skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apologies for being harsh, but this kind of thing is the phrenology of our time. I know it's utterly conventional to think this way about language in some circles that present themselves as doing legitimate science, but the view that you can calculate the amount of information in human speech, except in a super-technical sense that doesn't match any of the reporting on this study or the way people are interpreting it, has to be called out for the total nonsense that it is. It doesn't bear a moment's honest reflection.

And yes, I know information theory. It's language that these folks - many of them prominent and celebrated within their utterly normalized professions, just like in the days of phrenology - are fundamentally mistaken about. What quantity of information do you think there is in the word "trump," for instance? Is it the same over time, to bring up just one feature of how this funny thing called context informs human speech?

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is a good place to start if anyone's interested in understanding this issue.
> IMO LEGO thrives thanks to their relentless focus on product quality.

This makes no sense, otherwise only things that are high quality would survive. Everything proves otherwise.

Lego works because it is so versatile.
Andric, this is great feedback and we appreciate it. As you probably know, pricing is a bit of an experiment as a company evolves so we are listening 100%.
Yes, we will consider these and welcome other ideas.
Ask HN: Will you live longer than your parents?
Being developers, gamers, office techies, etc, who are mostly sitting all day looking at screens, surrounded with radiation, breathing in big city pollution, using a lot more plastic/consuming micro-plastics, do you think you will live longer than your parents?
That's actually a problem with all modern cars: If the battery dies, the key fob won't open the door. In fact, if the battery dies in the car or the fob, you can't open the door.

But, there is a mechanical backup with an ordinary car. In my 2012 Volvo, I can open the driver's door with the mechanical key. If the fob is ded, I can physically insert it and start the car. If the car is also dead, I have to sort that out to drive it, obviously.

I like to MTB and I used to climb, so I carry a backup battery that can start the engine if need be. But I appreciate that with a ZipCar, the whole point is that you don't need to go somewhere and pick up a mechanical key. So it's really the same risk profile as if I were to drive around with the key fob, but leave the mechanical key at home.

The other worrisome thing is if a car is designed that it needs the Internet to start. If you drive it somewhere remote, you have a problem. Or if there is a service outage, you have a problem.

If I buy another car, it will probably brag thatI can use my phone as my key. I will still want to carry the mechanical key, but my phone will then become a single point of failure.
With my fob, and my 2012 car, I can start the car even if the fob battery dies. But if my phone dies, I will be SOL.

Luckily, said backup battery that I carry in my car has a USB port to recharge my phone. But even then, what if the network is down? Am I to trust Bluetooth to do its thing?

These failure modes require some thinking through before going anywhere remote. I'd want to work all this out before taking another driving holiday with my family.
There are lots of differences, but one is that situations requiring aircraft pilot intervention often have a timeline measured in minutes. The recommended procedure for handling an emergency situation is to pull the checklist for that situation before starting to ensure you don't miss anything. Even urgent situations, like a TCAS alert, will often give 30 seconds warning. By contrast, this driver had roughly 2 seconds to notice that the autopilot was silently failing to handle the situation and to apply the brakes to prevent a collision.
I'd really like to listen to the session that makes the best use of those 15 minutes. How do you prepare for and make the most out of such a short time?

1 minute pitch

4 minutes descriptions of problems

10 minutes of back and forth?

Interesting constraints!
It's not what you have; it's how you use it / what you do with it!
Sure, I did my best to turn off all personalized Google ads, and then every now and then I get something extremely specific, that has to be targeted at somebody. But is it based on my data, or something that correlated with me? Something not part of Google's data per se?
Not true, you could only search for accounts using phone numbers people had entered themselves
Controls are more complicated if you're not using electric motors where a microcontroller can easily adjust the RPM. Someones already linked a hybrid drone with a gas powered generator but it's not cheap. In high volume it could probably come down a lot but I don't know how much demand there is for it.
The problem is if the person looking over your shoulder has power over you.
Successful ventures in this field make for more convincing lobbying
Certified Robustness to Adversarial Word Substitutions
I'm not saying nothing else survives. Mega Bloks have been around for 30 years and are still filling their market niche well as far as I know. I'm simply saying that quality has been what sets LEGO apart from its competitors. They make great products and target wealthier populations. Their prices (and likely also margins) are higher than their competitors. They're basically the Apple of toys.
In an area without cellphone reception, I was unable to open the car
I wasn't part of that battle. I fall into the camp of believing that clientside logic is often preferable to serverside logic, because users are more able to inspect, modify, and archive locally running code. So not only was I not a part of that battle, I was actively encouraging people to make your life worse.

But I am a part of this battle.

I don't want to start a fight about Javascript; that's a complicated issue. I just want to point out that the "we" you refer to in the privacy battle may be a fair amount larger and more diverse than the "we" was in the Javascript battle.
I've heard a lot about NULL being considered a multi-billion-dollar mistake, but not a lot about the wishy-washy integer types hierarchy.

The more explicit stdint types (e.g. uint32_t) are both safer and more portable. Modern languages like Rust seem to agree... (u8, i32, etc).

The argument I've always heard was that you want your program to use the sizes that the architecture can handle most efficiently. But actually, I don't. I'd rather my program run correctly, the way I intended, even if that means it runs a little slower on a sparc or powerpc.

The combinatoric explosion of size hierarchies is basically impossible for normal people to reason about or test for.
DocB

I never presented this as scientific fact, nor based on the algorithms. I agree with akavi comment on your post. That has been my experience.

KMCB
Judges are way above the law. Take this for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPjGyJvefd4. Yeah, the girl smiled. That's not a crime, yet that fat fuck of a judge got mad cause she said "adios".
I think the normal sets already encourage creativity and some engineering, kids learn e.g. towers have to be larger at the base so they don't topple.
It's really tedious to make a lot of websites work with an ad-blocker. I only started using one when I got some malicious ads, but I still have to disable it for almost every business's site that I need to log in to. And they break in non-obvious ways, so you have to remember to try turning it off.
I’m not against AWS or $36/mo. It just is kinda a drag when the promise of serverless is pay per user and scaling to zero. You could get a nice EC2 t3.medium and do a lot more RPS for the cost of that NAT and Lambda invocations.
A judge ruled he violated his bond conditions.

That was not the initial bail.
Numerous complaints as CSU proposes tougher admission standards
> How different is my Calculus 1 textbook Ed. 17 from this year's Ed. 18?

There's almost certainly no significant mathematical difference as far as the calculus it teaches goes.

If the target audience for the book includes students who aren't really interested in calculus, such as students who are just taking it to fulfill a requirement, and don't expect to use calculus much after they finish the class, then I'd expect the new edition to update exercises and examples to try to make them interesting and relevant to today's youth.

If the target audience is students who actually want to learn calculus, either because it is interesting to them per se, or because they know it is useful for things that do interest them, then there is probably little or no need for frequent new editions.

For example, a few top schools use Apostol's two volume text, "Calculus", either as their main calculus text, or for the more advanced track if they have multiple calculus tracks. Apostol volume 1 is currently all the way up to 2nd edition, which came out in 1967. Volume 2 is also on its 2nd edition, which came out in 1969.

Another example is Spivak's "Calculus", also used at several top schools, which is on its 4th edition, which came out in 2008. According to the preface, "Although small changes have been made to some material, especially in Chapter 5 and 20, this edition differs mainly in the introduction of additional problems, a complete update of the Suggested Reading, and the correction of numerous errors". The preface to the 3rd edition says that the biggest change was the addition of a chapter on planetary motion. It also rearranged quite a bit of material, and added problems. It looks like 2nd edition was a pretty substantial upgrade over 1st edition.

Spivak 1st edition was 1967, 2nd edition 1980, 3rd 1994, and 4th 2008.
The "ObjectId" type gives it away
I run something similar with Serviio, but in general I think a lot of people around here are going to be laptop-only at home.
Rust in Blockchain #3 – August 2019
Being overly focused on the "lit fic" genre they've overlooked the Wild Cards series, one of George RR Martin's projects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards
25+ books, a pending TV show. Most books being mosaic novels with individual chapters written by specific writers, some standalone novels.

Disclosure I've been a publisher of works in this series, but the glue that has kept this project together is their contract. If an author kills or damages a character they give up their share of revenue which stops people from painting characters into impossible corners.
So... any way I can see if my number was in this database?

Pretty funny. Years ago I very-begrudgingly verified my phone# on my FB account as my employer had me working on a FB integration... I knew I should have upheld my principles and not used my personal account.
Yeah, that is one lost cause
There is no hope in what they are doing, it's a classic "if I can't nobody can".
Teams changed too. Companies try to develop identities and cultures but it's often just the sum of its people.

Valve also has a unique decentralized structure where teams work independently on games, as has been noted many times before with their handbook (not sure how accurate that is today). So it's possible you're just seeing the results of a completely different team.
On one hand bummer about security on the other hand at least you don’t have to worry about apple patching out things that used to work or otherwise messing up the experience
How many dollars did you spend this year on these problems?
ROS makes the inter-process communication much easier if the SLAM system is incorporated as one component of a much bigger system. But you don't have to use ROS for that. We actually provide the ability to run it without ROS. Also, with ROS, it's easier to communicate with sensors given that the sensor drivers have been wrapped into ROS nodes.
Thank you for the quick response! You guys are building something really cool, I have no doubt that once you figure out pricing it has the potential to go viral.

I’m a product/frontend guy who’s trying to build a side project, and backend stuff has always been a PITA for me to figure out.

Right now I’m torn between investing time to learn AWS Amplify, or investing time to learn 8base.

8base has already captured my imagination, and I can’t wait to go further with learning it. Unfortunately I feel uncomfortable creating a few projects to practice and then later being shut out of them or be forced to pay $8/mth.
> It’s all fine to say that active funds can’t outperform index funds... but if it’s a bubble and it crashes, then people in active funds will be having a field day

The CNBC article I linked claims that actively managed funds have been beaten by the S&P 500 for _nine straight years_. How long do the investors in actively managed funds have to wait for their big celebration?
If consumers want it they will pay money, plus ads don't necessarily need to be targeted to readers.
> Mj prohibition is ultimately racially and politically motivated

On the other side of the equation, there's also the (much more charitable) point that we tried banning alcohol and it didn't work. It has a substantially larger cultural purchase, so banning it is naturally more expensive -- both in terms of the cost of enforcement and the number of upset people whose habits you've made illegal.

Marijuana might become impossible to ban if its use keeps climbing, but it certainly wasn't in the 20th century.
Toys R Us charged higher prices because they were offering a shopping destination, something closer to Disneyland than Walmart. Their customers knew their prices were higher but shopped there for the experience. They didn’t last forever, but they did last much longer than their competitors like KB and Playco that had lower prices but a more ordinary shopping experience.
It seems to me that the Navigator interface is a pretty rich source of info for fingerprinting. For instance, even if I spoof my user-agent in the HTTP request, Navigator gleefully exposes the real one anyway.
If I understand this correctly, it isn't that they are uniquely encoding each syllable. It's that they are encoding the information in each syllable. Many syllables have very low information content and must be combined with other syllables to convey information. Many other syllables are redundant.
There are sudoku puzzles which have a unique solution but which also force a “guess” in the solving process, so your approach doesn’t work in the general case.
The auto-calibration simply finds the spatial alignment between the camera and the IMU. If bad data are present, one needs some outlier rejection mechanism to filter out them. Auto-calibration alone does not provide that ability.
Have to agree re: Canada. Our banks are top notch technology wise and customer service. They are also conservative and don't gamble with our economy.

The banks are also spreading globally. I've been able to use different Canadian debit cards in quite a few Caribbean and Mexican cities. More branches are even in the US.
Some smaller companies essentially run customer service directly through Slack. It can be pretty nifty in that a customer support message thread can easily be rerouted to a developer if it involves a bug, attached to an issue, which then notifies the customer service team that the bug is resolved once the code branch is pushed to master and deployed.

Other use cases can be simple things like notifying teams when you get new subscribers, reporting metrics/charts that are displayed in a thread versus pushed via email (allowing newly joined channel members, etc. to scroll through.

I'm not saying any of these are game changes by themselves, but they each bring incremental value.
I'm sure you can tell the difference between how people interact on HN and Facebook. Obviously there's some small degree of ego in effect with how people interact on HN, but it's vastly different to 'profile-based' social media. Among other differences, we're here discussing a topic, not just projecting ourselves at each-other.
I was unhappy that CVS sent me promotional snail mail based on my prescriptions, but I don't know what I can do about it, since I assume they have lawyers that told them it was legal under HIPAA.

I also get text messages from them that have links that may or may not allow the retrieval of health information, which also bugs me inasmuch as there's no way to opt out (at least not without ending all text messages).
And then what? They have to close for a few hours? A few excited local reporters coming by?
Maybe one answer is a new fund type that spawns smaller funds automatically at a certain amount of capital raised which invest variable amounts in a broader group of companies.
Unlike a car, a plane at cruising altitude doesn't immediately crash into the one in front if the pilot doesn't pay attention for half a second, and despite their far higher absolute speed, actions performed when flying have a much lower relative speed.

For example, in a car, several seconds of following distance is normal and following another car that closely is common. In a plane, which can move in 3 dimensions, horizontal separation is measured in minutes and it's not that common to be following immediately behind another plane at the same speed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_(aeronautics)#Horiz...
Interesting article, I think they may have missed the memo about people using technology how it works best for them
You only find out who's swimming naked when the tide goes out.
Some are already offering text chat for a monthly fee as a cheaper alternative to a face-to-face talk with a therapist at an hourly rate. However, I don't know if anyone is charging for a bot yet.
If you think flights go as advertised 99.999% of the time, you haven't been flying lately. Especially not to/from SFO.

NOT THAT I'M SCARRED BY ANY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE...

That said, sure, LA <-> SF is a quite safe route. California <-> Colorado is a far riskier bet.
I assume their code/infra was in a holding pattern prior to IPO, and now they're dealing with tech debt.
Good point. Though I think there’s still room to distinguish an uncomfortably hot coffee spill from a third degree burn causing one, and it’s not immediately obvious to a casual consumer when you cross that threshold.
Stop Using Else in Your Programs
Same.

I think of workspaces as "introverted" and "extroverted" and I think it's a mistake to say one is inherently better than the other. The reality is that the best workspace is the one that fulfills the needs of the team using it.
> Most fobs include a physical key. I can tell you Corvette and BMW 3 series do

Only to open the driver side door. You still need the fob in close proximity at a designated spot to start the car. With Tesla cars there's no need for a physical key both for unlocking and starting.
Of course, someone developed a script for a patient too; I think it was called PARRY. Perhaps these could be combined in an adversarial learning setup...
/devils advocate

False positives are dangerous. Trying to detect ‘Anything’ may result in more deaths than hitting the tiny number of exceptions.

Alternatively, the system would be overly flakey and hard break all the time.
I'll admit you have a good point with keeping abreast of events in certain circles. That's essentially what I did though. In my original post I noted that I have an anonymous profile on one social network that doesn't do anything except for chat with a few people, it doesn't even have any 'connections'. Hi from another Sydney-sider by the way!
Or blocking a turn lane. My thoughts exactly.
The thing with predictions in the market is, even if you're the guy who figured out subprime before everyone else, your probability of getting it right the second time is completely independent of the last time.
What about the case surrounding Anthony Levandowski? Should he be allowed to freely take Waymo's IP when another company offers him a substantial economic incentive to do so?
What I hate about articles and reporting like this is the emphasis (in the lead) on that fact that some people were 'shocked'. You can always find 'some people' that will force their point of view and unfortunately do it in way that says 'there really isn't anything else to discuss about this issue it's open and shut'.

Also important to realize that there were most likely people at that meeting that agreed with what Negroponte said but were to afraid (for fear of backlash) to say that.

Finally this: “It wasn’t until another woman yelled “Shut up!” twice that Negroponte mumbled “Good grief,” and sat down.”" I am guessing that took Negroponte by surprised and he might be kicking himself now for not pushing back.
Here in Belgium it depends a lot on the study discipline: the pricing for the course notes in say physics and mathematics were quite reasonable like ~10 euros for a course, about 10 courses, so ~100 euros a year printed in a copy shop, while for other (traditionally higher social class) study disciplines like law or economics many professors wrote and require using the books they wrote themselves (through a publisher) costing easily about ~100 euros per course amounting to many hundreds of euros per year. Is this a bribe? nearly all white collar crime is optimized to skirt the definition and hides behind prestige.

In my opinion the solution is easy: to receive subsidy from the government, universities must provide their courses online free and in either the public domain or under a copyleft license, so that all citizens paying taxes can benefit from what they payed for (both indirectly through the usual study by other citizens, as directly by self-study). If a professor refuses to put his course in the public domain, fire or replace him with a professor willing to put his textbook in the public domain. Courses only change slowly over the years in practice, why should professors be able to extort a hidden enrollment fee from their students? The only reason I can think of is to arrange gate-keeping of those professions set aside for the higher classes... since the lower classes will then choose the other disciplines even though the university wide enrollment fee is superficially "the same".

If the university refuses to put its courses in the public domain, the government should refuse to subsidize the university. To make sure the populace has unbridled access to all relevant course materials, reward students for telling on professors / universities for handing out materials without uploading them to the public domain or copyleft courses platform. All a professor has to do is upload the materials.
I was going at 30-40mph in the right lane on a 4-lane all empty highway, when a gentleman flies at 60-70mph and hits us right behind, goes 360 turn with us and we hit the wall. Everyone survived without any medical incident (other than that I do panic and respectfully avoid those fliers now-a-days). Relevant because:
- I hope my sprinter (size of mini truck, with upfittings) had an autopilot in the front/rear to speed up or divert to save an accident.
- +1 to your parking angle. The other driver survived because he hit us at an angle and skidded full circle to minimize the impact. Of course, that helped our life as well.
As I understand it, Google is responsible for not sharing information that would allow them to violate GDPR. Without explicit user opt-in, that is.
The motor to run the drones was expensive till they became mass produced and dropped in price. Same for the batteries. DJI Drones aren't exactly cheap either.

also I believe if you want to be pedantic, if it runs on combustion it's a engine. if electric then a motor.
The annual cost of a pest control contract is about $200. Now that’s for vermin as well, so it’s apples and oranges. But, something which will rid your house of flies and mosquitoes as they appear, I’d buy something in the few hundred dollars range because it’s more than a toy. It takes care of an annoyance just as a roomba does.
opportunity contains some amount of timing; if you keep pushing you will trend up and to the right