fashion in perpetuity.
the problem with this analogy is that digital cameras worked, self driving cars don't
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Comes to Red Hat Summit
Or, duck duck go with the g! prefix, if you really must use google with bubbling turned off (instead of a reasonable alternative).
the disengagement reports are self reported and aren't comparing "apples to apples" between companies. This isn't a reliable metric.
this looks useful.
i wonder how accurate it can detect chapters.
i have been doing this work manually with audacity. and while the silence detector got me quite far, there always was some manual post processing to do because sometimes there were long silences within chapters or the chapter break was shorter than the others...
I like my ecobee, but do they have an api that would let me control it via a CLI?!?

edit: yes: https://www.ecobee.com/home/developer/api/examples/index.sht...
> Why are all these cities undertaking huge renovations to go to LEDs?

From what I understand one big driver is federal subsidy money. I’m not an expert on the financing though.

Also a ton of industry marketing / propaganda. And poorly designed recommendations / regulations for road engineering.
If you can invest $1 to make $2 you should then invest that $2 immediately, not put it in the bank.
Do we have the raw data to calculate the participation rate of 24-60 year olds over time?
Buy Negative Google Reviews: Google
You are assuming they will retain imap functionality.

Ask the xmpp/jabber folks about hangouts.
I agree, BTRFS has always been good to me as well and I use it day to day, however out of all the vague negativity in the comments below, this has real merit:

> ... raid5,6 had serious issues a while back - the write hole problem still exists for btrfs.

it does indeed. BTRFS should not be used on a RAID: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56
That's a good question - and I'm not sure.

I created my app when I had a Nest thermostat and was working from home. The thermostat would assume that no-one was at home during the day - and so turn off the heating - as I didn't walk past it often enough, so the original purpose of the app was just to detect when I was actively using my PC, and ping the thermostat not to go into "Away" mode.

It was then really rewarding to add more features and make the app available for others to use. I got some lovely feedback and sensible feature requests via email, and one user generously did a French translation of the UI. I even got a small number of $€£s in Paypal donations!

However. I no longer have a Nest thermostat (moved to Australia, where they're not available), no longer work from home, and now have a young son. So I have to admit that prioritising the time & finding the motivation to rework the app to work against a different set of APIs (if even possible) may be hard to come by.
That's a really cool idea. As I am secretly (read: slowly to the point that nobody could tell that I was actually doing it) writing a game, I wonder if you wouldn't mind expanding on that idea. I probably only ever played the first Ultima game and I totally forget it :-) I'd be grateful for some insight since it's a mechanism I was hoping to incorporate. Feel free to ping me at my email address in my profile.
Oh, it's not my account, I'm just a fan. All I know about the account is that it's run by the Reddit user Cosmologicon: https://www.reddit.com/user/Cosmologicon
Prop 13 was heavily pushed by businesses under the guise of “saving your grand parents from excessive taxes”.

What it actually is, is a tax cut for businesses (they don’t generally sell property, and so don’t ever pay tax on the actual property value), and land owners who rent/lease out property (because they can increase revenue in line with market value, while only paying taxes on increasingly far from market value properties). Given property taxes are generally used to fund a lot of public services (police, fire, schools, roads, etc) and a lot of those have costs determined by market value of property (eg cost of rent/mortgage is a significant determining factor for income), you end up necessarily pushing those costs on to individual tax payers. Businesses can easily incorporate out of state and so choose yet another cheap tax rate, pushing all of the costs into individuals.

Prop 13 must be revoked.
Software Engineering Is an Art and Science
Nobody is going to “on the fly configure” color temperature of street lamps. It would add cost and complexity, be less energy efficient, compromise longevity, and is not a worthwhile feature in that context.

In practice, all “white” LEDs (even the very warm ones) consist of a blue LED + a yellow phosphor, and for efficiency reasons in contexts like street lamps the phosphor is never set up to absorb all of the blue light, which means that the intense blue glare inevitably is there clobbering people’s night vision.

It would be possible to make LEDs appropriate for street lighting, but the lighting industry does not currently sell them.
For values of "could" that include "definitely will not be."
Or disable image loading by default like in email clients.
Imagine how they'd be handed out if the fine was $1500 and 6 months jailtime instead of just $150.
Okay. What should I replace my Nest thermostat and camera with? Recommendations appreciated.
There's also this company called "Apple" you might want to look into, if privacy is relevant to you. ;)
Cloud TPU pods are seriously amazing. I'm a researcher at Google working on speech synthesis, and they allow me to flexibly trade off resource usage vs. time to results with nearly linear scaling due to the insanely fast interconnect. TPUs are already fast (non-pods, i.e. 8 TPU cores are 10x faster for my task than 8 V100s) but having pods open up new possibilities I couldn't build easily with GPUs. As a silly example, I can easily train on a batch size of 16k (typical batch size on one GPU is 32) if I want to by using one of the larger pod sizes, and it's about as fast as my usual batch size as long as the batch size per TPU core stays constant. Getting TPU pod quota was easily the single biggest productivity speedup my team has ever had.
It's very likely that by the time the pricing competition is concluded (with Uber as the obvious winner), the drivers will be coming under competitive threat from autonomous tech (which will severely limit their leverage for higher wages). I don't expect there will be an outcome where being an Uber or Lyft driver is, on average, going to ever be a good job.
I helped out a guy who worked in image/video compression (http://www.cloudpresso.com/)

He says that one of their main competitors is Netflix, as they have similar compression technology. Google had an open source thing that did the same thing but it's a lot slower.
If they do do this, I really hope they make it recurring because every time they do stuff like this, they give more of a reason for their most productive citizens to flee the state, which causes them to lose tax revenue they were banking on, which causes them to increase taxes to cover the shortfall from fleeing taxpayers, eventually creating a virtuous cycle that bankrupts the state.

There is no state in the country that deserves to lose its most productive citizens and go bankrupt as much as California.
That's a bit of hindsight; digital cameras didn't work for many use cases for a long time.
I was just about to upgrade my home with Nest products. The other alternative I was looking into looks much more attractive now.

I wonder if this was about money, control, or developer resources? What's the upshot for them?
Thought they were more of a peach color.
In Los Angeles, the percentage of the city budget going toward funding of pensions is about 20%. Fifteen years ago, it was around 5%. Will it keep rising? What other spending is crowded out? etc...
It's definitely not, but the terms are indeed aggressive for using it.
I think I have been looking for a framework this simple and straightforward for about...12 years now? Ever since I got my own personal computer as a college student, pretty much.

I can't wait to completely go off the wrong quadrant of this chart with it.

https://xkcd.com/1205/
Ecobee.

Pretty sure ours paid for itself within 4 months.

If you have two-story house, the remote sensor is incredible for keeping the space you're in comfortable.
Exactly - it's more about recognizing the shift that will happen if the technology can work and what that will mean.

GM seems to think it's important since they bought Cruise in the first place, but instead of seeing failure on this as an existential threat it seems more like a side project for them.

From the outside this seems like a bad strategy and will only succeed if it turns out self-driving is impossible (which seems unlikely).

Digital cameras were toys until suddenly they weren't and then Kodak died - even though they had invented the digital camera in the first place.

It's not enough to have the tech, you have to prioritize it in the business. Xerox PARC is another example of this type of failure.
That would add to the cost.
lol I clicked this, but I wasn't really interested at all in paying. I just wanted to know what extra features were available.

As someone who did a startup before, it was surprising to me when I first learned how eager people are to throw money something that made them feel better. A part of me just went "ooh API stuff" and hoped for more.
Say whatever you want. The endgame for censorship types is to automate the process and remove the human element from online interactions.
> Sometimes you're not targeting the whole world and can assume users are office workers who have a reasonably fast desktop-class computer and a decent network connection.

Maybe. Just don't make any assumptions about their physical abilities, i.e. make sure business apps are accessible unless the task at hand inherently assumes a particular ability (i.e. is inherently visual).
I think you mean the new Java. C and C# are very different beasts.
Why does this thing open iTunes? Some band demo?
> Lyft have half a billion dollars in cash on hand, however, which will only last another 6 quarters at this rate.

I don't believe the balance sheet they're showing for Mar 31, 2019 includes the ~$2.2b in cash they just raised from the IPO. I can't get the figures to add up if it does. From the Q4 balance + the IPO cash, they'd have ~$4.2b in cash, then subtract what they burned in the latest quarter (they obviously didn't burn $3.6b in cash in Q1).

Besides that, the Q1 balance sheet is showing $1.03b in cash on hand, not half a billion dollars (I'm not sure where you're coming up with that figure). I believe their actual cash position was closer to $3.2b as of the end of Q1, including the IPO cash.
> Why now?

Because we are in a day and age where these efforts actually have a chance of success.

10 years ago, the vast majority of people would hold the same toxic attitudes that you hold, and the concerns would be dismissed.

But not anymore. Things are changing. And it is now possible to hold horrible people responsible for their illegal and immoral actions.
Sounds like a candidate for machine learning - and an excuse to learn it.
A request to drill for lithium near Death Valley
This article isn't too far from The Onion, but it does point to some of the constraints and general drag faced by anyone doing anything in this country, or at least California.
> Responsible email publishers

I'd love to meet these people. I've yet to have a good email publisher experience. whether it's a fortune 500 co or the newest startup they all terribly abuse email.

> unsubscribing you automatically

What is this magic? I've never once been automatically unsubscribed from anything.
Seriously, the only reason this is priced per month is to make money off people who don't use the service/forget to use it or forget to cancel it.

Why is this not just

10 cards = $30

20 cards = $50

50 cards = $100
?

Shady business tactics.
I paid 50 dollars per bulb for two bulbs about 8 years ago. They are still running. And then I paid 8 dollars for a bulb 6 months ago and it failed.

Or did it. I noticed that if you keep it on long enough after it turns off it will come back on. I think the fuse or something gets heated and it stops until it cools.
We had a loose connection of some sort in the electrical box to our house. Made for dirty power that fried probably 6 LED bulbs, and also the rectifier on our microwave.
s/a few nines/more nines than the cloud/
> this is a really easy problem to solve. Support or create an open standard...

We call it the tech industry but 90% of it is actually politics. Big money influences things the most but everyone basically looks out for their own interest, right down to programmers shilling their favourite language/framework. Thats what makes this a difficult problem.
Shh Keep Your Big Goals to Yourself
How, if at all, do you have to tweak model architecture or hyperparameters for pods vs tpu vs gpu?
> And I think “forced arbitration” is not worthy of moral condemnation. You are free to tell me all the ways those are terribly wrong ways to think.

Sure. Your way of thinking means that employees and execs can sexually harass people, and get away with it, without allowing the victim to achieve justice.

It allows companies to protect sexual harassers, all while being completely immune to the legal system, and making it extremely difficult for victims to hold companies responsible for protecting sexual harassers.

Personally, I'd rather live in a world where it was possible to sue companies for protecting sexual harassers, and for retaliating against victims, through our court system.

The whole point of our court system is to support the law. I don't like it when people's legal rights to justice are taken away from them, for the purpose of protecting sexual harassers.
Czechia is one of a few countries with local competitors to Google and other tech giants. Why should we care about Google? Seznam actually pays taxes here.
I'm going to posit that Mathematica knows that its value proposition is not its syntax.
> Prop 13 must be revoked

It might be easier, politically, to add carve-outs.

Not your primary residence? Assessed value rises with CPI. Renting it out? Assessed value increases capped to e.g. 5% per year. Businesses with more than X in revenues or Y in employees? No price protection. Home value more than Z? No price protection. Et cetera.
Hook to existing plants to help them load follow where intermittent renewables are at high capacity.
HomeKit is not open and requires Apple devices.
This is great, this is exactly something I've been looking for. I'll definitely look into using this for my next project.
> It's not that games are addictive, it's that addicts are playing games

Don't companies like Blizzard keep psychologists on staff specifically to make the games more addictive?
My girlfriend recently bought a sleep tracker device, from the store, new with shrink wrap, only to take it home and find out the service required to operate it had already shut down.
Chances are, it would had taken me 4 hours to compile that response alone.
I wonder how many people are doing this now and what media they are storing to.
Want to do something about it?
There business model is not predicated on tracking people. That's Facebook and Google tried to copy them. Their model is based on data mining. They belive lots of insights are available then. And a better product can be made available then.
Goodbye React. You were good to no-one.
> - Game companies can't reasonably opt out of offering "engaging" behaviour because if their competition offers it, they will lose money.

Excellent summary. This, at least is the excuse capitalism has used since the beginning of time for every unethical practice harming humanity, whether it's privacy invasion, environmental ruination, lazy worker protections, poor compensation for talent, or providing addictive services.
The month Google originally bought Nest, I sold my thermostat to someone else and picked up an Insteon thermostat instead. My Insteon thermostat's been a reliable partner since, and doesn't send my data to anyone. I actually turned a profit on it, since I got rebate credit from my electric company originally for buying it.
Closest I ever came was recording a few weeks of MTV's 120 minutes.
I'd say Flutter/Dart.