skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
StarAi: Deep Reinforcement Learning Course
Way back in 2017 when Deepmind released their PySC2 interface - we thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to create a competition to help accelerate the current state of the art in ML.

We thought that such a competition would need a big $ prize pool in order to attract talent to try help solve the "Starcraft problem". We tried to copy the model of the original Xprize and use insurance bonds to try finance the $ prize purse. This document, literally bounced around to insurance brokers all around the world- but we got no takers :). Lucky for us - as we all know by now Deepmind more or less solved the Starcraft problem this year.

One thing we realised, early circa 2018 is that there were no bringing RL down to earth courses out there to help people get involved in the envisioned Starcraft competition. So we went ahead and made it ourselves :)

I know that other great resources such as OpenAi's spinning up have come out since then, but we would like to present our work and open source it to the community. We hope this content inspires someone out there to do great things!

https://www.starai.io/

.
Wow. This thread is full of anti-nuclear fudd. An amazingly powerful two sentence Bloomberg blurb!

Generation 3 nuclear is on the way, with bipartisan support. Dozens of startups are working on generation 4 and on nuclear fusion. Is ycombinator involved in any?
This is a marketplace @Zack-sgu. On the supply side, you have multiple software development contractors. We vet them and leverage their availability data.
Good point about the price vs quality baseline! Have to give it a thought.
US prisons are taking programming books off the shelves over ‘security concerns’
I wish I could upvote this to the heavens.

It's been almost ten years since I read it also. Was originally published as a fake blog, with all the posts backdated according the journal entry dates from the late 1980s.

I remember discovering the "blog" after a night of insomnia, lying on the couch at dawn. I couldn't stop reading. After a few minutes I called in sick to work and spent the rest of the morning consuming the journal and literally tingling with excitement and nostalgia and pure inspiration.

I can't recommend it enough.
Four Essential Techniques to Understand Your Customer
> (Careful sending any easily editable format

Of course, I only send PDFs (closest you can get to non-editable without going exotic).

Personally, these days I just export my LinkedIn bio and then tailor to the particular application. Unless LI starts exposing this, I have no real use for it.
I'd definitely appreciate some 'next steps for the working programmer' that aren't a deep dive into math. What we need to be able to do is realize what sort of problem we're facing, how to describe it, and maybe what solutions might look like or where to learn more about them.

At a certain company, we were dealing with a limited number of phone numbers that could be used in on-line ads to get people to call for more information. Reuse the numbers too quickly and you wouldn't be able to track what people were calling about. Having too many idle numbers cost money.

Seemed like an interesting problem to me and it looked like "queuing theory" even if I didn't know the details. I suggested we could probably figure out a way to optimize our usage of the numbers. Blank looks and "let's just use 10 numbers per client and see how that goes".

I'm definitely someone who's wary of coding up a big, complex solution as the first iteration, so I could live with "let's start with a number", but I think that needed to feed into a further iteration using the knowledge we gained and a bit more thinking about the problem.
DevOps for the Database
It's pretty hard to explain.

Some meet-ups and projects had a problem with people being fucking arseholes. They developed "codes of conduct" to help them deal with those harassing abusive people.

This woman gave a talk to this meeting. She described her experience of working in open source. She was careful to say it worked for her but might not for other people; she was careful to say that it was anecdotal.

Someone at this meeting thought that she should have given stronger warnings about open source. That person is saying that by not giving the bigger warning the speaker was performing a micro-aggression against all the other people who've had poor experiences in open source because she was supposedly erasing their experience.

They're saying the speaker violated the code of conduct.

When the speaker asked for clarification the meeting organisers didn't apologise for making a mistake; they persisted in their description of the speaker as someone who violated the CoC.

So, that's roughly what the meeting organisers think. Clearly, they're wrong. Micro-aggressions are a thing and they're something we should be mindful[1] of, but this isn't an example of a micro-aggression. And there's a difference between a woman saying "I had a good experience in open source, but other people might not" and for example a man saying "there are no problems in open source development you just need to toughen up".

[1] Mostly because people who are oblivious to micro-aggressions tend to be taking discriminatory actions that potentially leave their companies open to lawsuits.
Thank you! The link I knew would be in the comments somewhere.
I would think that for most people "paying attention to political media" means hearing stuff from one side's point of view repeatedly.
> The suggestion that encouraging contributions to OSS might expose someone to being harmed in some way is absurd.

Ironically enough, given the way this woman has been treated, and with CoC's that are explicitly open to being aggressively abused against "undesirables" of all sorts being increasingly ubiquitous in the OSS community, this suggestion is becoming less and less absurd by the day!
- The skeletons stabbing you to death in Beyond the Forbidden Forest (C64)

- The entire Chiller[0] arcade game. I still sometimes have nightmares about it, and I've only ever walked by it once.

They both turn my stomach just thinking about them.

[0]http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/chiller/
True. I would imagine that people who use phones for gaming and video would really benefit from a bigger screen, but I don't do a ton of either of those on my phone anymore.
I would rather pay 30 bucks a month to not have to check my email
What should humanity do?

The big hitters are Drug addiction and Chronic Pain.

I don't have a solution for drug addiction, but I can't blame our generation for not finding a solution. No generation has, and given caffeine addiction, it's extremely hard for others to help with.

Chronic Pain needs to end. Between Doctors of Physical Therapy and medications, there are little reason for people to be experiencing chronic pain. Take note that the author was very generic about their meaning on that.

The rest of the stuff are significantly smaller and usually involved a traumatic event.

What can we do?
Can you get an HR reading from a webcam 200 meters away (about 2 football fields) and through clothing?
Thank you @dbm44! :P
Fixed
Broadcasts are prohibited in ham radio.

For the US, see https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=1a361a6eb3d1594e6a...

> (b) An amateur station shall not engage in any form of broadcasting, nor may an amateur station transmit one-way communications except as specifically provided in these rules;
Text Generation with Python and TensorFlow/Keras
People Don't Read Your Landing Page, Here's How to Convert Them Anyway
This is non-news. Someone who shouldn't be in charge of enforcing CoC comes into contact with someone who has the good fortune of possessing common sense.

Its important to try to be as inclusive is possible - the community engagement person is wrong, but ultimately with their heart in the right place.

Its also important to use your brain, read the room, and if something makes someone uncomfortable, let their voice be heard.

Next.
You can solve many, perhaps most terascale problems on a standard computer with big enough hard drives using the old memory efficient tools like sed, awk, tr, od, cut, sort & etc. A9's recommendation engine used to be a pile of shell scripts on log files that ran on someone's desktop...
I will always love Stripe Press for selling a reprint of The Dream Machine and even more for this news (a completely new book). This is great!
Exactly - I would have said "how do you measure that" is the fundamental problem with tech hiring. That's an incredibly hard thing to judge by any measure short of "hire them and see".
I think you’re misrepresenting things. Credit card fraud is not terrorism.

There’s a plenty of illegal activity related to Valve games, but it’s not the kind mentioned in the parent (drug trade, terrorism, human trafficking). Not at any meaningful scale anyway.
Depending on IQ certain skills are impossible to attain, is what I was trying to say. It's hard to imagine this reality unless directly confronted with such people and witnessing their inability to learn the simplest of things.
Are Internet points more fake than other kinds of points ? Would they be less fake if we had a system to aggregate all the points from other systems (Hacker News, YouTube, whatever other systems award their users points on the Internet) into a single Internet Points system ?
I don't think this is allowed under USA Amateur radio rules.

> §97.113 Prohibited transmissions.

> (b) An amateur station shall not engage in any form of broadcasting, nor may an amateur station transmit one-way communications except as specifically provided in these rules; nor shall an amateur station engage in any activity related to program production or news gathering for broadcasting purposes, except that communications directly related to the immediate safety of human life or the protection of property may be provided by amateur stations to broadcasters for dissemination to the public where no other means of communication is reasonably available before or at the time of the event.

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=3fe986fb082211e728...
And the attached photo: https://imgur.com/a/vttHOgY
And yet, in America at least, there's only two parties representing those beliefs, so by being aligning to either side you're stuck voting for both the bad and the good.
He seems to miss a point about the "meta" of hiring when avoiding framework experience vs design.

Namely that how canidates advertise and actual talent and abilities may not align fully. It doesn't make sense to emphasize their bests if nobody is interested or it is taken for granted. Besides they have to try to play to more than you and filtering on arbitraries is how you miss talent, boost expenses and increase delay.
Analyzing 9k firmware samples sure must be a lot of work, I wish every IT device manufacturer would be scrutinized with a magnifying glass in the very same way.

Without that, this just seems kinda misleading because I'm pretty sure every bigger IT device manufacturer has myriads of security issues [0] that simply never get surfaced to the same degree, like those of Huawei, for political reasons.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cisco-backdoor-hardcoded-a...
I own 2 iPhone SE, that I rotate whenever I break a screen. Yesterday I also had the battery replaced on both of them. I don't do this for cost reasons, I do it because I much prefer that size device and Apple won't sell it to me anymore.

This strategy will work but will eventually require me to stop receiving os/security updates which is a real problem.
I held off upgrading from pixel 1 to 3 for ages because I didn't want the phone to be bigger

Turns out that while the screen is bigger, the phone is actually slightly smaller. It just has a longer screen and less bezel
the video ends with "subscribe for more videos like this" hahahahahah
Reddit Places a 'Quarantine' on R/The_Donald
I love that the authors blog [0] hasn’t been updated since 2013. It makes me feel better about my most recent post being from 2009.

Also points out the beauty of the web that it’s so effortless to maintain information that it’s easier for me to keep it running than shut it down.

[0] http://blog.datapacrat.com/
To go slightly further back in time... the whole C64 Forbidden Forest game... the dragon, the reaper/ghost, the demogorgon all made 4 year old me crap my pants.
It's hard to centre a rebellion around the reasonable middle ground.
> TL;DR -- If you're having mysterious health problems, add a Lyme test to your other tests.

Or better yet, find a doc that will just give you the drugs to nuke lyme without tests. The tests are only good roughly 50% of the time. False positive/negatives suck, esp if the doctor clings to those tests.
> I might disagree with his conclusion which seems to be that things are just as bad now, or worse than they were say 70 years ago.

I'm not sure it's his conclusion. From the article:

> This is also why I am wary whenever people start boasting about how much better we’re doing than back in the bad old days. That precise statement seems to in fact be true. But people have a bad tendency to follow it up with “And so now most people have it pretty good”

I think his point is that things might be better, subjectively, but they're still not that good, objectively.
FYI: It's always a good idea to put the date that you wrote this, and then the date that you update it.
The argument is not that the advice is aggressive in itself, but that it should have been accompanied by a warning about the potential bad experiences in contributing to OSS, much like one might warn that a beach we're recommending can have particularly strong currents.

EDIT: actually I'm wrong; the argument is both that it should have been accompanied by a warning, and that not doing so (and stating it in a generalized way) ignores the experience of people who already had a bad experience contributing to OSS.
Mastercard and ING Turkey Turned Smart Phones into POS Devices
I'd like that to be true, but these people are very much influencing those that want their statements to be true (so they don't need change anything).
This is more about data than half the top posts on HN.
Also a lot of messages in the bitcoin blockchain are encrypted

Edit: https://github.com/barisser/bitcrypt

Must be others too
> This ranges from "telling me to clean up after myself is a microagression" to "we're going to name our fascist party socialist LOL."

FAKE NEWS!
Would you say that the average age of a vehicle is longer due to cars being pricy and people fixing them up or because they are far more reliable? I could see it going both ways.
Not unlike sports or wrestling fans. Do they want to hear and consider strong arguments for their villain? Not so much.
It's hilarious to think that, barely more than 10 years ago, having the smallest possible phone was a status symbol.
> relaying for 3rd parties

That's not against the rules. The Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) gets it's name for doing this. It's illegal to hide these messages or to use them for a commercial purpose. Original HAMs used to do radio telegrams (radiograms) for the public [0].

[0] - http://www.ncarrl.org/nets/mes_form.html
When you write "Also note: there's an immediately observable effect to throttle retardation in engine underslung aircraft", are you referring to the airplane pitching downwards, on account of the thrust line being below the center of drag?
Yeah, poor wording on my part. You're not going to be able to avoid 90-degree corners in any case when 45-degree (or any other non-axis-aligned) lines are not allowed in designs for many processes. What I should have said is that the metal line widths should take electromigration into account.

There are also fun things like optical proximity correction [1], but of course these things are mainly handled automatically by simulations/EDA tools now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_proximity_correction
Service and retail workers will have to unionize before they have the pay and benefits that made manufacturing such good work. That's how factory workers did it. Service and retail work are approaching the living hell of the pre-union Industrial Age.
>>>Private messages (...) are prohibited in Ham Radio

> Broadcasts are also prohibited in ham radio.

Wait what? Isn't any message either broadcast or private?
Isn't that just entropy in action... There are a zillion ways for any system to be disordered, and only a handful that we would consider "ordered".

Life is constantly fighting entropy, and always eventually fails. It makes sense for disorder and even misery to be fairly common.

I do tend to dismiss the concerns of others, simply because I've come to the conclusion that I cannot fix the vast majority of the problems of other people. I can't fix any of the issues mentioned in this article, for instance. I'd rather work on my own problems, and the issues of people closest to me, because then I have some chance.
Because all these hypotheses assumes Co-Processor model works. And as far as I know,It doesn't. You cant move process between different ISA, not to mention memory access.
For email, you can use Cloudron from the DO marketplace.

DO opens up port 25 by raising a support ticket.
I absolutely love my 5s mostly for the form factor - will be a sad day when it finally dies
Faces can be obscured or disguised. Gaits can be adjusted. Heartbeats...maybe caffeine pills could be used to avoid identification?
That depends on the way legislation is written of course. If you provide an open source package for free, there's no real transaction so you can't claim responsibility from anyone. Same if it's a free closed source product. But, if you sell software and neglect security issues within the warranty of said product, you should be held accountable, open source or not.

Such legislation should not be there to allow (class action) lawsuits but should be upheld by a government body, responding to complaints from the general public.

Problems with open source can also be solved by requiring companies who do not wish to take responsibility to give users to either sign a waiver (explicit, no TOS bullshit) or return the product immediately in exchange for money back. With open source software, there is no money given, so no problem. With closes source software, this highlights the vendor's behaviour regarding security support and might make consumers think twice before going with certain vendors.

Another way to do this would be to require vendors to put a clearly visible, standardised sticker/tag/image on their products detailing the support life cycle (warranty / software updates / security updates), similar to the nutrition information found on many food products. That way, consumers can shop around or hold a company responsible of their smart thermostat suddenly stops working because the company behind it got bought out by Google.

There are tons of variations of bases for legislation, but I don't see why physical and digital goods are that different.

If my CCTV system short cirtcuits and causes a fire, the company behind it can be held responsible for mot recalling the decices if the flaw was well known. If my CCTV camera has a known flaw that let's hackers in without authentication to record my alarm code so that they can break in, suddenly we're in the wild west of software support where you're on your own. Why is there such a difference?
Go 1.13 beta, next step toward Go 2, design of every day Go APIs (Go Gazette#61)
A New Wave of Bad Ads Is Hijacking Even Top-Tier Websites (2018)
iOS 13 makes improvements to this, with modal popups showing in a "card" style that can be swiped down to dismiss (as long as you're at the top of any scrolling content).

That the "Done" buttons in an upper toolbar have persisted for so long after they were reachable is a bit embarrassing. It was a great design for the original 3.5" iPhone screen, started to get iffy on the 4" iPhone 5 depending on how big your hands are, and has been stupid since the iPhone 6 in 2014.

There's still other buttons up there, but you can get away without them more often than before. I guess the concession is that phones are assumed to be two handed devices now, which I think is unfortunate. If I want to two-hand something I have an iPad for that. Give me a one-handed phone with the same camera as the flagship. RIP iPhone SE.

More on the popover cards here (EDIT better link): https://medium.com/@hacknicity/view-controller-presentation-...
> Data shows that the American left shifted far leftward over the last 30 years, with the left edge going the furthest. The Republicans shifted leftward only a small amount. Here's Tim Pool covering the data:

No it doesn't [1], using data from [2] and [3].

Maybe double check information you get from youtube pundits, especially those with an egregious agenda.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-pol...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Vital-S...

[3] https://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizati...
Why are the username and password on two different pages?
> I don't get it! My hands are probably bigger than 95% of all humans

This seems to be a recurring pattern, big-handed people as the last holdouts of the non-gigantic phone screen. Apparently the smaller-handed have given up on single-handed use several phone generations ago, so they have nothing to lose from even bigger phones.

(Written with one hand on a way too big XZ2 Compact)
Well it wouldn't be cyberpunk without breaking a few rules.
Well, Australia has two massive issues: mosquitoes and cane toads (poisonous). Both species are invasive. They developed an agent that should, within a year or so, kill off 80% of the population of mosquitoes, which the cane toad eats. Since they want to get rid of both species, this will affect species far outside those two, as other species eat both of the aforementioned species.

Australia has imported cane toads, foxes, rabbits, domestic cats (now at epic feral proportions), camels, and more, which has upended their indigenous species, which are now dying, some bordering on extinction. I think when humans tinker with nature, we don't look too many chess moves ahead. We see gain in one area, not realizing we will affect ten other areas.
> This is part of why I get enraged whenever somebody on Tumblr says “People in Group X need to realize they have it really good”, or “You’re a Group X member, so stop pretending like you have real problems.”

One of these is not like the other. You can have it good by being white and still have real problems.
Ah. I read the original comment like having the backslash is the nice gesture, some new meme or something like that...
It's been ages since I read this, but I remember coming away with a very different impression. "Packing" is essentially storing away details in your memory. If you ever see programmers who write the solution to everything down and then are constantly looking up their notes: that's a packer. "Mapping" is essentially deriving from first principles. It frees up a lot of working memory in your head and allows you to explore the issues more freely.

I think it's a bit more than that, though. Fluency in a task usually means being able to do it without undue planning. When you are speaking, you don't figure out the grammar of what you are saying. You just open your mouth and it kind of pops out. It's that kind of synthesis that's important. It's the same as play chess at a high level or especially playing go. You might not know exactly why one move is better than the other, but your fluency allows you to judge it correctly. To me, that's "mapping". "Packing" is a good strategy if you don't need to judge the value of your work. This is the answer: right or wrong. You can write it down. You can memorize it. You can produce it at the appropriate time. But you can't derive it without a lot of effort.

This writing influenced my thinking a lot, but when I started to get involved with language acquisition, I started to feel that it's a bit limited. I think language/skill acquisition models are actually a better fit. However, this analogy is still useful in certain ways.