skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's great to see awareness of the futility of pseudonimization bubble up to non-technical press.

Unmasking of bulk-sold pseudonymized user data is an externality, like pollution — those who bear the cost when the data gets reidentified are the users, not the buyers or sellers. Therefore the data belongs to the users and propagation should be severely constrained.
Amazon gold miners invade indigenous village in Brazil after leader is killed
Functional Annotation of Human Long Non-Coding RNAs via Molecular Phenotyping
I really enjoyed "The Summing Up" by Somerset Maugham
You are sort of making a diagonal movement anyway because of the rotation, that rotation is what's engaging the rest of your muscles to help you pull the water. If you cross the line, it's much harder to use your lats, your core or your chest to pull the water and instead you're using almost solely your shoulder and with increased resistance too.

That increased resistance is not helping you propell forward either, you're propelling diagonally with the stroke in that case which is a waste.
Greedy Investors Looted Sears into Bankruptcy
Holding cash almost always has a pretty bad negative rate, i.e inflation. Real rates of bonds might be negative, but they should always be bigger than inflation.
APIs Are About Policy
In other news, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq closed at record highs on Friday. The obvious explanation for both is there's a lot of money looking for somewhere to park, driving asset prices up and bond yields down.

There's either something not captured in inflation numbers, or most of the stimulus money just got invested and not spent.
Hum, that sounds pretty neat actually. How does it manage purity without lazyness?
I would be unsurprised if Instagram was collecting a lot more than just this, but the web-login for Facebook used to use websockets to portscan VNC/RDP/etc ports on localhost in addition to all the fingerprinting and enumeration, so this entire situation wasn't exactly surprising
Oof, that doesn't even really surprise me given the way people talk about deep learning and other ML
ideas.

On a related note, while x * 0 effectively erases knowledge of x, something like x ⊕ s, where s is some secret, reversibly obscures it.

The notion of reversibility is the key misunderstanding.
Wrong. The time value of money is the "time preference of money" i.e. if you have 1000$, you prefer buying a new iPhone with it today than wait for it for 10 years. You get old, you might even die, future is uncertain, and the time is wasted waiting meanwhile.
> "how dangerous is it to exceed the speed limit in a well-maintained car if you do nothing else wrong?"

What I'm saying is that speeding doesn't happen in isolation. The only times it's "safe" to speed is:

1. To keep up with other traffic. You're unlikely to get a ticket in this scenario, and by following the speed limit you would be making the situation more dangerous.

2. On an open country road, with little other traffic. You're also unlikely to get a ticket here, because of how few patrols would be around - but be aware of deer.

Otherwise speeding will necessary involve weaving in and out of lanes, sudden braking, and following other cars too closely.

> I expect you will consider this paranoid/cynical, but I don't trust the state to set reasonable traffic laws

I don't consider it paranoid or cynical. I'm aware of the yellow light issue and it's a terribly shortsighted thing for cities to have done. But none of this has to do with where we originally started talking: should fines be based on ability to pay?

> they see something easy to measure (eg, speeding),

If it's easy to measure, it's also easy to follow. Do we want more ambiguous laws that can be even more selectively enforced?

> and make laws that most people will break

That's something to lobby against then. Having a law that no one follows reduces respect for other laws.
Benchmarking TPU, GPU, and CPU Platforms for Deep Learning
Has this quote been debunked or confirmed? I personally feel drained and unproductive and lazy when in hot humid climates, but perhaps that is because I was raised in a temperate climate.

Anecdata, but I certainly know people who are from hot countries and work in hot countries who don’t seem to have a problem being driven, smart, productive, etc.
Also, very small antennas, especially compared to typical HF antennas (sometimes the entire 60+ ft backstay on a sailboat, for example)
> That’s more than double the long term stock market return, and it’s (basically) risk free.

You're comparing nominal and real numbers here. The nominal rate was more than double the long term _real_ stock market return, but the corresponding real rate was 4.5%, as the inflation rate was 13.5% in 1980. That's a more accurate and much less eye-popping number.
Euribor rates are just short end bank-to-bank reference pts. The interbank markets are mostly technically driven on the short end. Central bank policies (eg reserve requirements) play the largest role.

And can you show me euribor-based long-term loan where the interest rate is negative? For the most part, banks have no need to loan unless compelled, so maybe where is some policy forcing them to? I would call those extremely strange technical factors.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. They absolutely do that. If you were in person, they would even show you a great chart with their returns and the normal returns so you can see how how much better than the average they are!
here's a short video on "DisCoCat" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99keybEZN4g
This story somewhat reminds me of The Giant Pool of Money[1], a landmark This American Life story on the origins of the 2008 financial crisis (remarkably) reported in the early-middle stages of the crisis (May 2008). One of the things it points to as fueling the sub-prime mortgage crisis was an impossible-to-meet demand for mortgages to be bundled in to CDOs which lead to mortgage lenders lowering their standards to increase supply to try to meet the demand. Why was the demand so high? During the early-to-mid 2000s the global money supply had basically doubled (the titular Giant Pool of Money) and that new cash needed somewhere "safe" to be parked and CDOs were the highest-yielding "safe" investments.

That pool of money hasn't gone away and the lesson investors seem to have learned from the financial crisis is that the only truly safe investments are government bonds issued by major governments. The demand that drove mortgage lenders to make (in hindsight) irrational decisions to increase supply seems to have shifted over to those government bonds. Because the supply of bonds is fixed by politicians the market is responding as it needs to match demand with supply: lowering rates (effectively increasing the "price" of the bond), even below 0, to lower demand to meet the available supply.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/355/the-giant-pool-of-money
Why is that weird? Having money allows you to loan the money to people that don't have it, and they're gonna pay you for the privileged. Or, in another words, money you get today is worth more than money you get tomorrow. Both of these are very intuitive concepts.
The author's wiki photo is one of a kind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Coecke
Why can't the Fed manipulate long term interest rates?
Cameras don't deter crime as effectively as uniformed patrols. And uniformed patrols aren't eventually going to drain into a massive pool of recordings that can be mined for your every movement.
as in hidden costs- costs that the organization is unaware of because it's wrapped up in r&d/goods delivered on the accounting sheets. Its='s not until you pull in the utilization metrics that it reveals itself as waste.
Agree! Also add any other meaningful company to that list

What I miss the most about not being in big tech anymore are these great conversations

People on the outside don’t appreciate how challenging the problems are and how the compromise they land on and ship is remarkably good!
It's called "Financial repression":

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-21863295

Paul Mason, from 2013.
We are glad that you liked it.

I will try to port it to Safari.

Thank you very much for taking the time to use the app and provide your feedback.
Everyone, even healthy people, should attend therapy if able. There's a lot of tricky ground to navigate as a person and you don't have to be experiencing trauma to get help.
I, for one, would greatly respect a person who always speaks in the same way to everyone.
According the Planet Money's Giant Pool of Money, which I've come to realize is a superb postmortem on the 2008 financial crisis, this is exactly what happened:

Adam Davidson: All right. Here's one of his speeches that really drove that army of investment managers crazy.

Alan Greenspan: The FOMC stands prepared to maintain a highly accommodative stance of policy for as long as needed to promote satisfactory economic performance.

Adam Davidson: You might not believe me, but that little statement, that is central banker's speak for, hey, global pool of money, screw you.

Alex Blumberg: Come on, that's not what he said.

Adam Davidson: It is. I speak central banker. Believe me, that's what he said. What he is technically saying is he's going to keep the fed funds rate-- that's when you hear, the fed interest rate-- at the absurdly low level of 1%.

And that sends a message to every investor in the world, you are not going to make any money at all on US Treasury bonds for a very long time. Go somewhere else. We can't help you.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/355/transcript

To the question: why should you get a return above inflation at all?

I guess one way of looking at it is: do you want to treat low-risk returns for conservative investors as a sort of public utility guaranteed by the government? Or do you want to put it in the hands of private industry?
Hi,
It is mainly designed for articles so it wouldn't give any useful info when used on a page like HN.
Thank you very much for taking the time to use the app and provide your feedback.
I guess we would have to use Machine Learning to incorporate that.
That's complete hogwash. It is very common to commute 60 minutes, for example looks like half the workforce at Salesforce lives in Fremont. In the morning the train fills up right at warm springs and gets empty at embarcadero. This legend that Bart is mostly for short rides is just that, a legend. Most people using Bart have pretty long commute from Concord, Dublin and Fremont into the city.
It's the legendary 2007 Dropbox comment but with plotters instead of FTP.
Are you saying that you would consent to something you don't fully understand?
The software's poor design and security issues are separate from consent.
Boomers often cite the 1970s inflation spike as a terrible time, but the wage inflation eroded their debt, leaving them with high disposable income and the ability to refuse to work if not sufficiently compensated.

The establishment have not made the same mistake again. When you have people in perpetual debt you have them under perpetual control.

Credit can be created at will, but if you accidentally let financial independence break out, it's not easy to put back in the bottle. You have to wait for the next generation.
The "real rate" is the rate after inflation. It can't be both negative and bigger than inflation.
Ah sounds good. I might give it a try later on.
Thanks for sharing.
Yes, "risk free" has a technical meaning which doesn't include inflation risk. But it may be misleading when used in a non-technical context. Even if we assume for the sake of the argument that there is no default risk at all in government bonds you have risks linked to inflation and changes in interest rates (they affect the value of your investment before maturity and your ability to reinvest the coupons received according to the initial expectations).
So can someone explain to me how these high-yield savings accounts are playing into this?

I read somewhere that these savings accounts are basically loss leaders and don't actually matter much cost wise to the banks offering them, but if I can park my cash in a 2.4% APR savings account, why would I ever buy a 6 month treasure note that's at ~2%?
> Who is promising that?

This was very much the narrative back when WCs were first announced / released. If that's no longer a focus then what is their selling point now?
Ansaldo Breda in Italy.

Edit: turns out this business was sold to Hitachi. I didn't know that.
There are no protections being slashed. this is totaly and complete BS. France is attacking Brasil because of the impact in a comer ial agreement. Why you don't go take care of your lives instead of gossiping in the web?
It sounds like you might be over-correcting if you truly believe reading doesn't have any "causal benefits". The vast majority of what you read might not be directly applicable to your pursuits, but when you find those nuggets that reveal a flaw you hadn't perceived, or point you in a new direction the results can be dramatic. Practice and knowledge go hand-in-hand, the key is judgement on where to focus day-to-day.
Fixed rate mortgages are a uniquely US thing I think - I imagine made possible by government entities securing them. Rest of the world is predominantly on variable rate mortgages - why would a rational lending entity take on the risk of a fixed rate?
Ask HN: What is the modern equivalent of Visual Basic?
I just got married, and am working on a little app to download our sundry financial data via .ofx and let us do some light categorization and reporting. Nothing too complicated.

In order to make this at all usable, I more or less need:

1. A running instance of a db (mongo, postgres)

2. A web server

3. My python application which knows how to read and parse and store our data

4. Some frontend code to display charts (vue.js, chart.js)

5. Design a light HTTP API layer to surface data to said frontend

It seems like a lot! Lots of layers in different systems, and lots of documentation across different libraries:

1. DB schema

2. HTTP restful schema

3. Figure out which pieces of Vuetify (or bootstrap) to use for my UX

4. vue controllers

In a previous life, I might have cracked open Visual Basic, written my logic, bound to a local MS Access database, and drag-and-drop form controls for a GUI. I'd be done by now.

Is there a modern equivalent of the sheer ease and speed of VB programming for small utilities that I'd want to write for myself?
The discounting of transabled people in disability movements and studies
We started that way. I'm honestly surprised this isn't suggested more often. It allowed our devs to benefit from containers while not totally uprooting our existing Infrastructure.

We've mostly moved to EKS now but we had plenty of time to do it right thanks to this approach.
Wow, thanks for sharing. Yes, it's certainly a very valuable service but it is very hard to get it to work on every kind of article. I am just getting into NLP and would definitely like to explore other approaches to solving this problem.
That certainly works and is faster. But doesn't it turn UserData scripts into (part of) a provisioning management system? For instance in that example, you could have a machine die in the middle of the night, the autoscaling group replace it, and end up with a different version of node.js than the one you had before. Or the package server goes down and you can't bring up new instances at all.

I suppose you could bake everything into the AMI except your code, and hardcode the git sha into UserData to ensure your builds are reproducible. It just seems like it might get complex when coordinating lock-step code/dependency changes.
> I 100% agree on all the comments here saying the big story is lower rates driving people into riskier investments.

Yeah but Central Banks that set the interest rates say that too, so this is the worst kept secret known to man

All the comments here and your observation should just be “hey its working”
The logistics alone are kind of alarming. That's a huge mattress, for starters.
Many, many, many smaller cities and communities only exist as a byproduct of resource extraction. Taking that away means folks lose their jobs, families are broken up, and a way of life is lost. I had to leave mine to get a job in tech, and I miss the lifestyle and my community every day.
If working life is about being paid for your time by providing valuable skills, paying, or learning for yourself, to get useful clickbait seems like every other skill to me. Ultimately it's a bit like all other interpersonal communications so if you enjoy making headlines or captions or brand spiels you can probably learn to love clickbait titles.

Though if all of that is wooly to you then yeah it's probably not your cup of tea, but I can assure you for people who have invested in that skill they probably quite enjoy the thrill of trying to craft the perfect clickbait title and now in the age of data the success of it is measurable, creating a tighter feedback loop...
If you look down the list of deliveries included in the article, you will see that at least one of the other doctors has an unusually low rate of weekend deliveries, but that they peak significantly on Thursday and Friday.

This is likely because many OB-Gyns induce labour for the opposite reason to that which is alleged of Shuen: so their weekend golf game doesn't get screwed up by a delivery.

In truth, there is little difference between inducing labour for financial versus personal reasons. No doctor ever said to a patient, "I have a tee-off time at 9:30 Sunday so we have to get this baby out now."

This means that the issue of consent is identical in both cases. Consent means "informed consent". It doesn't matter if you're trying to get the extra billing for a weekend delivery or if you are trying keep the weekend call schedule quiet; it doesn't matter if you pop a misoprostol in during a vag exam or go through the formal induction process with the hospital. If the patient doesn't know the REAL reason, it's still a crime because of the absence of INFORMED consent.

This has been happening as long as there have been OB-Gyns. Babies come when they want, and doctors have always tried to manipulate that for their own preference.

Shuen's crucifixion is therefore more the result of his motivation than the fact of his behaviour. He was apparently doing for money what almost every OB-Gyn does for reasons that we consider more noble, or at least understandable, but which are actually no different because they prioritize something other than the health of the baby and the mother.

Even if doctors were truly altruistic, reality would still require inductions for the banal reason of hospital staff scheduling or resource availability. We are fools if we think this is any different from what Shuen did.

Any system motivated and rewarded by money will always suffer from these sorts of imperfections, as will any system that is not motivated by money.

It is the height of naivete to think otherwise. Shuen just flew a little closer to the sun than everyone else.

Also, the article neglects the obvious problem with chain of custody. Once you throw an exam glove in the garbage, it's gone. If Shuen ever got his day in an actual court, his lawyer would tear that evidence apart to the point where it would have to be disregarded by a judge or jury. It's not fair to trot it out now in this hatchet piece as if it is the smoking gun.

Keep in mind that the nurses justifiably hated Shuen because he (admittedly) behaved like a complete asshole to them. Nurses are really good at finding clever ways to take you out under those circumstances. You have to interpret that piece of evidence in light of the unbridled hostility of those who collected it.
OK, but is that really who is buying all these bonds?
> Some assets have gone up,

Land prices are not included in inflation stats. The cost of carry is, as mortgage payments, however that is simply the cost of money. And rates are at all time lows.

The difference between 7% rates where your mortgage takes up most 50% of your wages and 2% rates where your mortgage takes up 50% of your wages is that it's far harder to pay off your mortgage in the latter case.

You cannot attain financial freedom. This means ultimately you cannot refuse to work, even if compensation is poor (low wages, stuck low).

There is inflation. It's being used to force us to work, and the precariat cannot bargain for more of their surplus value.
> n the US city status makes an important practical difference to how an area is run and what the people running it can do independently of the State they're in.

The status of various municipal designations varies greatly based on state laws. Generally, government levels go state->county->municipality. The type and form of a municipality generally only affects how it is organized, not its level of independence from higher levels of government. Some states restrict types and forms based on size, though.
It might really depend what we are considering "deanonymization". This article is take a hopelessly naive approach to simply see how unique existing data sets are (am I misunderstanding this?), which is not the underlying issue here really.

Let me give a concrete example. Let's say you want to collect application usage information from users of your app. You could a) collect all the information attached to an IP address, and any other nominal information, and store it, or b) you could calculate the valuable usage metrics for the entry, and store it in some demographic bucket, throwing away any other knowledge.

The real problem is that companies want the full data so they can be free to change their models at will. We as users should not expect data to be stored properly, and cryptography tools are our main tool to address this problem.
> Not much difference between a sack under the bed and a bank account if you don't tell anyone about the sack.

Burglary isn't the only danger. Paper money can be eaten by moths, so you probably want to vacuum seal it. That still won't keep out rats. You could lose it all in a flood, landslide, tornado, fire, or earthquake.

The individual probabilities of all these events are quite low but multiplied with your all your liquid cash, the cost is unacceptably high for most people.
Yes, that sounds like a valuable application of article summarization but it would be hard to generate high-quality summaries that are very readable.
The idea is that for cash, the nominal rate is zero, so the real rate is (-inflation). Whereas for negative-real-rate bonds, the real rate is (r - inflation). Since r < inflation this is negative, but since r > 0, the magnitude is still below inflation.

The parent comment was maybe being slightly imprecise, but his core point isn't wrong that positive nominal rates means that your losses are less than inflation (whereas for cash they're equal to inflation).
What if you cannot withdraw it because we move to digital only "cash"?
It didn't seem risk free at the time.
> Forget that all these things exist: ... Containers, Kubernetes, Docker.

Not sure how this guy can give this advice.

containers make rapid development so much easier. There's no distinction between your dev environment and your prod environment except for a couple properties/env variables and some scaling factors.

Also "no" to cloudformation and "yes" to terraform.

And if I were to write a simple application, I'd probably try with lambda next time around.
A lot of countries with dictatorship regimes are natural gas exporters. Avoiding natural gas usage makes the world a better place. So that's a right decision.
I find it scandalous the perception that anything that is not a SUV is tiny.

One of the most sold cars in Europe is the Volkswagen Golf; I don't see how that is tiny.

Interestingly, I see that mid and large size classes (mid-size being a "large family car") originated in USA, which makes me wonder if that's a typical American perception.

I'd even argue that 1400+ kg for moving around an average of 1.5 person/120 kg (I think an average of 2 people is too generous), during a time of ecological crisis, is tragic, and in my opinion, describes perfectly how there's no hope.